Journals
Dev Journal
It took me all night but it was worth it. That was a city. Brigands took it out. There were so many checks to make sure that “monsters” don’t attack your city that had to be taken out in order to make the monsters have teeth again. So we’re going to create a new option “World Difficulty”. If World Difficulty is normal or higher, then monsters and other such things will take out players if they can. Before, monsters were prevented from even going into your zone of con... [read more]
Dev Journal
At heart, I’m a modder. So part of me really hates shipping games. I prefer them to stay in beta. Forever. But eventually, products have to be shipped and judged based on their state when they’re shipped. As a modder, the ship date is irrelevant. As a capitalist, I need the game to be good enough to get sufficiently positive buzz to generate the sales to continue my modding. Ostensibly, my main coding job on Elemental is supposed to just be AI. But that’s because all our previous games... [read more]
Dev Journal
A Preview of Elemental Beta 3-B
Beta 3-B is the big one. It’ll be the first beta build that should start to feel like a game. First off, there are the major features being enabled in the public beta: Tactical Battles Master Quests Near Final technology tree Near final city improvement list Tons of game play tweaks Lots of bug fixes This beta will start to show just how much impact the beta community has had on the game. I’ll be doing a video preview in the next day or s... [read more]
Dev Journal
As some of you know, Elemental BETA 3-B is the last public beta prior to the Modding beta (Beta 4). The modding beta will take things into a different direction while the team focuses on polishing, fixing bugs, and adding your requests into the main game in time for both the DVD release version (August 6) and the Day 0 release version (August 24). Having done these beta programs over the past 17 years, we’ve gotten a lot better at addressing beta tester concerns after the beta clo... [read more]
Dev Journal
One feature that players haven’t gotten to really see yet because they’re mainly applicable in tactical battles only are special abilities. Special abilities could be likened (and are actually implemented) much like a spell. For instance, a spider might have an ability where it can poison a unit. A ghoul might be able to send a unit into panic for a turn. The way it works is that in tactical battles, you will want to click on the various opponents to see what special ab... [read more]
Dev Journal
Greetings! Oh how I love this part of the beta. First off, you guys are doing a wonderful job getting us great feedback. There have been several crashes that even our internal QA team hadn’t found yet. The net effect of the public beta team is that it effectively adds engineering hours available to us because we’re able to find and eliminate bugs quicker than we had originally projected. Jesse and I were debugging through the ridiculously slow movement issue when you have an army.... [read more]