It's been a long time coming, but FINALLY, Elemental (our Turn-Based Fantasy game) has been announced to the public! Huzzah! You can expect a lot of posting to be done over then next 16 months, so let me introduce you to the team... - Frogboy/Draginol (Brad Wardell): CEO, Game Designer, AI Programmer - For those that don't know, Frogboy is the head of Stardock, barking orders and coding things up. Needless to say, he'll be around. - Boogiebac (S...
...don't allow this. edit: I just realized what I tease this would be for users hungry for more info on the game. I promise to put something of greater significance up in the next week. But seriously, that's a horrible starting location
Welcome to the first of several 'Countdown' journals leading up to the release of Beta 0. While we don't have a firm date for the release (several folks need to recoup from weeks of Demigod all-nighters ), we still plan on getting Elemental's first playable form into your hands for June! Boogiebac (myself) holding a Resturaunt Meeting on City Resources After seeing the amazing starships made by players (and reviewers) in GC2's ship design...
Remember Christmas-time back in grade school? You'd wrap up your assignments, have some parties, then go home for TWO STRAIGHT WEEKS of toys and relaxation? Well, because of the way things fell this year, the staff at Stardock was also granted the gift of 14 days of off-time over the holidays. It's been great, and while visions of Elemental still dance in our heads (I have some new ideas about population growth for next Monday) we're all thoroughly enjoying the time away from our desks. &nb...
Wow, what a week. A task that I had assumed would take 1.5 days ended up sucking up around 32 hours. While my lack of scheduling foresight sucks, the time was DEFIANTLY worth it to have this vital feature done right... In previous builds, all unit stat handling was done with a basic array of stats. There was a hard-coded list of what could and could not be stored in it (Strength, Defense, and HP to name a few). It worked, but with several new stats in the pipeline (Magic...
Before Elemental, most of us worked on a little title called Galactic Civilizations 2. In this game, you would do spend a significant amount of time conversing with AI players. They would plead, threaten, and barter with you in as intelligent a fashion as we could muster, with much of that 'intelligent' feeling coming from the PAGES of conversation text written. Based on everything from relations to military might, the AI would pop up with dynamic dialog that changes based on gameplay...
Hey Everyone! While we've been busy on all sorts of things (Betas, mostly), the seats in the office that once collected dust are starting to fill! We've added 3 new people to the team over the last 2 weeks... Kay Fedewa Kay is a local Michigan-bred Artist who's spent the last 2 years on the fantastic comic series The Blackblood Alliance . She enjoys playing Demigod as Sedna, and will be taking several of the art related tasks off my plate so I can...
Hey Everyone! Version 0.23 (aka 'The Beta1 Update') is now available on Impulse. We highly suggest those with major graphical errors on the main map give this a go. As for the major issues not listed as fixed... Saved Games: We're currently narrowing down the major issues with loading a saved game. These will be ironed out by next Thursday (Beta 1a). Crashs on Startup: This build won't do anything for people who can't get into the title screen. We have some leads on how the prob...
I really like writing journals for you guys, but I have a problem where, if I dont have time to construct something interesting (with videos or picts), I tend to focus on other tasks. This isn't a lazyman excuse, I jsut don't want to shortchange our fans. Anyways, I found Twitter to be a great in-between for anyone that wants to be kept in the loop but dosen't mind their info presented sans-excitement . This is the first week we have everyone back from the Demigod time-vortex, so ...
Since launch, one of the major complaints about Elemental: War of Magic was that the last bit of our title (the "Magic" part) was found to be...lacking (to put it gently). Global mana addresses areas of cheese, but without a significant overhaul to the Spellbooks and Spells you’re casting, that side of the game would still feel weak. We’ve taken the following steps to rectify this in 1.1.... 1. Spellbook Re-evaluation: There were several problems with the way spells have be...
One of the things people like about our office is the hallway-long whiteboard wall that the games team uses for a variety of purposes. Right now there are several to-do lists for 1.1 and beyond, a rundown of sales for our various titles, and a HUGE ‘wish list’ of Elemental features/tweaks players and press have requested. In fact, we’ve switched from writing the suggestions down and now simply print out feedback lists and tape them to the wall. My request today is in a simil...
Hey everyone, So v1.09 went live, and one of the big modding-side improvements is in the official addition of a 'my games/elemental/Mods' folder! The game will now properly read data from 'Mods/Data' and graphics and models from 'Mods/GFX'. For anyone using Mods that have required data or graphics to be placed in the core game directories, I highly suggest moving these out into this new folder, otherwise Elemental may attempt to rebuild the Data.zip file, resulting in a nice, lo...
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 m...
More of a maintenance update than anything, Elemental v1.07 focuses on the performance issues seen by both high and low end users. There are more improvements to come as code is continually improved and tile-designs are streamlined, but this update should bring a healthy FPS boost to all. And, if your frames per second remain under-par, new options will give you additional wiggle-room. That's not to say gameplay dosen't get some update love...resources no longer use up city tiles, ...
Well, here it is - our list of feedback as compiled from several review sites, this forum, other forums, and our own Q/A team. There are a few more sites I need to pick apart, but in general I feel this covers many of the egregious issues (but feel free to note anything we’ve overlooked...we want to be as thorough as possible). The ‘Major Issues’ are the ones you’ll be seeing fixed ASAP. Ideas/suggestions will be re-prioritized and completed as proper solutions are ...