Journals
Dev Journal
Game Development: The Internal Commercial Game Review Process
Note: If you’re not into game development this post will be pretty boring. So you may want to just skip this. Introduction In traditional game development there are usually two parties: The Developer and the Publisher. There is no exact definition of the responsibilities for each party so I will only discuss our experiences with it. The Developer The Developer is responsible for creating the game. Their responsibility is to provide the publisher with a title that is... [read more]
Dev Journal
Fallen Enchantress: Pre-Beta Ad-hoc video
As we close in on the beta of the second game in the Elemental universe (Elemental: Fallen Enchantress) we’re doing a lot of “play” testing. With that in mind, here are a couple of videos of me playing with some commentary. FE-Pre Beta part 1. As has been previously mentioned, everyone who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 will get Fallen Enchantress for free and get the beta added to their account this month. [read more]
Dev Journal
WHAT is Fallen Enchantress? You tell us
In mid 2010, we released Elemental: War of Magic. This was our first attempt at: [A] a fantasy strategy game and [B] a game that involved terrain. This produced…mixed results in that when released it was buggy (like on nVidia 7900 cards you get a white tactical battle screen which caused a particular PC Gamer UK reviewer to claim the game was totally broken) AND even once fixed it was…meh. v1.4 is decent but it’s no Master of Magic. So the question is, what do you think we should do to desc... [read more]
Dev Journal
Fallen Enchantress: Where we stand at Christmas
Fallen Enchantress has been a long road, but rewarding road for us. A year and a half after the release of War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is Stardock’s largest game endeavor in its history. My part in its tale includes the new computer AI and complaining – my traditional role on game development here. In recent years, the number of hours I could dedicate to those endeavors got smaller and smaller. That changed when we sold Impulse to Gamestop this year. Impulse had slowly come to ta... [read more]
Dev Journal
For those of you who want to see a lot of our day to day musings and mini previews, check out the Fallen Enchantress Sneak Peek Forum: https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/1012 [read more]
News
We are going to consolidate all our Elemental pages into one, so you can keep up with all the happening of all the Elemental series. Please come like our Elemental page here. https://www.facebook.com/elementalthegame [read more]
Dev Journal
Iteration is both wonderful and terrifying. It is the place where you take delight in the designs that are working out, and weep for the designs that sounded good but aren’t. It would be nice if I could sketch out a perfect plan, implement that plan and have an amazing game. But it takes work. One of our initial concerns when we started to playtest was that the game felt like War of Magic. Despite the changes, many of which wouldn’t be really appa... [read more]