Rush, Boom, Turtle: Sins of a Sins Developer

Blair Fraser confesses that Sins of a Solar Empire could have been a very different game.
3/10/2009 7:51 PM | 1 Comments | Page 3 of 8

Chick: You have to pay for mines, right?

Fraser: Yes, they all cost resources. That's because in the beta, back in November and December, people were just building insane numbers of mines. Thousands and thousands of these things. You couldn't counter it. People's computers were going down. It was just ridiculous.

Chick: They were free?

Fraser: Exactly. It was an antimatter cost, similar to how fighters are produced. That didn't work. People know how to maximize their antimatter. They'd fly to the star and recharge quickly, then pump out another hundred mines. They worked the system.

Chick: The beta must be invaluable so you can see how people try to break things.

Fraser: Oh, yes. It's pretty embarrassing, though. Even with the original Sins, as well as Entrenchment. It goes out to the public so bad, all they do is trash you for month after month. We've kind of trained ourselves to get used to it. For the original Sins, we didn't have many people at first because nobody had heard of it. We built up gradually this resistance, trying to learn to filter the good information from the bad. It's definitely worth it, though. Nobody knows how to trash your game better than the people who pay for it.

Chick: What's one of the most surprising things you've learned from the beta process?

Fraser: In the original Sins or from Entrenchment?

Chick: Either. Both.

Fraser:Fraser: Boy, there are lots of these. Probably the biggest one that led to the most fundamental change to the entire game was in the original Sins. You could phase-jump to any planet you wanted. There was no concept of phase lanes, so there was no map interconnectivity, no chokepoints. Our original design was based more on "Ender's Game," where you committed your fleet to a flight and when you went there, it had better be the way you expected it. But the community went absolutely batshit over that, and we had to remodel the entire basic infrastructure.

Chick: I could have told you that wasn't going to work. Doesn't Sword of the Stars do that?

Fraser: Yeah, that's the way it works.

Chick: It means you don't really have a map. You lose part of the flow of a game. Which, by the way, is something I really love about what you've done with Entrenchment. You have a map and you let the players affect and mold the map. They give it character. This is a dilemma in a space game. Space is, by its nature, a vacuum with a planet here and there. But I just think that, with the Entrenchment add-on specifically, Sins does a great job of giving space a sense of terrain. I really like how that turned out. But that's so funny to me that you guys thought you could let everybody just go where they want with no phase lanes.

Fraser: That was the original design. Space is open. It's realistic. We did other silly realistic things, too. We had a full gravitational model. I kid you not. Planets were originally spinning around the star.