A Small Update as I Regain my Bearings
Published on September 21, 2010 By ScottTykoski In Elemental Dev Journals

Greetings!

For those who didn’t know (and I don’t know if anyone cares) I’ve actually been out for the last two weeks, ‘expanding my dynasty’, so to speak (baby #2). It was a nice dose of reality coming off a pretty rough month - but you guys have been around the forums, so I wont churn that bucket of woes.

Instead, I’d like to take a fresh look at where we stand right now. While my time away didn’t provide the rest I would have liked, it did get me out into a state of mind where I could reflect on Elemental with a slightly clearer head...plus I played some ‘Legend of Zelda’ to get back to my roots


1. Tutorial
Elemental is a big game. I feel bad that we shrugged off a tutorial, but that’s what happens when you’re so close to a project. “How could someone NOT know what what 16x16 button does...” What can I say...we’re dumb. There are A LOT of ideas being tossed around about how to improve gameplay, AI, and performance, but no matter what we change, it’s obvious that a tutorial made now has a 100% chance of being obsolete once the major patches roll out. So opposed to putting in yet another feature that will need reworked, we’re putting that effort into feature implementation and bug fixes...so no tutorial yet. But it’s coming.

Zelda Sidenote: Speaking of games that need better hand-holding, why would the ‘Meat’, necessary to traverse the 7th dungeon, be sold in a store hidden in a tree that you have to burn down half way across the world?!  WHY?!?!?! At least now I have the internet, instead of bribing the kid at school who had ‘Nintendo Power’

2. Better-er Graphics
By giving the player full camera control, we’ve sacrificed the ability to ensure the game looks good at all times. In marketing terms, it’s WAY too easy to make a crappy looking screenshot in Elemental...but you get the right angle, the proper objects and a nice zoom and it looks pretty slick (IMHO). We have some ideas for v1.1 that will keep the full camera control that we love, but also ensure the game makes for an interesting composition a higher percentage of the time.

Zelda Sidenote: I really love the retro-graphics movement going on right now in the indie/casual gaming scene. Obviously we have our work cut out on getting Elemental up to speed, but I would love to do a simple, retro-themed Elemental game done in the style of those old Beta intros. Perhaps in a year I can revisit that idea

3. Multiplayer
We’ve seen a few folks jump into the internal-tests we’ve been running....we’re normally playing in the afternoon, so feel free to search us out. It tends to be the art team, and they tend to be a bit ‘smack-talk’ happy, but a good time to be had none-the-less.

Zelda Sidenote: Anyone play Secret of Mana for the SNES? A Zelda style dungeon crawler that allowed up to 3 friends to play co-op? Old-school multiplayer at it’s best.

4. Updates, Updates, and More Updates!
We’ve been served a healthy slice of humble pie with Elemental’s release, but now we’re lucky enough to have a chance to redeem our ‘baby’ (I’m glad actually babies don’t get a metacritic score). If you’re reading this, then you’re keeping tabs on Elemental as we continue to improve it post-release, and for your support and continued feedback we’re immensely grateful. Hopefully all the great ideas we’ve received will be digested, organized, implemented, and accumulate into several groundbreaking updates that reach the potential mentioned throughout the reviews.


Anyways, I just saw the newest poll, and couldn't agree more on how the numbers are falling. Magic and combat are high on our priority lists, so I’ll be excited as these get hammered out.

Time to head home and help out with baby...then it’s back to Hyrule for further ‘inspiration’


Comments (Page 3)
5 Pages1 2 3 4 5 
on Sep 22, 2010

Full camera control? I play this game in cloth map mode only. The "normal" mode sucks for real strategy game.

on Sep 22, 2010

Another example of ... "priorities" ... (in regards to camera-control)

on Sep 22, 2010

Congrats on Baby. Best wishes for your family.

 

Yesterday i bought GalCiv II with Addons (10€ for such a deep game...pff). Never played that.  Now I know what you guys are able to do. Soo.... now waiting isnt a problem anymore, because i know what elemental will become. I trust you.

 

And i like the grafics. Zooming in/out all the time, just to look around.

on Sep 22, 2010

Is this for real? 

-The graphics are fine. Half the users like them, the other half doesn't care how they look

-The tutorial is only needed when there's something to be taught

-We still have food-consuming buildings and scholars who study "how to raze cities" and dig up champions from dusty old tomes (...)

-There's still no sight nor talk of a map generat... oh well.

 

Why is it that everything keeps going backwards?

Congratulations about the kid, hope things will change for the better even here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

on Sep 22, 2010

Agreed with many other posters, the game mechanics are far more important at this point than tutorials and graphics.

There are quite a few unstoppable strategies in the game. They are made possible by AI "blind spots" combined with poorly balanced mechanics. I'm not saying all the mechanics are bogus, just that some of them suffer from bad balancing. Really bad balancing. You know, "suck the fun out of game bad".

For what it's worth, the graphics look beautiful to my eye. Especially the cloth map is a beauty.

on Sep 22, 2010

nOObonian
Stop at 2 kids!!!!

Having 2 kids leaves you and your wife in a man-on-man defense,  3 kids is a zone defense.

This means that the "best" behaved kid gets to do what they want.  "Best" is relative. If two of your kids are trying to set the house on fire and one is throwing cat poop on the walls, you have to live with cat poop on the walls.

(In all seriousness STOP AT TWO KIDS!!!!)

Absolutely - never let the kids outnumber the adults. (only women can cope with that)

on Sep 22, 2010

Love the graphics ..love the full camera control.

on Sep 22, 2010

Congrats on the new baby.  How much mana does he/she have? Hopefully you were able to have it before the patch nerfed down the mana.

 

Seriously though, great work on the patches and the game and good luck with the baby raising. I have two myself and you would think the 2nd one would be a linear work progression but trust me it's not.  There's this whole new dynamic to worry about which gets really fun as they get older and can play with each other.  I bought stratego for my two kids and they play it non stop, that is just one step away from a good PC TBS game.

 

 

on Sep 22, 2010

Congrats Boogie, and welcome back!

on Sep 22, 2010

Vallu751
Agreed with many other posters, the game mechanics are far more important at this point than tutorials and graphics.

There are quite a few unstoppable strategies in the game. They are made possible by AI "blind spots" combined with poorly balanced mechanics. I'm not saying all the mechanics are bogus, just that some of them suffer from bad balancing. Really bad balancing. You know, "suck the fun out of game bad".

For what it's worth, the graphics look beautiful to my eye. Especially the cloth map is a beauty.

 

 

I do personally agree with you, and others, on the points listed about mechanics being more important.  But I have also spent countless hours digging through the forums to learn from other users how the mechanics work.  And even then these are only shots in the dark sometimes and with the patches the statements for version X are not always correct for version Y.

 

Honestly, if they want to grab new users and sell the game (more) then they need tutorials to help users along.   I mean, the whole economy system is a total mystery to a new user.   Who would know resources are global if you add in caravans between cities?  How do you research stuff?   Why would a screen pop-up stating that you can now learn lost technologies and then not even bring up the research screen?    It is the little things that need some love that seem trivial to existing users that already have 40-100+ hours invested in the game, but mean a lot to keeping the interest of someone who is just starting out.

 

My my 2 cents. 

 

And congrats on the new addition!   I too will be experiencing your pain.. eh.. enjoyment of having #2 in a matter of days.   So, maybe we can share war stories.  lol.

on Sep 22, 2010

Secret of Mana with a friend was really good times.

on Sep 22, 2010

Congrats on your new kid Scott!

on Sep 22, 2010

Like I said a few eeeks ago, congrats man . The clan of Boogie grows by yet another mought. Soon you'll spawn that army you need to take over the world

on Sep 22, 2010

One thought- if you have some ideas you're tossing around, throw them out to the community.
For sure...we're going to start getting more dev journals up, leading the way for more two-way communications, mostly as big changes are discussed. We've been crunching for so long that it'll feel good to take time to interface with you guys more often   I think we've learned that it can be a GOOD THING to get your head out of the code from time-to-time, and writing journals is a great way to take that step back and communicate what's going on internally.

on Sep 22, 2010

the game mechanics are far more important at this point than tutorials and graphics.
Agreed, and like I said, I wish I had more gameplay meat to talk about, but these are simply the areas that I've been touching base with. You'll find Frogboy to have the gameplay journals, I have more graphics/misc journals, and Cari & the rest will have MP and technical journals.

So beleive me, lots of other things are going on, these are just some of the areas I've been tasked with

edit re: Full Camera Control, I suppose it's a matter of internal preferences, but we're all against the 'glass ceiling' approach of limiting how much of the world the user can experience (limited zooms, disabling camera rotation, etc.)  There are pro's and con's across the board on the matter, but we want to allow players to zoom in, look at their cities from every angle, then zoom out to the cloth map to survey the global situation.

I would, however, like to get in a 'snap-back' option (I put one into GC2) where you could pan around, but once done the camera would re-orient you to your default view (one of the reasons devs limit such things).

5 Pages1 2 3 4 5