Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t like game design. I like to mod other people’s games much more. That’s what got me into game development in the first place, the love of modding or taking other people’s concepts in a different direction. It’s probably one of the reasons I enjoy debugging so much (and hence, multithreading is so fun for me to work on). One of the areas I desperately want to improve the computer players on has to do with spell casting. I... [read more]
Dev Journal
On behalf of Stardock, I’d like to wish the entire Elemental community a Happy Thanksgiving! We’re very thankful to have you as participants in this ongoing journey to creating the ultimate fantasy strategy game. Wherever you are today, our thoughts are with you. Have a great day! [read more]
Dev Journal
With Elemental: War of Magic v1.1 BETA now out, you can see the direction we’re heading with the game. Global mana has made a huge positive impact on game play and having your population being put to work (literally) not only provides a great game mechanic but connects the player to the game more closely. As you can imagine, such significant game play changes require a lot of new AI coding to make it effective. With Kael joining us to relieve me as the Producer on Elemental,... [read more]
Dev Journal
The 1.1 Spellbook Overhaul Cometh!
Since launch, one of the major complaints about Elemental: War of Magic was that the last bit of our title (the "Magic" part) was found to be...lacking (to put it gently). Global mana addresses areas of cheese, but without a significant overhaul to the Spellbooks and Spells you’re casting, that side of the game would still feel weak. We’ve taken the following steps to rectify this in 1.1.... 1. Spellbook Re-evaluation: There were several problems with the way spells have be... [read more]
Dev Journal
AI Wars Part 2: Building a better empire.
For you map makers out there, you’ll be happy to know that I have modified the code today so that if you set your map to NO objects that it will create no objects at all (before it used to still seed the basic set which is no longer needed in v1.1). This means I can make a really boring but --- explicitly controlled map. Screenshots of what’s going on Please excuse the ugly screenshots. I’m in the debugger. Turn 1: Everyone on my test map gets ... [read more]
Dev Journal
To best understand the AI of v1.1 one must first understand the nature of threads. In a normal game, the players all function in a single thread. There is a while loop in which various components of the game are given the opportunity to to do their part – draw something to the screen, look for player input, update the game state and of course, move the computer AI. In most games, including v1.0, the AI does all their work at the end of a turn. This is why in most games you hit th... [read more]
Dev Journal
We have been hard at work on the 1.1 patch. Today we built an internal alpha which went to our testers and they began reporting issues, bugs, etc. Our feature list isn't completely implemented yet, there are still a few things to checkin but I expect that they will be all in by Monday. The team has been told to focus on bug fixes and polish between now and next Thursday (11/18/2010) which we are targeting as the date for the release of the public 1.1 beta.  ... [read more]