Emperor Heaven

Wuxing Mountain is a place of mystery and ancient secrets. Do you dare build upon it?










The wait is over! Designer Gweilo has just released his new custom campaign "The Wayward Sun Wu Kong". This campaign is a blend of history and legends set during the early years of the Tang Dynasty.

Sound interesting? For more insight into what awaits you in this adventure, check out the screenshots in the playtest album.

Gweilo would like to thank his veteran playtester Um Lei Tung, who has collaborated with him for many years.

You can download the campaign here, but be forewarned: it is designed to be a solid challenge for advanced players!

There have been many artistic representations of Sun Wu Kong, but perhaps this one is the most fitting for his new starring role. He is a powerful buddhist hero with many abilities, and many moods to match!








Designer Gweilo is currently working on a new custom campaign entitled "The Wayward Sun Wu Kong". The storyline will feature the mischievous Monkey King, and players will need to adapt to the idiosyncrasies of this supernatural being. The plot will include events from the beginning of the famous Chinese novel "Journey to the West". Will you be able to help the monk Xuanzang recruit Sun Wu Kong for his Great Quest?

These fantasy aspects will be blended to real history. The timeframe of the campaign is in the early 7th century CE, when the Tang Dynasty was replacing the Sui as rulers of the Middle Kingdom. This was not a peaceful time, and the campaign design will reflect this.

Sound interesting? You can read more about the development of this project in Gweilo's Design Blog. To see the progress, check out the gallery album of playtest screenshots. That album will grow as the playtesting continues over the next few months. Gweilo anticipates a release date sometime in the summer of 2008.

"SOLO: Essays and Commentary on the Art of the Single Player Game" debuts at HeavenGames! This new, semi-regular column on the art and theory of designing single player games will highlight important issues in the development of games, asking challenging questions about the nature of gaming, whether games will ever meet the criteria for art, and offering practical pointers on how the best single player experiences are created by designers.

SOLO is written by Gordon Farrell, a long-time professional designer of single player campaigns for AAA games such as Empire Earth and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. In addition, he has worked on strategy titles such as Caesar IV, Children of the Nile and BreakAway Games' Middle Eastern city builder, Arabian Lords. He is currently Lead Writer for Reverie World Studios' first game, Dawn of Fantasy, due for release in Fall 2008.

HGS regulars will recognize Gordon's work as a staple of our download sections, from games as diverse as Age of Empires and Caesar 3, to both Stronghold 1, Stronghold 2 and Age of Kings. In addition to his HGS mods, he has highly-rated Civilization 4 mods uploaded at CivFanatics as well.

Gordon is on the faculty of New York University, where he teaches narrative theory for video games, theory of screenwriting, and advanced studies in dramatic art. He also lectures at Marymount Manhattan College in video games, script analysis, and theatre history. In 2002, Prima Games published his essay, "The Theory of Scenario Design." His extensive professional and academic experience promises an exciting column filled with commentary on the art of games that will be both controversial and thought-provoking.

You can use EmperorMapper to browse through every map that comes in a campaign!

Pecunia has just released EmperorMapper. It is a small utility program to create PNG minimaps directly from Emperor campaigns (.pak), map files (.map) and saved games (.sav). The created images look exactly like in-game minimaps. For campaigns, all maps used in the campaign are viewable.

EmperorMapper has too many uses to list! Kudos to Pecunia for creating this fantastic tool!

With all of the changes at HeavenGames, several have opened up! A job at HeavenGames has great benefits in addition to the resume-building experience it offers, including:

Assistance in job/internship placement in the gaming industry.

Possible credit for those in university.

Personal websites (clouds) for all staff at no charge.

Possible access to game alphas/betas.

The current job openings are:

Marketing/PR Department Head

Art Department Head

Graphics Designer

Website Designer

Programmer

HG Main News Editor

Head to the the help wanted page for detailed job descriptions and please contact
the CEO at socvazius@heavengames.com if you're interested in any of these positions!

Source: The HG Blog


So now that things have been settled with HG's identity, it's time to go on to the fun stuff: the staff system! Woo!

It's been discussed in a previous blog post that HeavenGames doesn't operate as efficiently as it could from a staff perspective. A lot of issues have already been dealt with in the past several months, but there are two substantial problems that must be taken care of. First, there is no effective way to ensure quality and consistency of work across all of our sites. Second, we do not have dedicated jobs in a number of support capacities, including marketing, sales, and the like.

Revamped Staff System
The owners have thus discussed the issue with the HeavenGames staff and have come up with the following system:


As you can see, HeavenGames will still be run fundamentally the same:
the Exco - chaired by the CEO - makes all of the network-wide administrative decisions andSeraphs work under the Exco as site administrators. What will be added to the system will be a Seraph Liaison and Support Departments. First, the Seraph Liaison...
(Readmore!)

After considerable deliberation, the owners have decided that one major inhibiting factor for HeavenGames' prosperity is the simple fact that it doesn't have a clearly defined identity. It has always been a site about games, but that is far too vague for the development of any clear goals and the effective marketing of the site.


We have thus discussed the issue with our staff and decided that we
should make HeavenGames a site entirely geared towards community.

At its core, HeavenGames always has been about building the best communities possible, so it only makes sense that we devote all of our resources to that service...(Read more!)

What flaming carnage will you wreak from the back of your own war chariot?











As its name implies, "Bandit Lord's Destiny" is a new custom campaign that allows you to take your citybuilding skills in a slightly different direction. You will soon find yourself engaged in such interesting passtimes as making (and receiving) threats, launching raids, sacking cities, and demanding ransoms. With all that fun, there is little need to dwell on the less appealing aspects, like appeasing the Ancestral Heroes, forced construction, extortion payments, being used like a pawn by Powers-Greater-Than-You, and the outright degradation of begging to other cities! Just give the life a try, and before long you could become the Most Wanted Villain in all the Zhou lands!

Designer Gweilo has set this entertaining storyline during the historic final years of the Western Zhou Dynasty. Do you know the ancient Chinese morality story concerning the Legend of the Beacon Towers? Here is your chance to experience the actual events surrounding it - and from a unique perspective!

Gweilo would like to thank his veteran playtest team of Shaun, Pagh, and Um Lei Tung. Some of their great playtesting efforts are available for viewing in the Bandit Lord's Destiny playtest album.

You can download the campaign here, but be forewarned: it is designed to be a solid challenge for advanced players!

"Bandit Lord's Destiny" will feature this new arid map of 'enormous' size. It represents an area of the Ordos Desert along the Wei River. Rebuilding your bandit gang in this rugged terrain will not be easy!






Designer Gweilo is currently working on a new custom campaign entitled "Bandit Lord's Destiny". It will be set far back in China's bronze-age, but like all of Gweilo's campaigns, its storyline will be rooted in history. In the designer's own words:

"The story revolves around a fictional bandit gang which becomes caught up in the events during the collapse of the Western Zhou Dynasty. As the campaign unfolds, Zhou soldiers have attacked, and the gang has been hurt badly and driven into hiding. With your chief slain, it will be up to you to take over and rebuild the gang. A player will face critical decisions about which path to take to achieve this, as several strategies will be available. It gets even more interesting when the historic events start unfolding!"

Sound interesting? To see more details, check out the gallery album of playtest screenshots. That album will grow as the playtesting continues over the next few months. Gweilo anticipates a release date sometime in September, 2007.

An Imperial Survey has begun to solicit feedback about our site's Downloads. It would please the Emperor if you would take a couple of minutes to participate in the survey, which you can find here.