Gah, artists. I love artists, but many of them don't freelance well. I've had a ton of artists whose work I love, but who I absolutely can't afford to hire because they don't give me stuff I can use, so I'm just throwing away money to get them to make stuff that doesn't come through in useful resolutions or formats.
I think the whole thing going for Paradox is that they embrace the complexity, and cater to players who don't care about the fact that it's a learning process. I can tell you that I feel like their grand strategy is perhaps even easier than many "simpler" games that are enigmatic because they try to abstract things out. They give you very simple tools, and let you make what you can with them.
When I got stuck doing layout and artist wrangling for the book for guardians of the order I cowrote, Hearts Swords and Flowers, I learned that dealing with artists was the last thing the world I really wanted to do because that was my first professional book management experience in the RPG industry – and it was a real trial by fire.
Artists are just a pain in the ass to work with for the most part. There are a few who go out of their way to be extremely professional and businesslike and love to hit deadlines and deliver what you talked about in your art requests, but they are almost impossible to find in every single one of them has some absurd, extreme quirk.
I've done more of it since, but it will never be my favorite thing in the world to do. Given the choice, I prefer just being a writer.Paradox knows the kind of game that they have a reputation for, they've embraced that, and they know their audience is there. They have spent many years building that audience, interacting with that audience, and liking that audience, which is all too rare.
In a weird way, EU4 is very much like Minecraft. They both give you a delimited set of verb-like interactions with the setting, albeit extremely large sets of them, then turn you loose and what's effectively a sandbox with goals which are largely the creation of the user. Some people completely freeze up and don't know how to deal with that has a game and some people flourish in it.
Being able to recognize that both of those groups exist and catering to the one while not demonizing the other is a finely balanced activity.
Ugh, layout is a pain. I'm intentionally avoiding most of it with Segira by going with a style that basically predates modern digital document layout software, drawing from old military manuals and Twilight 2000 for inspiration with a handful of space-filler art. I'm not looking forward to Genship Exiles, which is going to have some truly fantastic art in it, but will be a royal pain to actually layout as a result.
I find that the artists who work well are the equivalent of national treasures. I'm kinda hoping to introduce one who I've had a really good experience with to Steem, but I'm kinda unsure how to evangelize it best.
I will confess that writing for games is probably my favorite part. I got my start in homebrew, creating just massive documents that I didn't have any real responsibility to do anything other than write for. Now that I'm trying to get into "professional" game design, it's more important to really dot the i's and cross the t's and make things look nice. At least I can add an absurd level of familiarity with word processing and desktop publishing software to my resume if I ever need a new day job. I just hope that at some point I can add community interaction to that list of "Things I have experience doing as a hobbyist/small business owner."
I'd never really thought of EU4 and Minecraft together, but I can see the similarities. Really, both are pretty keen on emergent play. Traditionally I compare EU4 to Dwarf Fortress due to how incredibly deep the systems in those games are. I'm always surprised when I bump into a kid who plays something like Stellaris in their free time, but then I realize that it's sort of an act of mastery in and of itself; if you can play Stellaris, you can play anything.
One thing that I think would be interesting is to see an interactive tutorial for Stellaris/EU4 that scaffolds the player into running an empire, tied into a roleplaying scenario where the player takes on the role of someone responsible for just an aspect or two of their controlled civilization at pivotal moments.