Journals

Dev Journal

Elemental: Sword of Ambrose

For those of you who have the book, Elemental: Destiny's Embers you can soon download the first in a series of mini-campaigns that have been produced via a collaboration of Stardock and Random House. The campaign is heavily story-driven and written by Dave Stern who I worked with during the writing of the novel. The story takes place prior to Elemental: Destiny’s Embers and recounts the early days Lord Ambrose when he was a young adventurer. The releas... [read more]

Dev Journal

WAR of MAGIC & FALLEN ENCHANTRESS

One of the most common series of questions I’ve been getting over the past month is what the difference between War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress will be. The marketing folks want me to keep the specifics to a minimum so I’ll focus on broad terms.  The Plague Cat you see on the right would never have been in War of Magic. That’s because War of Magic was much more broadly scaled.  Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, is much more tightly designed.  Put another way, Fall... [read more]

News

Strategy Informer Live Interview Event with Derek Paxton on Tuesday, March 29th

On Tuesday, March 29th the great folks at Strategy Informer will be holding a live interview with Stardock’s Derek Paxton.  The upcoming Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be the main focus of the evening, and we encourage our community to head over and participate. The interview will be on Tuesday at 8pm EST.  http://www.strategyinformer.com/editorials/11622/live-chat-with-derek-paxton [read more]

Dev Journal

The Middle Market is not dying

There’s been a lot of debate in our industry in the past year about the so-called “middle market”.  This is the class of games between say Call of Duty and Angry Birds.  Not quite AAA (i.e. not $25 million to produce) but also not $250,000 to make the game. The middle market is the world that Stardock and Paradox thrive in. And both of us have done very well in this market. The argument against the middle market basically boils down to market size.  That the middle market ju... [read more]

News

Fallen Enchantress “Design a Trait” Contest is Open!

We have a new contest starting today for the upcoming Elemental: Fallen Enchantress!  The Design a Trait contest gives you the ability to submit your own Traits for Fallen Enchantress.  In the same manner that other contests have been, we will choose the top 5 traits and then post them for the community to vote on. For more information about the contest, check out the post from Derek Paxton about it. https://forums.elementalgame.com/406518 The contest starts today, Mar... [read more]

Dev Journal

Design a Trait Contest

  I love role playing game’s (RPGs).  At its core Fallen Enchantress is half 4x strategy game and half RPG.  The best mechanics for Fallen Enchantress are applicable at an RPG and 4x level.  In particular we are trying to push the RPG side of the game so that it feels like a 4x game set in an RPG world. There are a lot of game mechanics and implementation details (flavor) that support this focus.  But one of my favorites in Fallen Enchantress is Traits. Tr... [read more]