Journals
Dev Journal
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]
Dev Journal
THE NEW BETA IS COMING TONIGHT. A few notes about this update: The random video card overheating issue has not been addressed. As long as you don’t have an ATI or nVidia card you should be fine. Otherwise, please be prepared to replace your video card. We do expect to decrease the severity by Beta 3 (late Winter). The Boot Sector handle lock issue is addressed on 32-bit machines but not 64-bit. As a result, most 64-bit machines will likely still experience a hard lock that wil... [read more]
Dev Journal
First, I’d like to apologize as we had promised that the betas would suck until Beta 3. Oh, they still suck. But because we need to get this feature in earlier than later, something fairly cool is getting in early. I will say that we will make an effort to avoid any cool features getting in early in the future. So in today’s beta update, players can design their own units. But in Elemental, units are represented by cards from a UI point of view. To make this a us... [read more]
Dev Journal
Numbers and numbers with some numbers
Someone who is only casually into gaming asked me what battles in Elemental will be like. I said if there was a game called Magic: Total War, then you have a pretty good idea of what the scale of battles would be. Now, for lots of people (and myself included most of the time) auto-resolve will be the preferred choice. One of my biggest pet peeves as a gamer is feeling like I have to fight through every battle myself. So this is an area that beta testers and us will be disc... [read more]