Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
Elemental – Data Driving the AI
When I wrote the AI for Galactic Civilizations, everything was hard-coded in C++. That was nice for me but not so nice for everyone who would like to tweak things later. Moreover, it makes it very easy for things to become a mess later on as improvements rely on my memory of what technique I used to do a given thing. Yesterday and this morning, I officially began my work on the Elemental AI. What’s in the game presently isn’t AI, it’s just a few IF/THEN statements.... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Destiny’s Embers Preview
Elemental: Destiny's Embers is due out in August. Published by Random House, the story revolves around the Kingdom and the Empire trying to regain mastery of the world. Myself and the editors and writers at Random House are collaborating on a single set of lore that the game and the novels make use of. The novel helps underscore how serious we are about delivering to gamers (and readers) a world that isn’t simply generic fantasy. Starting with beta 3 of Elemental, the lore star... [read more]
Dev Journal
Let’s try this again…
This week we’ve put up a couple of journals that are soliciting input from players on what they’d like to see in terms of faction customization. My journals were clearly too wordy as I failed to convey the fundamental questions at hand. So I’ll put it in bullet point form. We are rapidly nearing Beta 3 where the “game” itself comes together. At that point we will need to decide where to focus our asset creation (read: Artists and Random House writers). Presently, ... [read more]
Dev Journal
More discussion of Factions and Races (long)
…In the beginning there were Men and Dragons… When the Titans came, they saw the creatures of the world as building blocks and created many new creatures from them. These creatures are called (by men) “The Fallen”. There are four known sentient races of The Fallen (see the Lore for more details). In previous discussions, we have used analogies to Middle Earth. In Middle Earth, Illuvatar created only two sentient races. The El... [read more]
Dev Journal
We have been pleasantly surprised at how this has worked out because it gives us the opportunity to look at seeing if we have time to do something we have wanted to do: Develop the RACES further. The Kingdoms are made up by a single race (Men) The Empires are made up of three races presently (Men, Trogs, Urxen). However, with the reality being that people seem to much prefer to create their own factions, it may make sense for us to return to TWO pre-made races (Men and F... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental – Beta 1Z4 is coming
While the vast majority of users who actually have Beta 1Z voted for moving forward (the publicly displayed poll isn’t designed to filter based on downloads but rather whether they have an Impulse account) we believe another Beta 1 is still in order. There are some Windows XP issues we want to nail down in particular with regards to stability and memory and there were a bunch of fixes that got finished that didn’t get checked in in time for beta 1Z3. We are probably going to dispense w... [read more]
Dev Journal
The third pass of the conclusion of Beta 1 is going up today. Here’s what’s new from last Thursday: * Item Swapping * Overview: You can now swap items between units by opening the ITEMS tab for a selected unit and dragging/dropping the item icon to either a unit on the map, a medallion on the empire tree, or a medallion in the army/stationed units context list. + Added ability to drag (non-equipped) items out of a unit's item context list and drop them either on a unit on th... [read more]