During the development of Galactic Civilizations II, Frogboy tried to get me to write developer journals for it. I never did, mainly because I honestly didn't know what to write at the time. Most of the work I did on GalCiv II was feedback to the rest of the team, and late in the process, on business stuff (I only officially took on Stardock's publishing section after the game shipped). With Sins there actually is stuff I feel I can write about, so prepare to be subjected to the first of po...

For Part 2 of our Trinity journal series, we’re going to take a look at the changes to the game’s Mission system. One of the most requested, and in many ways most disappointing, additions in Trinity was the ability to give Missions to other players. As a design decision, we opted to make this system very flexible; unfortunately, this open-endedness meant the AI didn’t know how to evaluate if a mission was worth doing. Given that completing missions was a key requireme...

Since releasing the version 1.2 update for Sins: Trinity/Diplomacy, a lot of work has gone into a substantial redesign of its gameplay. When we first released Trinity last year, we’d overhauled the diplomatic and relationship systems in the hopes of giving players the ability to be a virtual puppetmaster that would make Machiavelli proud.  Unfortunately, we fell short of that design goal, and while a number of good improvements did pan out, the diplomatic aspects ended up feeling pre...

Recently, Ironclad Games and Stardock released version 1.9 of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion to players, marking the 5-year anniversary of the latest expansion. I've had the pleasure of working on Sins of a Solar Empire since we released the original title in 2008, and it's been great to see fans continue to play both the base game and the many mods that have been created for it. If you're new to the series, or looking to join in the fun, what is Sins of a Solar Empire all abou...

I haven't written a developer journal in ages, but with the release of the Stellar Phenomena DLC for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion today, I thought I'd give it a go. This DLC adds a number of elements to Sins that I've long thought of, so seeing it come into being has been a blast.  As with everything Sins, I worked closely with Ironclad in designing Stellar Phenomena, as did the rest of the team in creating it.  I love getting to work with Ironclad on this stuff, so th...

In the final article of our Trinity/Diplomacy v1.3 journal, we're going to take a look at the updated Envoy cruisers and Pact system. Envoys Envoy cruisers in Trinity are largely a “fire-and-forget” affair that provide needed relations boosts over time, along with some beneficial abilities. We intentionally designed Envoys to not require much player management, since Sins isn’t about micro-ing every little detail. However, quite a few of the Envoy abilities w...