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 6 of 8

Fraser: I think the majority of people use all the fast options. But not a lot of people know about the Quick Start option yet, based on what we're tracking on Ironclad Online. Chick: You mentioned earlier that the majority of your customer base plays single-player. What are the figures on that?

Fraser: The last public number we put out for sales was something over 500,000. It's quite a bit more than that now, but in terms of public announcements, it'll give you the magnitude. And we've only got about 75,000 people registered for online play. On any given night, a very small portion of those people are actually playing online.

Chick: Are you surprised or disappointed at that number, or is that what you would expect?

Fraser: Certainly, I'd like it to be higher. But I recognize that Sins does fall more into the old 4X sit-in-my-room and play-it-over-a week thing, like Civilization, where it goes on and on, and you pause it or save the game and pick it up later. But considering how long some of those games take, I'm impressed the numbers are where they are. If I were more of a businessman, I would say multiplayer isn't even worth it. However, we basically only play multiplayer, so there is multiplayer because we love it. We're in this because we love it.

Chick: You've mentioned some of the capabilities you've unlocked for modders. What are some of the cool things the modding community has done?

Fraser: Every time I put out a patch, I give a very detailed list of everything we've done, and there's a whole section for modding. I always make sure there's a bullet point or two that's a direct response to their requests on the modding forum. With Entrenchment, we went all out. We added a whole new manifest system that allows them more control over what files go into the mod. We gave them dynamic ships in combat so they could move around. We gave them the ability to have multiple targets per ship. One of the most important ones is that you can stack mods. So now you can have a visual mod that works in tandem with other mods in a priority system.

Chick: What sort of mods have you seen people making?

Fraser: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, basically every major sci-fi. Then there are the guys who take all the mods and combo them into mega-packages, like 7 Deadly Sins; plus they add all their own new material. It's pretty crazy.

Chick: Finally, there are two things I'd like to talk about, where I think you guys have done a wonderful job. If I were to look at the game without either these two things, I would probably just throw my hands up and want nothing to do with Sins. The first thing is your empire tree, the interface on the left side of the screen. That, to me, is the key to the game. I couldn't imagine Sins with a conventional mini-map. Tell me how that came about. Was that an epiphany? I can just imagine the "Hallelujah" chorus playing when that thing finally clicked.

Fraser: It was literally a three-year slow evolution. There was no epiphany. It was iteration after iteration after iteration. We were doing mini-maps at one point. What it really evolved from -- you're going to laugh at this -- was that I used to play the crap out of this turn-based strategy series that you probably know, the Dominions series.