Journals
Dev Journal
Hey Everyone! While we've been busy on all sorts of things (Betas, mostly), the seats in the office that once collected dust are starting to fill! We've added 3 new people to the team over the last 2 weeks... Kay Fedewa Kay is a local Michigan-bred Artist who's spent the last 2 years on the fantastic comic series The Blackblood Alliance . She enjoys playing Demigod as Sedna, and will be taking several of the art related tasks off my plate so I can... [read more]
Dev Journal
The Elemental game development project at a glance
For those of you who aren’t game developers I thought I would write up a quick article on how modern games are made. In the old days… You would code up the game. There was simply “the game”. The development team would code their largely from scratch. Now… Games are broken up into many different parts. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll divide it into the two main parts: “The Engine” and the actual game. Civilization IV licensed Gamebryo for its engine.&#... [read more]
Dev Journal
Don’t get excited. It’s still primitive. It will still randomly corrupt your boot disk, kill random pets, and make small children cry. But here’s what’s new: ------------------------------------ Change Log - Beta 1b Update (0.25.015 on Impulse) ------------------------------------ [Refreshed 0.25.014 build to fix an intermittent crash bug on launch and to change unit costs to 1 gp per turn.] - New Features - + Info Cards Displaying rollover data - Game obj... [read more]
Dev Journal
…It is time to discuss….DEATH!!!! (or at least combat)
Starting next Monday, we begin work internally on the Elemental combat system. It won’t see the light of day for months (tactical combat part anyway). But this is the place to discuss how you would like it to work. Right now, a unit has Attack, Defense, Hitpoints, and speed. It’s very straight forward. When in battle, other factors come into play too (range of attack, height, and cover). But obviously there are a lot of other factors that could be looked at. Blu... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Tough love for beta 1B
Let me cut to the bad news right off. Beta 1B isn’t ready to go yet. It needs to be pushed. But for your convenience, I’m going to walk through the problems with the current internal build. Now, before someone who isn’t paying attention closely sends me a flame PM, please read this: I work at Stardock. It’s my job to be critical of the game. The only thing unusual is that I’m airing our internal dirty laundry to the public – but there... [read more]
Dev Journal
No, I work at Stardock – really!
Every so often I get a flame private message from a fan of one of our games telling me to “give Stardock a break” because they see one of my posts as “flaming” Elemental or Demigod or Sins or Galactic Civilizations. Just as a head’s up. I work at Stardock. I’m one of the developers on some of these games or am the product manager. It’s my job to complain about the games and to make them better. Please don’t PM me telling me that I need to be “nicer” about the games. Thanks! [read more]
Dev Journal
Once hooked in, Python is very nice for coding. Where it is NOT nice, so far at least, is the work having to expose new APIs to it. I must be doing something wrong because it seems like there’s a lot of work to expose methods and such. And worse, even once I do that, IDLE (the Python shell I’m using) doesn't seem to have any intellisense for the imported APIs and classes. [read more]