Journals
Dev Journal
Welcome to Elemental:War of Magic, a fantasy strategy game for the PC! Elemental is about you. It turns out, you are a powerful Sorcerer. And the world needs you. Badly. About 160 years ago, there was a huge cataclysmic battle that nearly destroyed the world. It was so bad that it has been only in the past few years that people have become numerous enough to begin starting up settlements again. So the world is in pret... [read more]
Dev Journal
Which Elemental AI is the most lethal? Are the Kingdoms better than the Empires or vice versa? Round 1: Gilden Round 2: Tarth It’s looking like the last of the issues from v1.09t (beta of v1.1) have been resolved as with this many battles over and over it’s gotten very solid. I’m just an observer in this world. [read more]
Dev Journal
As part of Elemental: War of Magic’s v1.1 stability testing, we play through thousands of turns in order to see what sorts of stability things we might run into. The most common things we’ve been addressing include: (1) Good old fashioned access violations. These have largely been the result of functions that aren’t “thread safe”. Elemental v1.1 is very multithreaded. If you have a multicore machine, you’ll be able to really see this, especially late game. v1.0 of the... [read more]
Dev Journal
Lockdown is the least fun part of the process for me. There are some bugs I mention to the programming team and they fix before I get back to my desk. And there are others that take a lot more work. There are issues that a crash dump will tell you where the failure is, and there are some where the dump only shows you what happened afterwards. Like finding a body in a room with a knife in its back. You can see that the body is dead, see that the... [read more]
Dev Journal
Hi guys, I’m on the plane heading to San Fran for various meetings on various things. Anyway, we’re pretty happy with how the latest beta of 1.1 is working out. From here on out, we’re focusing on stability. More new features will come in for 1.2. Sales of Elemental have been..unusual. For the first day, Elemental was our top launch in company history. Then the infamous PC Gamer UK article came out and sales went to nearly zilch. Since then, it’s picked up. Dramatica... [read more]
Dev Journal
I hope that if you are here reading dev journals then you are curious about the game development process. There are a lot of ways to manage a game, so I don't mean this to be the bible of game development. Only a talk about my thoughts. High Level Design The first step to creating a new game or an expansion is to write a high level design. My design for the expansion was about 30 pages (I tend to have problems summarizing). The important part isn't tha... [read more]
Dev Journal
They’re currently working on staging the new beta build for the upcoming Elemental:War of Magic v1.1. If you’re not into test builds, definitely stick with the official release build. For this week, Kael and team focused largely on stability and performance but there were some significant game mechanic changes as well that should make the game play with a much better…hard to describe but a much better pacing. I finally got to spend quality time with the AI. That’s the whole... [read more]