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Majesty Gold, the fantasy kingdom sim, is now also available on the Ubuntu Software Centre.
Majesty is a unique sim putting you in the crushed velvet hotseat of your own kingdom. With an epic quest before you, you make the decisions of where to build your settlement`s guilds and temples. Each one has a mind of its own and must be enticed to meet your goals, via rewards you offer and spells you cast.
Majesty Gold, the fantasy kingdom sim is now also available on Desura.
Majesty is a unique sim putting you in the crushed velvet hotseat of your own kingdom. With an epic quest before you, you make the decisions of where to build your settlement`s guilds and temples. Each one has a mind of its own and must be enticed to meet your goals, via rewards you offer and spells you cast.
Majesty Gold is now available on Gameolith.
Majesty is a unique sim putting you in the crushed velvet hotseat of your own kingdom. With an epic quest before you, you make the decisions of where to build your settlement`s guilds and temples. Each one has a mind of its own and must be enticed to meet your goals, via rewards you offer and spells you cast.
Meanwhile you must make sure that your treasury stays flush with cash to support these and other outlays necessary to maintain a thriving medieval town. The fact that you are being barraged by attacks from mythical beasts and fantastic creatures doesn`t make your job any easier.
With Majesy out of the door, and releases complete for Mindrover and Candy Cruncher, we began what turned out to be the long slog.
At that point, fresh from our completion of Majesty, we were convinced world domination was just around the corner and we would all have our ferraris quite soon. We had a number of copies of Majesty printed (no, I’m not saying how many), and expected to have to get a reprint within 2 months, judging by the number of applications for the beta test, and the enthusiasm shown by people.
Over the next few months, reality, and a certain level of depression set in. We didn’t need to reprint Majesty. In fact in the first 3 months we didn’t even sell a quarter of the copies we had produced, and after the first few months, sales begin to slow down, so it didn’t look likely that we would suddenly see a huge rush of orders. The optimism pretty much evaporated.
So, realising it wouldn’t all be parties and glamour and free money by the bucketload, we settled down to some real work. We had more projects going on, with NingPo, Soul Ride and HDB, and we had new ideas. One of the new ideas that we went with was to open a physical shop.
Not a lot of people know we did that. We opened a shop in Nottingham, that was selling games. I admit we didn’t just sell Linux games, we sold all kinds of games, but the idea was to get a bit of local publicity for Linux games, while raising money using sales of other games, to fund the development of Linux games. It also didn’t feel horrible to see a shop where Linux games were on the same shelves as Windows games.
To be honest it didn’t do that great. The shop was small, and the people we rented the premises from made vastly inflated claims of how busy the mall we rented in was. Oh they didn’t lie, but they neglected to mention that the figures for mall visitors also included people walking in one side and straight out of the other side, as it was the only direct route from the city centre to the train station… However we sold a few Linux games, and increased company turnover (which always looks good on the books). In the end though, it was fairly obvious it wasn’t going to be the cash cow we had hoped for, in fact it was more a cash sink. So we closed it down after a few months.
Shortly after, I had been invited to talk at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, and on my return to the UK, found we had had a disaster. Overnight on the day I returned, our stock room (also our server room) flooded. Our premesis is on a hill, and a severe rainstorm caused a building uphill from ours to flood, and the flooding cascaded downhill until reaching our stockroom, which seemed to be waterproof on the downhill side and not on the uphill side. End result was that the water pooled there, causing thousands of pounds of damage, and days of downtime. 6 inches of water took several days and a quite elaborate pumping system to remove, and obviously while half of the electrical system was underwater, we couldn’t fire up the servers!
Luckily, the damage wasn’t catastrophic. while hundreds of games had been destroyed, and computers had been submerged, no game was completely wiped out of stock, so we had no mad rush to reprint, and no orders were delayed. Backups ensured no data had been lost, but it was a bit of a scare! We spent a good few days raising everything in the room up by 6 inches, so that if it ever happened again we wouldn’t have a big problem, and we even installed a pumping system just in case!
Following one disaster, it is only appropriate that we mention another company disaster at this point. Disciples, a great game, but unfortunately LGP’s DNF. It was around this point that Disciples caused the first of many resignations from LGP. Mike Phillips left the company after one too many late nights trying to beat the game into submission. It isn’t that there is anything wrong with Disciples, it is simply that you need a developer with just the right development style to be able to port it, and they have proven hard to find over the years. And so over those years, Disciples has been part-ported several times, leading to belief it will never be released. I can say for sure it will be released, I just cannot, still to this day, say for sure when!
Despite the downsides, the flooding, the game that refused to be ported, and the staff that left, we had successes. Postal 2 became the fastest selling game in its first month, and when we looked back at the accounts we found that we had, in many ways done it right. The company had proven itself sustainable. Where Loki had come in in a blaze of glory and burned out just as quickly, we had been around for as long as Loki, and we were still here. We were not as high profile, the games we ported were not the ones you see advertised on TV, but they were all undoubtedly as good as the games produced by Loki. Just because a game is high profile doesn’t make it good, and just because a game is less well known doesn’t make it bad.
So, we were stable, we were ready for the future, and we now had to make some decisions. How could we grow. What could we do to drag Linux gaming into the mainstream. And how could we do it without the blaze of glory ending…
I am sorry to have to announce that as of today, we are officially discontinuing support for all PPC versions of LGP games.
The decision is not one I am happy with, and I know that a lot of people will be equally unhappy, but unfortunately, practicalities must win out. The demand for PPC versions of LGP games has been almost non existant, with just a few players buying for this platform. The decision was reached recently, when we looked at the costs for bringing the new Majesty updates to PPC. The cost would have been well in excess of any possible revenue we would gain from new PPC sales, and with most people who have already bought Majesty for PPC also having access to x86 machines, well, it just seemed for the best. I seriously doubt if any players will actually be left behind because of this (though I expect several people to post comments here saying that they will be). While we would love to keep supporting ppc, and any other platform you can think of, we have to be practical, and throwing money into a project we know will never even come close to recovering its costs is not going to keep LGP making games into the future.
For the forseeable future, we will concentrate on the x86 platform, 32 bit, and when appropriate 64 bit (although all of our games will continue to run on 64 bit using the 32 bit compatibility libraries).
A few people are asking where is Majesty, howcome everywhere is running out of stock?
Well, Majesty is actually out of stock. We ran out during the May sales, and it is still not reprinted yet.
We have been holding off on the reprint, as we are working heavily on updating it. The first version of Majesty is a little dated now, it uses some old libraries (we were using SDL 1.2.5, which is just a little out of date!), and it uses some systems we have since stopped using (such as the old static/dynamic release system to satisfy the LGPL).
We are also removing the old OpenPlay library used for multiplayer games up to now, and replacing it with Grapple, and integrating it with the PenguinPlay server for lobby and scoring systems (as you can see below).
This does mean network compatibility between versions will be lost, but it means that you now get all the advantages of PenguinPlay, and Grapple, which is a more advanced networking system than OpenPlay. Saved game compatibility will not be lost, luckily!
Unfortunately this all takes time, and we were not expecting to sell out so soon. We sold more Majesty than we were expecting to in the sale, and so we were out in our time estimates by a few months, as to how long the remaining stock would last. The updates were about half way through when the stock finally ran out, and not in any position where we could simply release a new version.
Luckily the changes are almost finished…
So, in a few more weeks, you can expect that new Majesty will be coming your way! If you don’t have it already, you probably should get it. If you already have it, well, the new version also has a colour manual instead of the old black and white one, uses the new setup tool, and the disc looks better.
I know some people may ask, why didn’t we make the colour manual and better layouts before? Well back when Majesty was first printed back in 2003, the cost of colour manuals was so high that it was just not possible. Now, colour manuals are much more affordable. As for the rest, well, LGP was just learning its trade back then, and now, we know what we are doing and can do a better job!
So, new player or old, whether you buy the new version, or just patch your existing disc, I hope you enjoy the new version of Majesty. All in all, it is a new lease of life for one of our most popular games!
Thanks to everyone that posted and emailed about part one of this history. I’m glad you enjoyed it, and here is part 2…
So, there I was, back in the tail end of 2001, with a contract to do Creatures and Majesty, and really, no idea how. Creatures wasn’t much of a problem, as Creature Labs had done the port already, and just needed a publisher. I pretty much winged that, I got the game made up, but made the mistake of doing it in parts. To this day, each copy of creatures that is shipped has to be hand assembled with each of its 4 parts. It may not sound like much, but over the years, it’s been a real pain. All other games we had made since then, we had made ready to ship.
At around this time I got the news that we had all been expecting. Loki was going out of business. I immediately contacted Loki, and asked them if LGP could obtain the rights to carry on producing the games they had made. This would have been a great boost to the new company, and would have allowed us to keep on making the games that were still in great demand by Linux gamers. Unfortunately Scott, the CEO of Loki at the time, was asking for such a ludicrous amount of money for the licenses (way more than they were possibly worth, and probably more money than the games had made by selling for the entire history of Loki) that I had to let the idea go. We made a second attempt at the liquidation of Loki to acquire the rights, but the company handling the liquidation was so unprofessional, that they made it impossible to do so. With their policy being that the only way for me to officially state our interest being to fax them, and their only fax machine being broken for over 2 months (they kept telling us it would be fixed any day), we didn’t really have a hope. The liquidation hearing came and went before they contacted me, several months later, and acknowledged LGP’s interest in the liquidation. Not a lot of use really.
So then there was Majesty. I had the porting rights, but I had no idea what to do with it. I mean, I pride myself in being a very good programmer, but porting was something I had no real experience in.
Sam saved the day. Sam Lantinga, previously one of the Loki developers, pointed me at a number of ex-Loki staff who were still interested in doing more porting work. Of those, Mike Phillips was the one that ended up joining us, and even though he left the company some years ago, his influence shapes the way we do porting development to this day.
Mike spent quite a while pushing me in the right direction. I had a number of preconceptions that he had to beat out of me, but I also had to push back on some of his ideas, and I think, in the end, we got the right mix of decisions. Mike set up the idea for the LGP build environment, one that we still use a derivative of, as it has proven to be a build system that is very very portable, and enables us to make games that run on all distros. He also introduced me to the idea of IRC, which has enabled the company to have a real interaction with our customers.
Before Majesty work could start, Mike spent a number of months sorting out the LGP build system, and building some of the basic building blocks that LGP uses to make porting easier. He wrote wrapper functions for file handling and other common tasks, and established the tools we would use for our games. SDL for input and graphics, smpeg for video, SDL Mixer for sound, and openplay for networking, were the main choices.
Majesty work started in earnest. Mike spent a lot of hours on the project, while I carried on trying to find resellers and distributors for our games, and at the same time finding new games for the company. I ended up making an agreement for a couple of smaller games by Pyrogon, and also managed to pick up the rights to Mindrover, one of the Loki games we had missed out on earlier.
Majesty porting finally came to an end, and then we had a decision to make, that has influenced how we do business from that moment, and a decision I am very happy that we made right. After the beta test, we had one bug left, where network games occasionally went out of sync. Mike wanted to go gold, and ignore the bug. I wanted to find the bug, despite the fact that the bug happened in the Windows version too. I put my foot down and insisted, and that was a turning point for the company. From then on, LGP’s policy was always to delay release as long as it takes, to get a good release, not an almost right game, but one that we can be proud of. So Mike spent a good few weeks hunting for the bug. In the end, I joined him in the hunt when his resolve started to waiver, and between us, we found the bug after a hunt that lasted for over 8 weeks. It was a simple 1 line change, and the multiplayer game was fixed.
Majesty was finished, and our first game, ported from scratch, was done!
