Journals

Dev Journal

Battling lighting

This week we’ve been messing with lighting in Elemental. Lighting makes the difference between something looking awesome and something looking awful. Compare: vs.   Only difference here is lighting.  I suspect lighting will be something we battle with for months to come. We have time since, ahem, the betas are all cloth map… [read more]

News

IGN Interview with Stardock’s Scott Tykoski

IGN.com has an interview with Elemental’s Producer, Scott Tykoski about the art style of Elemental: War of Magic .  I'd like to say that Elemental's visual style was chosen purely for the love of art. That the style was risky but required to properly lay fourth our grand vision of dead world refueled by magic. That the style would finally establish video games as works of art and we can all celebrate our incredible cultural triumph! Read the full interview at IGN . ... [read more]

Dev Journal

Kotaku: Elemental sets up dynasties

Kotaku’s AJ Glasser got a first hand look at Stardock’s upcoming turn-based strategy game, Elemental. Developer Stardock has mentioned many inspirations for the game from Tolkien to George R.R. Martin. Amongst the major strategic elements to the upcoming PC-only game is the new diplomacy system in which the player, who exists in the game as the immortal sovereign of their kingdom, can have children who in turn can have children and so forth and can thus build diplomatic relations with other factions by arranged marriages. These marriages have off-spring who may (or may not) be friendly to different factions based on their family ties. These off-spring also exist in the world as playable characters setting the stage of players having to choose whether to place a particularly gifted family member into a battle even if it risks the ire of related factions. [read more]

News

August 2009 screenshots at Gamespot

Gamespot has put up some new screenshots of Elemental. Check them out here . [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental: IGN August Preview

IGN’s Jason Ocampo has put up his preview of Elemental.  Stardock’s new turn-based fantasy strategy game isn’t due until 2010 but even at this early stage it’s pretty far along. During Stardock’s recent preview to IGN, one of the closest kept secrets of the game, its diplomacy system, was finally unveiled.  In Elemental, diplomacy is not merely a matter of trading and treaties but involves family politics as well.  Each sovereign, while eternal, can have children who will, in time, grow up, have children, grow up, and pass on and repeat the cycle over and over.  Political marriages can strengthen ties and children and family members can become playable characters in the game world similar to “heroes” found in other games who have their own unique abilities based on their pedigree. In addition, while the game will include a state-of-the-art 3D engine designed from the ground up for massive scale strategy games, it will also be fully playable as a 2D cloth map.  Players can zoom in to the full 3D experience and set in the options dialog how close they want to be before the transition between strategic view and tactical view occurs. [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental News starts tomorrow

Hi guys, last week I was out visiting the media and showed off Elemental and gave away a lot of tidbits that haven’t been public yet. Keep an eye on the news section here on ElementalGame.com as we’ll be linking to stories as they come up starting tomorrow afternoon EST. If you live in the Seattle area, we’ll be showing the full Elemental build (not the cloth map build) at the Stardock boot at PAX . [read more]