The first significant update to Sorcerer King: Rivals it out.  Most of it had to do with making the neutrals behave more intelligently (attacking enemies, building things better, etc.).  We also update the UI to make the Ascension spell much more accessible to players. We also had a pretty major improvement to late game performance thanks to a customer who sent me a saved game who was running into this.  The result is that late game should be much much fa...

I had the opportunity to get a saved game from a player who was experiencing long turn times.  This was extremely useful because it’s one of those things you “hear” about sometimes but it “never happens on my machine”. I was able to reproduce it and the results were fascinating. A huge part of the cost was recalculating those zones of control.  This is something that has always been in there (going all the way back to Elemental) but over time, it appears to ...

PC gaming, at some point in the past year or two, has changed from expecting expansion packs to be offered as an integrated product to demanding they be released as DLC.  Sorcerer King: Rivals stumbled into this brave new world. Our story so far: Last year, we released a fantasy 4X/RPG game called Sorcerer King.  It takes place in our Elemental game universe and is a combination of a 4X strategy game with RPG elements.  It’s a really fun game. In that game, you start ...

Greetings! Many years ago I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 in my dorm room in college. Some of you reading this may have even played it a long long time ago. Following its success, I always wanted to make a fantasy strategy game. Our first try at it was somewhat of a disaster. We made this amazing, custom, fantasy 4X engine but we couldn't quite get the game right.  That game, of course, was Elemental: War of Magic.  I was so disappointed in it that we gave its sequel ...

  Overview Since there’s a lot of material to go over, I’ll try to be as succinct as possible. For Diary #1 we will cover: Directory Structure Quick Links How to cheat Sample Quest: Editing existing Sample Quest: Creating new one Debugging your quest Sharing your Quests   Directory Structure For our purposes, I am going to refer to this directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sorcerer Kin...