Any questions you have on the book? This is the place for them.

First impressions: Very positive.  Anyone else here have one?

Elemental: War of Magic v1.09 was released last week.  It’s been a challenging month or so since the release of the game.  At this stage, the technical issues that affected the game at release have been largely resolved.

Now we move towards the next phase which is where we begin to address the game play based on feedback and our own experience.

Now as some people have probably noticed, most games released today are sequels to existing games. It’s difficult these days to launch a new franchise and Elemental has certainly been no exception.  We don’t wait to wait for some future Elemental II to make sure the game lives up to its potential. And realistically, I don’t think we have that luxury.

Elemental: War of Magic is, ultimately a strategy game that lives in a fantasy/RPG style world.  There is so much potential there to be tapped and having suffered the knocks of the initial launch, we want to make sure we do things right going forward.

During the later parts of the beta, I took over as the interim Producer (Project Manager) of Elemental: War of Magic.  Typically, my role is that of Executive Producer and AI developer.  But the sheer immensity of Elemental: War of Magic led us to conclude last Spring that I needed to get more directly involved.  With v1.09 now out, it’s time for me to return to my traditional role on our games and pass the torch on to someone else.

After careful internal consideration, it was decided that we needed to bring in someone with a great deal of project management experience.  This way, Elemental and our future games would have a dedicated, experienced, full-time Producer and I would be able to get back to running Stardock as a whole.

Tomorrow, we’ll be announcing the new Producer for Elemental and, in all likelihood, Stardock’s subsequent games that we develop.  This is a person that is already well known and well respected in the PC gaming community and we’re very excited to be able to hire someone with his talent, experience, and qualifications to succeed me as the Producer on Elemental.

This will allow me to focus my time on design and AI on the game without neglecting the rest of Stardock. In turn, a full time experienced Producer on Elemental will ensure that subsequent updates and expansions get the kind of attention they need and deserve.

We are going to have Elemental: War of Magic v1.1 be the transition between he and I.  After that, we’ll begin work on the first expansion pack for Elemental which will be given to all people who currently own Elemental: War of Magic.  I won’t go into any details on that expansion since our new Producer will be heavily involved in the specifics of the design.

Our goal for Elemental to become a worthy successor to classic games like Master of Magic has not changed and we will be continuing to endeavor to make that a reality. Stay tuned!

Elemental: War of Magic v1.09 was released last week.  It’s been a challenging month or so since the release of the game.  At this stage, the technical issues that affected the game at release have been largely resolved.

Now we move towards the next phase which is where we begin to address the game play based on feedback and our own experience.

Now as some people have probably noticed, most games released today are sequels to existing games. It’s difficult these days to launch a new franchise and Elemental has certainly been no exception.  We don’t wait to wait for some future Elemental II to make sure the game lives up to its potential. And realistically, I don’t think we have that luxury.

Elemental: War of Magic is, ultimately a strategy game that lives in a fantasy/RPG style world.  There is so much potential there to be tapped and having suffered the knocks of the initial launch, we want to make sure we do things right going forward.

During the later parts of the beta, I took over as the interim Producer (Project Manager) of Elemental: War of Magic.  Typically, my role is that of Executive Producer and AI developer.  But the sheer immensity of Elemental: War of Magic led us to conclude last Spring that I needed to get more directly involved.  With v1.09 now out, it’s time for me to return to my traditional role on our games and pass the torch on to someone else.

After careful internal consideration, it was decided that we needed to bring in someone with a great deal of project management experience.  This way, Elemental and our future games would have a dedicated, experienced, full-time Producer and I would be able to get back to running Stardock as a whole.

Tomorrow, we’ll be announcing the new Producer for Elemental and, in all likelihood, Stardock’s subsequent games that we develop.  This is a person that is already well known and well respected in the PC gaming community and we’re very excited to be able to hire someone with his talent, experience, and qualifications to succeed me as the Producer on Elemental.

This will allow me to focus my time on design and AI on the game without neglecting the rest of Stardock. In turn, a full time experienced Producer on Elemental will ensure that subsequent updates and expansions get the kind of attention they need and deserve.

We are going to have Elemental: War of Magic v1.1 be the transition between he and I.  After that, we’ll begin work on the first expansion pack for Elemental which will be given to all people who currently own Elemental: War of Magic.  I won’t go into any details on that expansion since our new Producer will be heavily involved in the specifics of the design.

Our goal for Elemental to become a worthy successor to classic games like Master of Magic has not changed and we will be continuing to endeavor to make that a reality. Stay tuned!

Historically speaking, have you ever noticed that on some games, the reviewer consensus is much higher than the player consensus? And other times, the reviewer consensus is much lower than the player consensus.  What do you think causes this?

Since the beginning of my career, I’ve been a creature of the net. That is, my “real life” exists on the Internet. It may be a generational thing or a just a niche geek thing. Probably the latter.    

Many years ago, I created the blog, Joeuser.com explicitly so that I and anyone else could freely post our thoughts.  It didn’t matter what my day job was because, there was a clear separation in people’s minds between a person’s personal opinions and what they produced as part of their job.

In the past few years, one of the worst kept secrets of the tech media has been the discovery that stories about people instead of tech drive more page views.  Thus, if you use archive.org and go and look at some of your favorite tech (or game) sites home pages you’ll find a very slow but consistent trend away from reporting on products/techs to the people behind products/techs.

As “The Social Network” has shown, the trend has become mainstream. People are hungry to know about the people behind these things. The rules have changed and many of us, who operated for years as “creatures of the net” find ourselves getting a level of scrutiny that has put a real damper on participating online.

I got my first real taste of this about a year ago when I snarked on Facebook that I’d have Stardock ship via Fed Ex instead of UPS because UPS had started boycotting networks based on their political leanings.  Since the network in question was Fox, the not impartial media quickly took my non-public FB comment as a rally to Glenn Beck (who, I’ve never watched nor care about). It was not newsworthy but it did drive page views to those who decided to sensationalize it.

Once that happened, suddenly all my blog posts got a level of scrutiny usually reserved for political figures which has continued to this day.  It’s really sucked the fun out participating online. But there’s nothing that can be done.  This is how things are now.  People snicker about “Well, if you write it online it’s public for all to see” thinking that this has always been the case. It hasn’t. It’s hard to believe that Usenet flame wars used to be considered something of an art form.  There used to be understood gradations.

As on UK editor told me after his magazine trashed our latest game, “My job is to maximize page views to our site, so don’t give us ammunition.”  While I don’t agree that that is what an editor’s job is to do, I do concur that tabloid stories get a lot more hits than hard news stories.  People are drawn to stories with a narrative.  And make no mistake, tech sites are there to make money.

Many of the best tech journalists have abruptly disappeared in the past 2 years. The ones who were experts at covering tech and products aren’t necessarily the ones best suited for reporting on the latest scandal or gossip or statement by a person.  I don’t say this lightly, take a look for yourself using archive.org. Pick your favorite gaming or tech site and look for yourself. You’ll see the same top talent people at these sites year after year and then suddenly, about two years ago, pow, they started disappearing abruptly.  You want to talk about a scandal, there’s one: the systematic termination of the high quality journalists in the tech media.  The ones who are left have had to become freelancers or independents or have been hired by the companies that produce tech.

One only has to look at the amount of nonsense written about Activision’s CEO or some of the vile crap written about Valve’s CEO  or that Steve Jobs personally designed the antenna on the iPhone 4 (if ever an issue was overblown it was that) and so on to see that it’s increasingly about the people making the things we use rather than the things themselves.

It’s a shame because in the long run, it separates the producers of things from the consumer of things. 

Ah, it’s so frustrating yet I find myself drawn back to it every night.

This Fall I’m starting to get back into skinning.  For the past 8 months or so, I’ve been the interim Project Manager on Elemental: War of Magic to get that game ready for release – which I failed spectacularly at. Sometimes, the answer is not to “work harder”. But I digress.

The problem I’m seeing with skinning is business vs. passion.  That is, Windows XP users still represent a near majority of the people using our skinning programs. The problem is, Windows XP is dead as a technology base. I don’t want to even support it any longer.  I want us to make cutting edge technology using WPF and Silverlight and other things that can show what is possible.

A lot of the new Windows technologies have been under used which is a real shame because there’s some great stuff there.

My main worry right now is that WPF is not being well supported by Microsoft and I don’t want us to get into a tech that Microsoft is going to abandon (GDI+, cough cough).

See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/13/microsoft_defends_silverlight/ for my concerns.

My beloved Thinkpad T400 is starting to get a bit long in the teeth. It’s 3 years old now, the longest I’ve ever kept a laptop as my primary non-programming machine.

I’m thinking that I want to wait until USB 3 is in these laptops but I’m not sure how long that’ll be.

So this week we’re finishing the process of porting the 1.0x updates to multiplayer. The new combined version will be called v1.09E.  It has a handful of single player game fixes (like the free money from pioneer thing <g>).

After v1.09E, we’ll take a step back to see how people are playing multiplayer and start putting together plans for future improvements in that area based on the number of people in the community playing it.

For myself, I’ve been working on a different branch (v1.1) along with additional content for players of the book (Elemental: Destiny’s Embers).  People have been asking about what the focus of version 1.1 is.

So as some know, the initial release of Elemental was pretty buggy. Obviously, we didn’t intend that and we apologize for the inconvenience and disappointment this caused to our fans and community.  So these updates thus far have been largely about addressing those issues.  Given how traumatic the past month has been on all of us here, I can tell you we’ve spent a lot of time looking into the what, why, and how.  Obviously, fixing things won’t change the early negative reviews. But we’re big believers of word of mouth and we’ll see how things go as the game improves.

Version 1.1, however is almost purely new features and game play changes.  Briefly, here are the general changes:

1. A global mana pool. Right now, every spell caster has their own private mana pool. This in turn allows players to imbue lots of units with spell casting ability who in turn can summon their own army of monsters.  In version 1.1, there will only be 1 mana pool to draw on and every summoned unit will have its own per turn mana cost to maintain it and every imbued champion will have a mana upkeep cost as well.  This goes back to our original concept of what a Channeler is: Are you going to keep your power for yourself and become incredibly powerful or spread it out into many creations?
2. A revamp of the spells. Because of the above, we can have a much larger variance in the way spells function.
3. Population becomes a stored resource rather than a consumed resource.  This means that soldiers, improvements, pioneers, etc. use population for them to function.  Players thus have to make choices between sending their citizens off to fight wars or use them to research new technologies, study spells, run your shops, etc.
4. Money becomes more derived from people rather than things. Rather than relying on gold mines (which will still exist but won’t be the defacto source of wealth) money will come from the economic activity of your citizens (again, getting back to the concept of you’re rebuilding a society and your strength comes from the strength of your society).  The higher your population in a city, the more money it makes. Higher level cities gain access to improvements that magnify how much each citizen generates. Send your people off to war enmasse and you’ll hurt your economy.
5. Training times for groups of units will have far less penalty. In essence, we will encourage larger sized armies to move towards more epic battles as well as reward those who have more developed, large cities (i.e. able to supply more citizens for training).
6. Outposts won’t provide any housing anymore which also means no area of influence until you start housing people.  Outposts will function like…well, outposts. Guarding an area.
7. Pioneers will be able build on resources outside your zone of control (as long as it’s neutral).
8. Caravans will provide greater economic benefits but will no longer provide food.
9. The new multithreaded AI will be in v1.1 which should allow the AI to fight a much more effective game and allow me to implement more background analysis functions (like in GalCiv II) rather than purely reactive (Elemental 1.0x).
10. Technologies will begin provide special abilities to various types of units. In addition, special abilities will not be tied to “mana” but rather have a cooldown time (and in fact, cooldowns will be in generally).

This is, by no means, even a remotely complete list and it still pales compared to what we’ll be adding in the first free expansion.

We’re also in the process of further increasing staffing on Elemental based on analysis of what areas we need to improve internally. 

Anyway, v1.09E should be up this week, v1.1 should hopefully be ready sometime in October but no promises. We’re giving a lot of the team some time off to recover from the past few months.  At the very least, if you guys want a sneak peek, we can look at letting those who want to have access to our beta builds of v1.1 to tide them over (though I don’t recommend this for most users).