Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
Some people are good at making things. Others are good at breaking them. I guess I’m a breaker. As some long time players know, we’ve been trying to find ways to reduce the memory foot print of Kumquat (the engine behind Elemental). It’s a non-trivial thing to do, especially when long ago when we were specing this we were thinking of the day of 64-bit gaming when the 2 gigabyte memory limit was no longer a concern. 2 Gigs Now, a quick thing about that. No matter ... [read more]
Dev Journal
Light…is not your friend
One of the most challenging things in making a modern PC game is nailing the lighting. Light is all powerful when it comes to deciding how a game will look. In most games, the camera is fixed. In some games, the camera lets you zoom in and out…a little bit…but not rotating. It’s not a technical restriction as much as an artistic restriction. The more fixed the camera, the more optimization you can do on the presentation of the game. War of Magic v1.19b. ... [read more]
Dev Journal
The natives may not be friendly
Jeff Vogel has a great blog about how creators should never read their forums . It’s definitely worth a read. Now, as you guys know, I do read our forums. A lot. Why? Because I’m dumb. As in, dangerously dumb. I have to consciously remember not to swallow my tongue dumb. But there’s probably a bit of karmic retribution in there too. I got into making games because I was one of those nerd ragers on Usenet back in the day. Greedy bastardly idiotic game developers who put out games... [read more]
Dev Journal
Debugging AI is tough. Is the AI stupid because of a bug? Is it stupid because the AI developer was stupid? (in my case, that’s usually why). Or is it stupid simply because the player is doing something that the AI didn’t know how to handle. So thanks to the forums, one thing that popped up was that the AI sovereigns were being unusually stupid by not cleaning up the goodie huts near them. Why weren’t they? There’s a fairly good algorithm for scouting the FOW and then going after g... [read more]
News
Design a Quest Contest Voting is Open!
The top 5 finalists for the Elemental “Design a Quest” contest have been chosen and posted to the contest page. It is now your turn to vote for your favorite to be included in Elemental: War of Magic. https://www.elementalgame.com/contest [read more]
Dev Journal
Good quests are hard to create. I seriously considered removing quests from Elemental entirely (I still don't know which is the better design decision). But at the end of the day part of what makes Elemental unique is the concept of these D&D type quests in a 4x game. So right or wrong they are quintessentially Elemental, so we will make them great. Which leads to the next question, what makes for a great quest? In my opinion a great quest has to do one of 3 things... [read more]
Dev Journal
In previous journals we’ve discussed the intention to create a modding layer that would use Python as its scripting language. Python is slower than Lua in terms of interpreted languages but there’s nothing stopping us from having C++ source that people could use to in addition or instead of a scripting language for performance sensitive elements of a game. With that said, let’s hear from those familiar with both on what they think of either one and why. [read more]