Journals
Dev Journal
Elemental: Kumquat Graphics Engine
Elemental makes use of a brand new 3D engine developed specifically for PC strategy games. Its multithreaded design along with dynamic LOD (level of detail) allows for it to look great on a wide range of hardware. To see and understand why Elemental can look good on low end hardware and yet benefit further from higher end hardware see for yourself how the dynamic LOD works: Look very very closely here. This isn’t one 3D object. This is dozens of 3D objects. The engine det... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Researching Technologies
After the Cataclysm, much of the accrued knowledge of the world was lost. One of your priorities will be to find scholars who can recover this lost knowledge. Elemental doesn’t have a traditional technology tree. Instead, it has 5 research categories (the Kingdoms and the Empires have different categories). When enough research has been done, a breakthru in that category is made and the player is presented with possible technologies to learn at that point. When choosing... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental is a turn-based strategy game that takes place on a world that was once filled with magic but now finds itself recovering from a great conflict known as “The Cataclysm”. In this post-cataclysm world, only a handful of of beings are capable of casting spells. These beings, known as Channelers, have begun to set up realms across the world. As one of these Channelers, you are the sovereign of a Kingdom or an Empire. The Kingdoms are realms set up by sovereigns who chan... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: AI difficulty levels
In Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod, the difficulty levels of computer players were either hard coded or very hard to access for players. In Elemental, the difficulty levels are in an XML file called CoreDifficultyLevels.xml The game will read from the different difficulty levels and display them in game. Players can create new difficulty levels themselves if they’d like by changing this file. In Galactic Civilizations, I only had 3 real variabl... [read more]
Dev Journal
Getting ready for beta 2. It’ll either be this Thursday or the following Thursday. Last week I was visiting journalists on the west coast showing off Elemental so i didn’t get to work on the AI and some other pieces of the game that I think need to be a bit further along before beta 2 starts. The modding tools won’t be part of beta 2 (they come with beta 4 which is expected to start sometime in July). Now, the richness of the included modding tools is not because we’re anti-DLC.&... [read more]
Dev Journal
Tactical Combat discussion continuation
Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles. The evolution of tactical combat in Elemental owes a lot to the beta program. 9 Months of public beta testing of the game engine with corresponding debates has led to some important changes that would not have happened otherwise. A lot... [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental: Beta 1 retrospective
This is going to be long. I beg for forgiveness up front. So for those of you just tuning in, Elemental has just completed a marathon 8 month Beta 1 cycle. The purpose of which was to explore all kinds of new game mechanics and try different things out. It went so well that in our next game, I’d like to bring the beta people in even earlier. For Beta 1, we stripped out the graphics engine forcing users to play on a “cloth map” interface. We went through considerable l... [read more]