The Titans of old long used men as pawns in their proxy wars on Elemental. But men were often unpredictable.

It came to pass that some of the Titans with the darkest of motives began to take the strongest, most ruthless, most consistently evil of men and used them as the basis to create a new race of mortal - The Fallen.

The architecture of the Fallen is very alien from that of men. More savage. More violent. But also more practical.

A world broken in two The continent of Cartagia was broken into two at the climax of the titanic war between “the powers” in what became known as the cataclysm. From this we now have what the inhabitants simply refer to as “the west” and “the east”. When the world was broken, all was laid waste and much lore was lost. In the time that became known as the “War of Magic”, we saw Channelers begin to return and carve out kingdoms. During the War of Magic, the world was again l...

One of the cooler technologies that has really come of age in the past few years is level of detail. It doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves. But it’s a big, big deal in terms of letting us make a game that scales seamlessly from an old laptop all the way up to a Core I7 system with a monster video card. Level of detail lets us seamlessly use different models and assets depending on the level of detail a user needs. To illustrate this, let me use something as simple and ...

The Elemental alpha continues to move forward now that the team is back on it full time. The first alpha that any users will see will look a bit like this screenshot. It's the game's cloth map (the strategic zoom mode). The idea for the alpha builds will be to nail down some of the basic game mechanics. Elemental is primarily a single player game. However, our intention is for the first public alpha to have Internet multiplayer in it. This may seem odd but we are thinki...

As some of you know, the Elemental Beta 0 got nixed due to us needing to throw developers onto Demigod to help GPG and Raknet with the online experience.  The team is starting to migrate back and we’re all glad to be back on Elemental but we did lose some time. But we are still pushing to have an Alpha build on June 25th to give out.  It’ll be cloth map only (so what you see in the above screenshot won’t be in the alpha series and the betas will look a lot better than what...

As some of you know, we had to assign quite a few members of the Elemental team to help with Demigod after it was released.  Most of them are back on Elemental but a couple of our developers are still attached to Demigod to refine the multiplayer system in that game.  It’s been particularly challenging since initially there was virtually no “Stardock code” involved and now it’s thousands of lines.  So we have definitely “gotten involved”. The good news is that it will likel...

While the vast majority of users who actually have Beta 1Z voted for moving forward (the publicly displayed poll isn’t designed to filter based on downloads but rather whether they have an Impulse account) we believe another Beta 1 is still in order. There are some Windows XP issues we want to nail down in particular with regards to stability and memory and there were a bunch of fixes that got finished that didn’t get checked in in time for beta 1Z3. We are probably going to dispense w...

"Flattened forums" option now available. The flattened forums option is simply another way of viewing the forums.  The layout and design won't change, but what posts you see will.  What it does is "flatten" all of the posts in a specific forum so that it includes the posts in all of its sub-forums.  For example, you can go to the Elemental forum and it will automatically show you the newest posts from any of its sub-forums. It makes it a lot quicker to v...

Greetings! Today we released beta 1Z.  There are a number of stability hicups that will need to addressed with an update this weekend but overall we’re pleased with the results so far. However, it is our determination that beta 1Z is not sufficiently stable enough yet to proceed to beta 2. Sorry guys we just want to make sure we aren’t rushing anything. What’s next The remainder of Beta 1 will be about stability.  Making game mechanic changes and the process of tu...

Random House announced its new initiative (see this Wallstreet Journal article) today to collaborate with game developers to improve their in-game stories as well as present those stories in other mediums (books, movies, etc.).

The first result of this initiative comes from Elemental. The universe created through a collaboration of writers at Stardock and Random House is seeing itself presented first in the upcoming book, Elemental: Destiny's Embers (August release date) and then followed up by the PC strategy game, Elemental: War of Magic.

What does this mean to gamers and readers?

For gamers, it means that the quality of the writing in Elemental: War of Magic will be much stronger than it would have been otherwise. This manifests itself in terms of the backstory, the campain, the in-game quests and the general the cohesiveness of the game world.

For readers, it means that the book won’t just be the standard “book based on a video game” fare that often comes across as only vaguely connected to the same world that the game came from.

Elemental: Destiny's Embers is a story I’ve been working on for some years now. With help from Random House’s writing team, they’ve helped me take my early manuscripts and polish them and craft them into a story that I think readers of fantasy will enjoy.

More information:

The book: Elemental: Destiny's Embers

The game: Elemental: War of Magic

 

-Brad Wardell (aka Frogboy)

There’s a big Impulse announcement on Wednesday so we’re going to get bumped to the following Thursday. I guess we’ll just be that much more polished. Sorry about the wait guys.  The Impulse announcement is pretty cool though. I’ve been watching what they have in store. It’s one of those “Duh, why isn’t everyone doing this already?” type things. But IT can’t handle us, this and the Sins of a Solar Empire update next week too. On the bright side, there will be a TOOONNN of new ...

Ah, vacation is over.  So much to do.  The next public beta is scheduled for Thursday, February 4th.  That build should have the dynasties and quests in it.  Don’t worry, it will NOT be fun yet, I promise. I try to suck out all the fun in the betas. I need to.  Below is a picture of me at work that might help:

The more I work with the beta of Elemental the more I think we need to integrate info cards into it.  Those of you who have played Sins of a Solar Empire know what info cards are. They are one of the major game UI innovations that Ironclad has introduced to the genre. The idea is that when you mouse over something, a “card” appears on the screen that gives detailed information about it. They’re kind of like super tooltips. Well, for Elemental, that’s what we’re looking to do too. ...

The Elemental team having a night out. 

In every Stardock game ever, from 1993 on, the “flavor text” was done by whoever had a moment to throw something in there. Often times, it meant I did it since I type 120wpm and could crank out a lot of stuff.  The GalCiv technology descriptions are notorious for this. In War of Magic, we decided that we would keep the tongue in cheek text to a minimum which in reality just made it dry and boring. Since we didn’t enjoy doing it and our fans really wanted to see our games sta...