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, 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...

Derek and his team have been busy working on the sequel to Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, the sequel to last year’s War of Magic.The final release date for Fallen Enchantress hasn’t been set yet but we do expect to go into beta around Thanksgiving. Beta and Release The initial beta will only be available to those who already have War of Magic. A later beta will be available to anyone who wants to pre-order it.  The beta will be available via Stardock’s new digital store. We plan...

I had the story for Elemental: Destiny’s Embers in my mind for over two decades. Twenty Years. That’s a long time. And when Random House asked me to write it, I had no problem providing them with my first draft. Then a second. And so on.  What ended up being printed and available to purchase at your local book store is nothing like what the original drafts were.  The story is the same. Make no mistake, I didn’t have to sacrifice the story. But the way it was writte...

Once upon a time… A city level in War of Magic had two key game mechanics attached to it. First, it determined what improvements you could build. The higher the level, the more powerful improvements you could construct. But secondly, it limited the number of improvements you could build as well.  Unfortunately, this had the effect of being very frustrating to users who quickly discovered that they couldn’t get their settlement to the next level without wrecking somethin...