Journals
Dev Journal
Elemental – polishing for Alpha 0
So much going on this week and at the same time, so little. A lot of vacations here at Stardock pop up in June since this is one of the prime months here in terms of weather. On a sad note, Trent (Mittens) had his last day today. He’s off to Salt Lake City to take a position as a designer at a new game studio. We’ll miss him. Combined with the people on vacation, the studio area feels like a ghost town. My executive planner and marketing manager gave me a “CEO ma... [read more]
Dev Journal
As some of you know, the Elemental Beta 0 got nixed due to us needing to throw developers onto Demigod to help GPG and Raknet with the online experience. The team is starting to migrate back and we’re all glad to be back on Elemental but we did lose some time. But we are still pushing to have an Alpha build on June 25th to give out. It’ll be cloth map only (so what you see in the above screenshot won’t be in the alpha series and the betas will look a lot better than what... [read more]
Dev Journal
As some of you know, we had to assign quite a few members of the Elemental team to help with Demigod after it was released. Most of them are back on Elemental but a couple of our developers are still attached to Demigod to refine the multiplayer system in that game. It’s been particularly challenging since initially there was virtually no “Stardock code” involved and now it’s thousands of lines. So we have definitely “gotten involved”. The good news is that it will likel... [read more]
Dev Journal
A strategy game that is also a world
When people think of 3D hardware and its benefits, they usually think of first person shooters and RPGs. But ever since Galactic Civilizations, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire started popularizing strategic zoom the possibilities have really opened up that 3D acceleration, now mainstream, let us do a lot of amazing things. In Black & White, players could zoom out to see the world or zoom in to see individual villagers living their lives. It gave us... [read more]
Dev Journal
One of the things we really want to drive home in Elemental that we think will make it stand out is that a well equipped army is a big deal. The Roman armies dominates much of Europe not because Romans were inherently better warriors but because they were well trained and well equipped. Contemporary fiction tends to trivialize the significance of a non-industrialized society being able to train and equip 10,000 men with swords, plate mail, steel helmets, leather boots, etc. But i... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Internal debates made external
So how complicated (as internal critics put it) or sophisticated (as internal advocates put it) should the Elemental economic system be? We have the code in for handling a pretty sophisticated/complicated economic engine. But the debate is, is the system sophisticated? Or just complicated. Let me give you the arguments of each camp. Camp #1: “Sophisticated” 1. Everything in Elemental is a resource. Food, metal, swords, armor, horses, you name it.... [read more]