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[Areyar]

Networking code bugs shouldn't be much of a problem anyhow, as the main focus of elemental will be the SP campaign.

Depending on the time investment in a single game, though, I'd love to be able to play cooperatively.
...maybe with 'king level' players hiring 'hero level' players to do quests?
or maybe not, those channelers are supposed to be rare, would be silly to have 100000 of them running amok in a MMORPG like way.
maybe the 'spore' massively singleplayer concept will be used, what with having highly customisable units and all that.

(I now consider spore to be more a concept pilot/demo than an actual game. Considering how the first videogame ever was created as a benchmark demo that is almost poetic. I wonder whether the concept was patented by EA?)

ed:
Bleh! preorder does not allow use of Paypals. Oh noos, not has credit!
I'll just have to endure not being able to play betas and wait for it to go gold.

[Tormy]

Why don't you use your credit card? 

[Sowelu]

Eh, their 'pay for betas' makes sense to me.  They're way earlier betas than most companies.  This ensures that people who don't understand 'EARLY beta' won't see it and say 'Oh, that sucks, they aren't getting my money'.  Because they, um, already have your money.

I will probably preorder once their betas get to a point where they'll let more than a couple hundred people in.

[Areyar]

Why don't you use your credit card? 

No plastic card entitling to credit has I.
Refuse to pay, does I, for a service only going to be abused to get porn... and this beta.
then again betas are game-nerd porn.

[Tormy]

Elemental – polishing for Alpha 0
http://forums.elementalgame.com/355507


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 make over” today with a bunch of new clothes. I guess trade show shirts and ratty shorts just aren’t good enough anymore.

Right now, we’re looking at dozens of issues that need to be addressed before we can even do the alpha build of the game.  Everything from the fonts looking crummy to setting priority on what should be on the setup.

For instance, if someone wants to create a custom civilization and in there choose “good” or “evil” that’s fine. But I’m having them get rid of being able to have pre-existing factions be good or evil because it would literally double the writing involved for each faction’s back story.  While that’s interesting to have, I would rather have more depth per faction rather than half the depth but a mirror universe version of each one.



The screen you see here will likely be significantly altered between now and release. But this gives you an idea of how iterative the process is.  I’ll probably eliminate the appearance area and put that into the custom race area. Right now, “design your race” is the only option. There isn’t a formal “choose your faction” area.  Elemental comes with 2 built in races and 12 factions but we plan to let people create their own races and factions as well, but that should be a separate area that is a lot richer. If you try to mash too much stuff together, it’s confusing to new players but still too weak for experienced users.

[Tormy]

Elemental: Thoughts on multiplayer
http://forums.elementalgame.com/356493

"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 thinking that there may be quite a few ways for the game to be fun in multiplayer mode too. One mode we're very interested in is called Duel. This is where you start on a relatively small world with only 1 other human playing. There would be AI players in the game but there would be only tactical battles in this mode when attacking other humans. This way, players don't wait around very much."

----

Elemental:WoM on Twitter!
http://forums.elementalgame.com/356474

"I really like writing journals for you guys, but I have a problem where, if I dont have time to construct something interesting
(with videos or picts), I tend to focus on other tasks. This isn't a lazyman excuse, I jsut don't want to shortchange our fans.
Anyways, I found Twitter to be a great in-between for anyone that wants to be kept in the loop but dosen't mind their info presented sans-excitement.

This is the first week we have everyone back from the Demigod time-vortex, so we're shifting from basic 'feature implementation' to the 'polishing the game' portion of development.

Feel free to hop aboard and join our day-to-day!
http://twitter.com/teamelemental

[Tormy]

Elemental: AI designing
http://forums.elementalgame.com/356626

For those of you not familiar with game development, most of the development is spent designing the engines and technologies that will be used by the game. In our case, about 2/3rds of the time is spent on that kind of thing. 

In many respects, this time is much like developing a traditional software application.  Elemental uses a graphics engine that has been developed over the past couple of years for Society.

Our previous games used an engine called Pear that was developed in the late 90s and enhanced over the years.  The new engine, called Kumquat, has all kinds of goodies (as you'd imagine).

One of the big differences in Kumquat from my personal coding perspective is its use of Python for scripting.  Our old engine wasn't scriptable so everything was written in C++.  Now, Stardock is a bit unusual that we don't tend to use scripts in our games. In Elemental, the only reason we're using scripting is to make it easier for other people to mod the game.

Anyway, now we're starting to put the pieces together to actually make "the game" as opposed to a series of technologies.  That means I finally get to start sinking my teeth into AI.

With Galactic Civilizations, I only got a couple of months to work on the AI and I had to do it basically on my own.  This time around, our team is large enough that I get to work on it longer and I have help.

Not that I don't mind writing functions like get the distance between two points or whatever but having others who can write the worker functions will save me a lot of time.

One other difference in Elemental was the decision to have multiplayer support. There's a single player reason for this - I want to see how people play the game before the game is released so that I can incorporate clever strategies into the AI.

Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI.  Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players.  My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win.  But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.

----
Elemental: June 2009 FAQ
http://forums.elementalgame.com/356722

It's a quite long post, so I won't copy and paste everything. However, there is a new screenshot in this article. It's a screenie about the tile editor. It looks decent already. 

[Sowelu]

Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI.  Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players.  My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win.  But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.

A man after my own heart.

[Aquillion]

3D engines for doing very very nasty things to the game world when you have enough magic -- think Populous

Oh yes.  I'm replaying Populous 3 just now, and I'm a huge fan of Magic Carpet -- I can't believe there haven't been more games with the ability to magically-alter terrain like those.

[umiman]

Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI.  Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players.  My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win.  But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.

A man after my own heart.

You would find, ironically, that after awhile... humans are more predictable than AI.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

Those of you not familiar with Stardock developed games know that from my personal perspective, the only point to these games is the AI.  Personally, I think it's great that humans want to play the game too but I'm in it for the computer players.  My fun on GalCiv was always watching the different AI personalities fighting each other to see who would win.  But then again, I'm a pretty weird guy.

A man after my own heart.

You would find, ironically, that after awhile... humans are more predictable than AI.

Especially in tournaments.
They play RTS like they play a trading card game, with those pre-designed build or whatever...

[Tormy]

3D engines for doing very very nasty things to the game world when you have enough magic -- think Populous

Oh yes.  I'm replaying Populous 3 just now, and I'm a huge fan of Magic Carpet -- I can't believe there haven't been more games with the ability to magically-alter terrain like those.

Oh boy, I guess I will install Populous again. It was an excellent & unique game. 

[Tormy]

Fun with level of detail
http://forums.elementalgame.com/357021

I won't copy and paste out all of the text, only 1 sentence:

"In our case, we want to have randomly generated worlds that are FULL of lots of exciting things without having to compromise."

Sounds good, isn't it? 

[Tormy]

Elemental: Updated screenshots
http://forums.elementalgame.com/358044

Whoa, take a look at these new screenies about cities. Pure awesomeness. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Sowelu]

City screenshots don't look easy to use (looking forwards to real interface shots), and the tactical shot with the fog and stuff looked very, very ugly.  Let's hope their shadows do what they're supposed to, but the colors and the cel shading look WAY off in combat to me.