Journals

Dev Journal

Elemental: Video blogging

You too can do this. Here’s how: 1. Go to http://www.jingproject.com and download Jing made by TechSmith (the other software company in Michigan..) 2. Once installed click on its settings (looks like gears) and you will see “Customize Jing buttons”. 3. Click on “new” 4. Label “Embed” 5. On clipboard contents choose embed code. Voila. When you take a screenshot or a video, you can click on the HTML button in the editor and paste in the embed code Jing giv... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental: Pen & Paper

I’ve always wanted to do this but never had the opportunity to try it out since schedules are usually too tight for it.  But would anyone here be interested in playing a game of Elemental…via pen and paper…over the Internet through a series of posts? I would need 5 volunteers who are in the beta, are active players and would have enough time actually play a game back and forth online (almost like PBEM).  We’d set up a simplified rule set but the idea would be to work through ga... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental Story design

In our previous games, the story (or better yet, what little there was of it) was kind of crammed in after the fact.  There is a lot of backstory to Galactic Civilizations but when it came time to put it into the game, it was the last thing.  For me, my priority in Galactic Civilizations was computer AI.  More accurately, Galactic Civilizations was mainly an AI project for me that we decided to let other people participate in playing though, truth be told, I enjoyed watch... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental: And now for something completely different

It’s not the loudness I’m a stalker. No. Really. I am. I don’t just read the feedback on Elemental in our forums. I read the feedback on lots of other forums. So I lurk on sites like RPG.net, Octopus Overlords, PCCohort, Qt3, CnardPC, WArgamers.com, rpgcodex.net, tacticularcancer, colonyofgamers, bay12games.com, Shrapnel Games, penny-arcade forums, etc. And one of the most consistent concerns I read is that the hard core beta testers who post the most will influence the gam... [read more]

Dev Journal

Don’t be afraid of the sausage factory

If you’ve been through Stardock betas, none of what I’m going to say is going to be news to you. But for everyone else… Most companies – the smart ones anyway – carefully control the message.  You won’t see early screenshots or quick sketches shown to the public of most games because internally, most games change dramatically during their development. We game developers like to give the impression that we have the MASTER DESIGN from the start. We know what we’re doing. ... [read more]

Dev Journal

We don’t like the research mechanism

Every 4X game we’ve made going all the way back to the beginning we try different ways of researching new technologies.  Galactic Civilizations I and II both originally had very different research systems. The one in Elemental we have in the beta we don’t like so we’re going to be making pretty radical changes to it in the upcoming builds. Here are some of the key elements that we WILL be making more of a focus in keeping: Infinite techs. That is, the tech tree doesn’t e... [read more]