I’m sharking around the office.
Because today is the day.
So far, this project has been handled by Stardockians working in their spare time: the same ones who made the original game 15 years ago. It’s a labor of love for us.
What I’m hoping is that we’re not the only ones who love this game and what it could be. That’s what Early Access will tell us. If enough people join in, I can justify bringing on more engineers, artists, writers, and others. We’d love to grow the team and work on this full-time. We’ll soon find out.
The art in this game is old enough to drive a car, but the underlying engine is state-of-the-art. We’ve converted everything to 64-bit, HD, and FBX (which probably took 50% of our effort, with another 25% spent on localization, so you’ll see a few broken strings at first).
Fantasy Games for the New Age
Many of you are probably around my age. I’m 54. I was 35 when I started designing Elemental. I was 20 when I began writing the backstories that became Elemental and Galactic Civilizations. I wanted Elemental to mix Master of Magic, Populous, and Diablo. By release, it was a shadow of that. We fought so hard just to make it work that many features had to go. It was painful.
Those systems weren’t deleted, just disabled. They’re still here. All that depth and detail is still there. Each day, more of it returns.
This was a game made before every feature was analyzed for “market segments” or “engagement.” Does it make sense that every unit has a backstory you can read? That you can modify and customize each one? Probably not, but the work was done.
When this is finished, the sheer amount of content will be staggering, even by today’s standards, and that’s before modders get involved. This time, everything uses standard formats. Music files are MP3s and WAVs. Quests are XML. Screens are INI (dxscreen) files referencing PNGs, and 3D assets are FBX.
What to Expect
Stability should be solid. The main bugs come from ongoing localization work. In the original, text was hardcoded in C++ or XML, so moving it out is a manual process. You’ll probably see some missed spots, but they won’t affect gameplay.
The fun is there. It’s already more enjoyable than FE or SK. We’ve done significant balance work and restored many War of Magic items.
The UI is still a work in progress; some spells, tooltips, and info aren’t displaying correctly yet. That should be fixed in the next few days. Every day brings big improvements.
If you like fantasy 4X games, you’ll probably like this.
What’s Next
Localization is our top priority. I apologize to our non-English fans that it didn’t make it into Beta 1. Every time we thought we’d found all the strings, we’d discover something like TreasureWnd.cpp with a hardcoded sprintf().
After that comes modding. We want Steam Workshop integration ASAP. Once people see how easy it is to share maps, dungeons, techs, recipes, items, monsters, and city improvements, it’ll be clear:
This is awesome.
We were absolutely insane in 2010 to build this.
Then there’s the Dynasty System: a big deal. Breeding your heirs is a core part of the game.
That’s the near term. What happens next depends on how many people join Early Access. Hence the sharking around the office — seeing who I can pull onto Elemental.