One of the challenges in making Elemental has been to create a game with a very distinctive look. A lot of land-based strategy games tend to look pretty similar to one another.  What we want with Elemental is an art style that someone will instantly be able to identify with this particular game.  To that end, we have developed an art-style that is kind of a water-color look. One of our challenges is that we want players to be able to zoom in on units as closely as...

One of the things that has been driving Demigod beta testers crazy is that they aren't used to how Stardock does betas. A lot of them came from the Gas Powered Games community so they don't realize that Stardock betas tend to be very primitive. With Elemental, we may drive the point home by having the first beta of the game only use the cloth map instead of the actual game engine for game play.  The idea is, if it's a good game, it should be reasonably fun even without fancy ...

Well today I have to start putting together all the assets that are going to need translation so that we can get that going. For Elemental, the plan is to have a much much higher level of writing quality than we had in previous games by bringing on professional authors and editors to help. So what sorts of things do we have in mind? The Factions There are 12 named factions (races) in Elemental. In addition, players will be able to create and submit their own factions to be ...

If you’ve ever played D&D with friends, you no doubt got a feel that you were adventuring in a world that was much larger than just your party. Elemental is, in a way, about building that world. Each game of Elemental is meant to be different and customizable in such a way that players can make those worlds theirs.  For us, that means having a world that feels organic. As you build things up, things begin to happen automatically. There isn’t a ton of micro management in ...

  In Elemental, you design your own units. Give them whatever name you want to give them, equipment them with weapons, armor, helmets along with deciding how much training they need. Creating a soldier or a scout or a knight or what have you boils down to how long it takes you to have the equipment on hand and training which is raw time.  There is still "quick build" but that simply, at a cost, gets supplies to that town a lot quicker. It's like having your...

We mentioned in a previous entry that Beta 0 of Elemental will be able to be played on a cloth map.  Now to be clear, not all of the game elements will be able to be handled so abstractly. But enough will be that the basic game could be played on the cloth map. But some users have emailed me asking why even bother having the zoom in map? And the answer is that a game, in our opinion anyway, is greater than the sum of its parts.  What we hope to make special about Ele...

When looking at the graphics in Elemental as we show them, there are two things to remember: 1. We're over a year away from release so we're talking very preliminary artwork. 2. It's a strategy game not an RPG so the units aren't going to have the kinds of detail that an RPG has because we have to display thousands and thousands of these units on screen. So the other day we discussed how equipment being added to your units would work with the Intel Havok physics engine. The idea...

One of the things in Elemental we've been thinking hard on is how the economic system in the game should work.  Elemental is, first and foremost, about building a civilization that happens to exist in a world filled with magic. So when it comes to building things, we are trying to get away from the classic "N production units".  There are, for instance, no factories in Elemental. We want players to really understand just how big of a deal it is for a civilization to be a...

For those of you who have been through the development of a Stardock developed or published game, much of this will be familiar.  For those of you aren’t, welcome! Early next year we plan to release a new turn-based PC strategy game called Elemental .  Our games typically have 3 betas and then a private “gamma” and then release.  We use the beta to mean truly unfinished, not feature complete but playable (we also use the term “alpha” for truly unfinished but not playable be...

When people think of 3D hardware and its benefits, they usually think of first person shooters and RPGs.  But ever since Galactic Civilizations, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire started popularizing strategic zoom the possibilities have really opened up that 3D acceleration, now mainstream, let us do a lot of amazing things. In Black & White, players could zoom out to see the world or zoom in to see individual villagers living their lives.  It gave us...

Some of the concepts we're talking about will be hard to envision without actually having the game but one of the real innovations we're trying to introduce with Elemental is the concept of unlimited expansion. The key to this is not hard coding civilization capabilities but rather leaving them open-ended. So let me start at the beginning: When someone first gets into Elemental, the relationships will be simple between things. A player who wants to design a horse mounted knight wi...

I’m a map junkie. I love making maps.  I even bought a program called Campaign Cartographer years ago just to make maps. One of the features of Elemental is, not surprisingly, a map editor. But the map editor is also being designed so that you can export your creations so you can easily print them out and such. The map editor will let users build theri own mountain ranges, forests, swamps, you name it. Of course, it’s also useful that you will be able to t...

So much going on this week and at the same time, so little. A lot of vacations here at Stardock pop up in June since this is one of the prime months here in terms of weather.  On a sad note, Trent (Mittens) had his last day today. He’s off to Salt Lake City to take a position as a designer at a new game studio.  We’ll miss him.  Combined with the people on vacation, the studio area feels like a ghost town. My executive planner and marketing manager gave me a “CEO ma...

While a lot of Stardock’s development team has been interfacing with Gas Powered Games to continue to improve Demigod, the Elemental team continues forward. Now a couple of things about Elemental that should be made clear: Elemental will be a single-player focused game.  It will have multiplayer but most of the development time will be spent on single player. Elemental will have a story-based campaign. While Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod do not have story-based ...

Our story so far... In Elemental there is no such thing as a knight or a wizard or an archer.  Instead, players design their own units.  If you wanted to call a unit a knight, you might take a man, equip him with some armor, give him a helmet, arm him with a sword, and pair him up with a horse. The armor, helmets, swords, etc. are things you manufacture and thus have some control over how they look. Normally, customizing an individual unit falls only in the realm of role play...