Journals
Dev Journal
Elemental: Christmas time Status Report
Greetings! As we reach the end of the year, we can take stock of where we are and where we’re going next. …our story so far… About 3 months ago, we released the first “beta” of Elemental. Designed to let players help us mold the game mechanics, the beta has been going very well so far. Through beta feedback, the economic system for the game has been changed a great deal, streamline and generally put into place something that will be fun, deep but should also k... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Revisiting the Great Cities of (my) RPG Gaming
As of now, the Cities in Elemental are traditional TBS fare. You build them up, train units, harvest resources and give the AI key locations on which to focus their invasions. Building improvements on the map is kinda unique, but in general it's currently what you'd expect from settlements in any Turn-Based Strategy title. To you they are production centers...to your neighbors they're obstacles. I'd like to improve the TBS city experience. Looking back, I don't really have any... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Beta 1D Change Log.
Greetings! Today we’ll be released Elemental BETA 1D to the beta team. For those of you not in the beta don’t worry, you’re not missing out on anything. I can assure you that the game will still cause horrible disfigurement if played. The big thing about the diplomacy engine in Elemental is that it’s live rather than video ala GalCiv or most other games of this type. This means that we can have in-depth conversations with other characters in the game that have t... [read more]
Dev Journal
It is time to talk about QUESTS!
For our brave and daring beta testers who are playing through the prototype betas (Beta 1 and the forthcoming Beta 2) it’s probably hard to imagine Elemental having role playing aspects. But the quest system is a big deal in the game. You ever play D&D? Or maybe (as I did) Fantasy Hero? You are exploring a world, going into dungeons, and generally wreaking havoc in some poor guy’s kingdom. Well, in Elemental, you’re that poor guy – the king of that kingdom. There will be part... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Data-Driving the Unit Stats
Wow, what a week. A task that I had assumed would take 1.5 days ended up sucking up around 32 hours. While my lack of scheduling foresight sucks, the time was DEFIANTLY worth it to have this vital feature done right... In previous builds, all unit stat handling was done with a basic array of stats. There was a hard-coded list of what could and could not be stored in it (Strength, Defense, and HP to name a few). It worked, but with several new stats in the pipeline (Magic... [read more]
Dev Journal
Random Elemental journal: December 2009
One of Sid Meier’s rules of game design boils down to “Prototype, prototype, prototype”. Forgive me for any unintentional hubris but as far as I’m aware, Elemental is the first commercial PC game that opened that phase of development to the public. Just this week all kinds of changes have been made to the engine. So let’s talk about that. First, for those of you not in the game industry, the thing to remember is that 80% of a game’s development ... [read more]