Hi guys, last week I was out visiting the media and showed off Elemental and gave away a lot of tidbits that haven’t been public yet. Keep an eye on the news section here on ElementalGame.com as we’ll be linking to stories as they come up starting tomorrow afternoon EST. If you live in the Seattle area, we’ll be showing the full Elemental build (not the cloth map build) at the Stardock boot at PAX .

Now for those of you who know me, none of this will come as a shock.  For Elemental, one of our chief goals is to make a game where the community can keep it going forever and ever. That means automating as much as possible in game from our standpoint. We want people to mod and mod and mod the game. For instance, if someone wanted to make Carcassonne (I think that’s what it’s called) I want people to be able to do that with Elemental. What people don’t understand about Elemental i...

IGN’s Jason Ocampo has put up his preview of Elemental.  Stardock’s new turn-based fantasy strategy game isn’t due until 2010 but even at this early stage it’s pretty far along.

During Stardock’s recent preview to IGN, one of the closest kept secrets of the game, its diplomacy system, was finally unveiled.  In Elemental, diplomacy is not merely a matter of trading and treaties but involves family politics as well.  Each sovereign, while eternal, can have children who will, in time, grow up, have children, grow up, and pass on and repeat the cycle over and over.  Political marriages can strengthen ties and children and family members can become playable characters in the game world similar to “heroes” found in other games who have their own unique abilities based on their pedigree.

In addition, while the game will include a state-of-the-art 3D engine designed from the ground up for massive scale strategy games, it will also be fully playable as a 2D cloth map.  Players can zoom in to the full 3D experience and set in the options dialog how close they want to be before the transition between strategic view and tactical view occurs.

This was an early engine test. The guys made me promise to put a disclaimer that the final game will not look like this and that it’s MUCH better looking than this.

For those of you who have been in a Stardock BETA, none of what I mention is going to be a surprise. But for everyone else, stand back! See the screenshot? If you’re in the Elemental BETA, you won’t see anything remotely resembling that for MONTHS.  That’s because BETA 1 of Elemental will exist only with the strategic map (aka the cloth map).  Imagine playing Galactic Civilizations or Supreme Commander or Sins of a Solar Empire purely from the zoomed out strategic map. Wh...

Greetings! Today I’m evaluating the Elemental Alpha.  All the various “platforms” come together to start putting together a game. Next month, the Beta of Elemental will be released for those who have pre-ordered it.  Shortly after, we will Downloading… First, I have to download it from Impulse.  This is the version of Impulse that people will be getting by the time the beta comes out. It’s “Phase 4” and has a lot of new ...

Soft: 75   Soft: 100   No HDR.   Still working on lighting. I still worry it’s not…happy and friendly enough. But I’m not sure.  What do you think?

One of the things that will make Elemental different from anything Stardock has developed before is that we will view the release date of the game as the beginning of its life rather than the climax. The reason for this is that a big part of our objective with Elemental lies in the engine underneath it.  It is our dream to slowly evolve Elemental to be so modable that a user familiar with Python 3.x will be able to use Elemental to create virtually any kind of land base computer game. ...

We’re on the last day of PAX.  If you want to get into the beta, you can still do so by pre-ordering it.  After the beta goes out, the beta will be closed to new users until next year. Note: The beta will NOT be fun. These are real betas. The game mechanics are only partially implemented and subject to radical change based on player suggestions.

In my mind, the fun of Elemental resides in the fact that you’re not just trying to conquer some fantasy world but the world itself is designed to be so organic and unique from game to game. A lot of the difference between games is a result of things like a tech tree that has different techs in it, a huge library of special content that is integrated into map generation randomly each game, quests, integrated community content, and the divergent paths to victory. Now, as some of y...

In Galactic Civilizations, we had minor races which players had relatively little control over their existence.  In Elemental, 32 players will be the maximum number of major factions that the game will start out with but that doesn’t take into account of minor factions and vassals.

In Elemental, one of your abilities will be the governing ability. The more cities under you control, the more overhead cost there is to run your ever growing kingdom. At some point, it may become advisable to turn some cities into vassals. A vassal state is a city (or group of cities) that is originally founded by the player but has been made independent by that player. It becomes its own independent faction controlled by the AI. Initially, as a vassal, it is allied to you. But being independent, all bets are off of what happens in the future. It may join up with someone else, combine up with other vassals to form a new kingdom, or even go on its own to try to become a major faction in its own right through a path of conquest.

One could picture a large game where there might be dozens of vassals who form ever changing alliances throughout the game.

We’re going to organize these online better but in the meantime..    

This is a very very early implementation of the research screen. We have a lot of work to do on research as we’ve been experimenting with lots of different ideas for the past few months. The goal was to have something very different from Galactic Civilizations but also something that is easy for people to add their own techs, distinguish different factions with their own techs, and allow for infinite researching. In this UI, the player has researched the ability to res...

If you’re a software developer on a large project, IncrediBuild is awesome. Let’s you offload all your compiling to idle machines in the office.

I’ll be giving some demos of Elemental this week at PAX.  Visit http://pax.stardock.com for an official schedule.

The 30 minute presentation will be broken into two parts.  The first part will talk about the game itself.  What our goals are. Inspirations for the game (Master of Magic, XCom, Civilization, etc.) and what makes Elemental new and different.

Here are some in-game screenshots.

As pretty as this is, the thing to remember here is that this can be run on a 2 year old laptop (non gamer laptop) and still look like this with 30fps.  How this this possible? Well, part 2 will talk more about the technology underneath Elemental that is new but in short: a 3D engine designed from scratch as a PC-only engine for land based strategy games (as opposed to FPS).