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).

 

To say we were pleased with the reaction Elemental got at the Penny Arcade Expo would be an understatement.  Despite the game only being in alpha, users seemed to really like the direction we’re heading. Some of the features that really got people going included: Family Trees and Succession .  That is, one of the strategies for victory is to quietly arrange marriages so that your family is in the path of succession when sovereigns start getting killed.  In Galactic Ci...

…and so it begins…

The game’s graphics engine (i.e. the MAIN graphics) won’t go into beta until January 2010.  But to give you an idea of how far things have gone already let’s take a look:

 

   
2006: Society rendering engine.

 

2007: First Engine port from Society .

The AI in Galactic Civilizations I and II has tended to get a lot of praise over the years.  But it could have been better. Much better.  A big reason that kept it from being better was sheer laziness on my part.  A lot of the best strategies involve algorithms that just are tedious to write. For example, I submitted feedback to GPG for Demigod’s AI based on algorithms I knew would be effective but that I didn’t actually use in GalCiv because they were a pain to write. ...

With the beta scheduled to go out TODAY I thought we should go over some of the game concepts here.

Now, as has been mentioned, the graphics for beta 1 are stripped far far down in order to focus on the core game play.

Now when you start out the game, it is just your sovereign. The world is largely covered up. As seen in this screenshot, you see the outline of land but not much else.

 

Eventually, you will come into contact with other players as you can see here.

Beta 1A of Elemental has arrived (or will in a few minutes).  It’s still incredibly primitive but a lot has gone on under the covers thanks to feedback from the beta testers from the initial beta. First, a lot of bugs got fixed. There’s still a lot more to go at least but the CPU frying issue, the hard disk corruption issue, and of course the video card overheating problems have been mostly taken care of so we are pretty sure that the odds of the game physically damaging your comp...