With Legendary Heroes out, I can finally start reading how people are playing the “finished” game.  Kael’s gotten me tons of reports and I’ve started tackling them one by one. I am hoping to have the first batch ready for the next update (perhaps as early as next week). But that won’t be the end of it.  I plan to take care of some low hanging fruit strategy suggestions first and then go on and deal with the more challenging aspects that will require a lot more play testing to do. ...

Once upon a time… Thousands of years ago, the world of Elemental was filled with magic.  This was the time of the Magi.  In their quest to create ever more powerful magical devices, the Magi foolishly created The Forge of the Overlord.  It allowed its users to bend the fabric of reality entirely.  It also brought their world to the attention of the Dred'nir, immortal Titans who lived beyond the world.   They arrived and utterly destroyed the Magi and enslav...

Stardock’s lead game developer, Cari “Elf” Begle, who led the effort in Galactic Civilizations I, The Political Machine, Galactic Civilizations II and part of Fallen Enchantress (until she went on maternity leave) will be leaving us on May 1 to focus on being a mom.  She’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met. She’s an amazing developer, a kind hearted person and is always eager to take on new challenges. She was the one who did most of our network programming (including the mult...

Overall, we’re pretty happy with how Elemental: Fallen Enchantress turned out. It’s sold pretty well and it’s looking like it’s going to end up with an average review score of about 4 out of 5. Obviously, there’s always room to improve. And that’s where Legendary Heroes comes in.  This expansion pack is a top-to-bottom revisit of Fallen Enchantress. We’ll have a full change list up soon (and it’s many pages long) but here are some of the highlights told in screenshot form.   ...

The goal is to have the Legendary Heroes beta out this week.  It’s been held back mostly because we’re having trouble with the self-shadowing. Shadows are a pain in the butt.  In Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, more engineering hours were spent on the self-shadowing than anything else. But ya gotta do it. It’s one of those uncanny valley things. Game Geeking Derek (Kael) and I have been going over various UI elements, particularly regarding the behavior of selected ...

Hi everyone! Here is a lengthy play through of Legendary Heroes. Note that this is pre-beta and there will be a lot of improvements, especially visually, between now and release.

Here’s a weird thing.  Stardock turns 20 this year.  That’s 20 years since I incorporated it back when I was in college.  My mom was the one pushing me. She was afraid I’d get sued by someone. I told her that was crazy. No one would ever sue us.  Cough. I was playing FTL and if you don’t already have this game, you really should get it.  It’s a reminder that a great game can be made by just a handful of people.  It serves as a great exhibit for our internal g...

(Map I made where my character starts out in the middle of an abandoned village)   For those of you who are taking full advantage of the map editor, here is a list of hot keys to help make it easier to make maps.      {'B',           MFLG_CONTROL,   ELEMENTALUI_MAPEDITOR_KEY_SELECT_CHOKE_POINTS,      IMKEY_KEYBOARD, ENUM_VALUE,},     {'C',  &#...

As Fallen Enchantress rushes towards the 100,000 unit sold mark, we are hard at work on v1.1.  We are hoping to have it ready before Christmas but I don’t want to make any promises. The main changes in v1.1 will be memory and AI related. There are lots of bug fixes in the pipeline too such as ones that help with modding and just plain good old fashioned bugs that slipped by. People have been asking whether Fallen Enchantress is “selling well”.  It’s a h...

Have a great day everyone!  We are thankful for many things and among them is how grateful we are to be able to hang out and talk to you guys (and gals) on a regular basis. Happy Thanksgiving!

Very soon we plan to release the very first Map Pack for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.  In addition to a new hand crafted map for every map size along with new stamps to spice up random map generation, it also includes the full Anthys map. A gigantic map that contains the entire known world of Elemental (at least, as of ~150 AC).

Fallen Enchantress at two weeks Fallen Enchantress has now been out two weeks. So far, we’ve sold about 50,000 units (give or take).  This is somewhat below Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion but, obviously, far far ahead of War of Magic during the same time frame.  The biggest obstacle has been reviews.  It’s hard for niche titles (and make no mistake, fantasy turn-based PC games are niche) to get coverage. There’s only so many reviewers to go around a...

Only 2 days left until release I don't want to sound sappy here but we have been really touched by all the support we've gotten from you guys over the past couple of years that we've been working on this. One of the motivations for making so-called "niche" games is that we really enjoy our tight knit communities.  We enjoy hanging out with you, listening to your ideas, arguing different game designs, etc. Earlier today, we went "gold" which simply means 1.0. I like to...

As someone who has played PC strategy games since, well, since there's been PC strategy games to play, the thing that often stifles me is the late game. Often times, strategy games will bog down due to sheer wait time between turns or just collapsing under their own weight in micro management. Fallen Enchantress attempts to solve this through the use of a multithreaded game state architecture.  What this means is that while you're taking your turn, a bunch of different things ...

There's only a week left! That's just so hard to believe that we're almost there. Looks like there's going to be another public update tonight. They want to test out some installer improvements and...well since they were doing that, we snuck in some tweaks, fixes and I ninja-checked in some AI improvements. The team that started Fallen Enchantress includes virtually everyone who made Galactic Civilizations II (and expansions).  It's been a real joy seeing the team ...