I wanted to share and highlight this video for others to see. This is such a thorough and amazing resource for the dev team at Frost Giant (the makers of Stormgate) that I hope they have seen. The breakdown and walk-through of the different elements of the game was such an amazing thing to watch.
I found myself sitting there watching for hours, this is exactly what game companies need in terms of experienced game tester leads that can articulate and explain everything going on in the game from the perspective of an average player. I think if every game company had someone of this caliber, to sit down with them and go over the basic mechanics of the games, we would all be a lot better off. I felt like I was sitting in on a company meeting while an outside contractor was going over his notes with the developers and trying to understand their vision while giving his unique and experienced position.
I'm definitely more excited about the game than I was previously after watching this video (as confusing as that might seem). It shows a clear path of how to fix and enhance the gameplay which has a chance to come into fruition with the game still in the testing phase.
Without knowing any details I can only speculate but 10 years is a lot of time to refine your experience and expertise in a field. Do you remember what game it was and why it didn't amount to anything?
I had to look it up. It was called Guardian of Atlas and Sean left the company right after the beta launched and then the game got cancelled. My guess as to why it went poorly is just that it was inexperienced devs making a game at a time when SC2 was still actually relatively popular. There was no space in the already tiny genre of RTS.
Now that Blizzard has essentially abandoned StarCraft, it might be possible for some folks to carve some of that tiny market away.