Brad Wardell is the founder of Stardock Entertainment and the cofounder of Oxide Games
Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game that takes place in the distant future where humanity has begun to expand into the galaxy. Each match takes place on a particular planet where the player builds and controls vast armies to conquer it.
Released in April 2016, Ashes of the Singularity was a fairly well known quantity in hardware circles due to its distinction as the first native DirectX 12 game (it runs on Windows 7/DirectX11 as well). The question on many people’s minds was whether the game itself could outshine its various technological achievements.
This postmortem will walk you through a few of the things that went right, but mostly we want to focus on the things that didn’t go right. That way, other developers, as well as gamers, can gain a better understanding of the process for creating a brand-new large-effort game, from scratch, in 2016.
Reception
Within the first week of the game’s release, it made the top sales charts and has received some very positive reviews due to its strong replayability, lots of maps, good AI, and multiplayer features as well as some mixed reviews due to the expectation that RTS games should focus more on a story with characters. We will discuss the lessons we learned from this.
In our minds, good strategy games create their own stories from their game play. However, that doesn’t somehow make the criticism of the game’s relatively light campaign invalid. As game developers, our job is to deliver games based on the demands of the market.
In short, Ashes has had a very successful launch. And, lest one is tempted to say “Of course you’d say that,” I will point you to my last postmortem.
How we got here
No game is made in a vacuum. Well, not yet. I mean, they could probably make a game in space in space suits, I guess. Maybe next time.
Anyway, the origin of Ashes of the Singularity goes back to 2000, shortly after Cavedog (the makers of Total Annihilation) closed. We had recently worked with Blizzard and GT Interactive on the StarCraft expansion, StarCraft: Retribution. Our proposal was to license the Total Annihilation engine and create either a new game or a Total Annihilation II.
The original Total Annihilation
Our proposal included two primary gameplay additions to Total Annihilation. First, we wanted to let players zoom out further if they wanted. Secondly, we wanted to allow players to build a new series of structures called “Orbitals” that would give them global abilities.
The idea was that StarCraft units had abilities and we wanted to give players the ability to act tactically, but without turning the game into a click-fest. Thus, building an orbital would unlock a new button on the screen that would have a cool-down. An example would be, for instance, an ability that would let the player insert a construction unit on a far off big map if they had vision or an ability that would give units a temporary shield while engaged in combat.
Unfortunately, GT Interactive went defunct and was acquired by Infogrames. So no Total Annihilation 2, and no new game. We were starting to feel cursed.
Build a game engine? Or license a game engine?
After it became clear that a new RTS built on the Total Annihilation engine was no longer viable, Stardock, like many game developers of that time, found itself struggling to build a third-generation game engine.
This talk of generations and game engines probably requires a little background. Briefly:
1st Generation: DOS, 16-bit, 640K max, single-threaded 320x200 max with 256 colors, sprites
2nd Generation: Windows, 32-bit, single core, 640x480 typical with 256 colors, sprites
3rd Generation: Windows, 32-bit, single core, 2GB max memory, DirectX 9c
By 2006, Stardock had just barely managed to cobble together a 3rd generation engine and released Galactic Civilizations II.
From 2006 to 2010, Stardock worked to develop a true 3rd generation engine called Kumquat which was going to be used to power Elemental and Society. However, in doing so, it learned just how technically challenging it is to develop.
If you, the reader, are wondering why everyone just uses Unity these days, now you know why. Unity is a fantastic, mature, fully featured 3rd generation engine. What they’ve accomplished is non-trivial.
Stardock learned a great deal of hard lessons while developing its own 3rd generation engine:
2GB of memory disappears very fast if you want to have a large map with hundreds of unique units.
You don’t really have 2GB. You have whatever the largest chunk of free memory available when you allocate (memory fragmentation). If your clever engine does a lot of dynamic memory allocations, you can run out of memory at 1.3GB with relatively few tools to explain this (2009).
The ramifications of some of the DirectX 9c limits had on creating really cool, deformable, randomly generated terrain in terms of texture limits, vertices, etc.
DirectX 9 only lets the main thread (the one that launches the game) actually talk to the video card, making it very difficult to get any sort of high fidelity visuals when combined with lots of units.
Stardock’s partner, Ironclad, successfully built their own 3rd generation engine (the Iron engine) for Sins of a Solar Empire. Similarly, Gas Powered Games had pioneered third generation engines with the Dungeon Siege engine, which later became the basis for Supreme Commander.
Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander
By 2011, it became clear that Stardock didn’t really have a viable third generation game engine. This was an existential issue because historically, the company’s strength had been based on the scope of its games. If we had to license our engine from a third party, we would lose some of our distinctive abilities to make truly custom games.
For example, Paradox’s development studio has a third generation engine called Clausewitz that they’ve used to build Europa Unversalis, Hearts of Iron, Victoria, Crusader Kings, and Stellaris. As a result, Paradox has been able to leverage their powerful engine to make a host of outstanding and unique game titles that are also very robust.
In short, Stardock needed a robust game engine if it wanted to continue to develop distinctly unique large-scale game designs.
Oxidation
For a long time, we’ve dreamed of making a game where the player could zoom in and see individuals living out their lives while zooming out to see an entire world with various wars being fought out by dozens or even hundreds of players (ranging from nation states down to liberation fronts).
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