News

As we head towards the release of Sword of the Stars 2, we’re looking for a few handy SotS players who can help us hammer out bugs – this won’t be a large playtest, rather we’re looking for a small team of dedicated souls who can help us test out all the depth of the SotS2 features (and blow up some cool ships in the process.) If you’re interested and would like to know more, please head over to our messageboards.

Coverage for Sword of the Stars II continues, with lead designer Martin Cirulis giving a huge interview to the Joseph V Stalin Podcast – you can listen to the whole interview at their site or through iTunes.

The weekly Meet The Team Q&As is wrapping up this week – catch up on them all now at Paradox, our publisher’s website!

As well, we managed to make Angry Joe into Happy Joe, Tracy Morris sat down to talk writer to writer with our very own Arinn Dembo, and PC Gamer UK gave us a sweet preview!

A lot of media coverage lately – here’s the most recent batch. Get the links after the jump;

Strategy Informer: Your benefactors and overlords at Paradox Interactive obviously launched their flagship Paradox Connect platform this year – are you tying SOTS2 into that that in any special way? Especially in terms of multiplayer or maybe achievements?

Martin Cirulis: You can expect a whole host of wild and woolly achievements that not only will let you brag across the breadth of Paradox Connect, but even unlock badges or graffiti for your own ships.

• Game Shark interview with producer Chris Stewart
• Strategy Informer preview
• Strategy Informer interview with lead designer, Martin Cirulis

Favorite thing about making games
I like that it’s a rare job in a rare industry. People make assumptions about the work (“Oh, how lucky! You get to play video games all day!” Yes, the same work-in-progress for the better part of a year…) and the industry (“It’s like making movies, right?” No, not really), a lot of which misunderstand the amount of work required to make a game. But at the same time, nobody else in the world gets to solve the kinds of problems a dev team gets to solve. Not just technically, but creatively. There’s a line at the end of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 The Movie where one of the robots spots the special-effects team and cracks, “Oh, those are the guys that spend all day making elves dance.” That’s what I tell people I do… it’s not far off the mark, really.

Read the whole Q&A here.

Man of few words and AI programmer on Sword of the Stars 2, Dan Read, is this week’s Meet the Team Q&A!

“How did you get started in the games industry?
I started making my own games on an Apple II when I was 14.”