For those of you not familiar with game development, most of the development is spent designing the engines and technologies that will be used by the game. In our case, about 2/3rds of the time is spent on that kind of thing.
In many respects, this time is much like developing a traditional software application. Elemental uses a graphics engine that has been developed over the past couple of years for Society.
Our previous games used an engine called Pear that was developed in the late 90s and enhanced over the years. The new engine, called Kumquat, has all kinds of goodies (as you'd imagine).
One of the big differences in Kumquat from my personal coding perspective is its use of Python for scripting. Our old engine wasn't scriptable so everything was written in C++. Now, Stardock is a bit unusual that we don't tend to use scripts in our games. In Elemental, the only reason we're using scripting is to make it easier for other people to mod the game.
Anyway, now we're starting to put the pieces together to actually make "the game" as opposed to a series of technologies. That means I finally get to start sinking my teeth into AI.
With Galactic Civilizations, I only got a couple of months to work on the AI and I had to do it basically on my own. This time around, our team is large enough that I get to work on it longer and I have help.
Not that I don't mind writing functions like get the distance between two points or whatever but having others who can write the worker functions will save me a lot of time.
One other difference in Elemental was the decision to have multiplayer support. There's a single player reason for this - I want to see how people play the game before the game is released so that I can incorporate clever strategies into the AI.
Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI. Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players. My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win. But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.