Welcome to the Elemental Community!

If you're new to a Stardock game community you're in for a real treat.

Here are a few things to be aware of and help make your stay with us more enjoyable.

1. The developers of the games we make actively participate in the forums. The game itself is only part of the experience. Hanging out with you guys, chatting about the game, coming up with new ideas for the future is part of what we enjoy doing as well.

2. The CEO of Stardock (me) actively participates. My involvement ebbs and flows depending on what's needed but I'm always around.

3. Stardock games evolve over time.  We're our own publisher AND developer. Other than Valve, we may be the last independent game developer that also publishes its own titles at retail and digitally on its own service. What this means is that what you're playing right now is likely to change and improve over time based on feedback from the community.

4. The community revolves around mutual respect. Because the actual developers of the games we make participate, we have a lot less tolerance for rage-posts or flaming. As a result, you will see posts get locked and abusive users get booted.  We welcome constructive criticism and lively debates here. Just try to remember there's another human being on the other end of the screen before you hit the post button.

5. We may not always (or even usually) comment on each thread but we read nearly every thread on the forums at some point.

6. A lot of the participants here have been here a long time (see the karma ratings next to them). We all help each other here. We're all on the same side.

7. Feel free to post your own experiences, ideas, fan fictions, game play examples, you name it. Just try to use the proper sub forum.

8. There is a little button in the top right of the forums that flattens the forums. If you do this, you'll see all the latest posts from sub forums from their parent.

9. We're everywhere. That is, the people here are from around the world. Please avoid bashing a particular country. If you want to debate politics or ideology or what have you, feel free to visit www.politicalmachine.com and participate in those forums there or go to www.joeueuser.com and participate there.

10. We're all on the same side here. We're all here because we love the game and want it to get better and better.  Elemental had a rough start but we love it and will be working as long as it takes to keep making it reach its potential.  As long as people are interested in the game, we'll stick to it.

Enjoy and have fun!

One of the great misconceptions of the Internet is that people have control over how they are perceived online.  This illusion is a carry over from “the real world” where people can manage the perception they give off by how they dress, how they speak, and how they present themselves.

On the Internet, without the benefit of people being able to really “know” a person, they only get fractional glimpses of you. As a result, people have to fill in the holes with their own preconceived notions.

The closest thing in the real world we get to that is in politics where savvy politicians do their best to make sure there are large holes in which their handlers can then encourage people to fill those gaps with their hopes and dreams. But on the Internet, it’s virtually impossible to have any control over how those gaps in perception are filled.

My day job is at Stardock where I’m the President and CEO.  It’s a company with dozens of different projects in development at any one time.  I generally don’t get involved in any particular project unless it is (a) critical to the company overall and ( needs executive intervention.  Unless you’re a mom and pop shop, you can’t micro-manage any given project or you doom it to failure.

When an executive intervenes, their goal is to bring in resources from other units to solve a given problem. When things go well, it’s invisible to the general public. When things go wrong, well, that’s when one begins to lose control of their online persona.

For example, my own persona has been filled with the perception that I’m a “control freak”.  Those who have worked at Stardock know this is the opposite of reality.  When things are going well, I just read through reports from the PMs and give a thumbs up.  The joke on Neowin.net (a site we own that few people are even aware of because it runs smoothly) I rubber stamp everything from the PM.  Same for WinCustomize.com and the Enterprise group.  The same is usually true on the games side of our company as well.  My job is to make sure the PMs have the resources they need to execute and to provide a general design of the given product in question with the PM filling in the details (whether that be DeskScapes, Multiplicity, Object Desktop, GalCiv, Elemental, or you name it).  On external projects, I’m usually more hands off unless things start to “go south”. 

Usually I can intervene and solve it and the public is never aware of how close things came to blowing up. Sometimes, however,  the intervention comes too late or is beyond my capability to solve. In nearly 20 years, we’ve only had two big failures – the Demigod networking and the Elemental launch.  In both cases, my job was to identify the problems, work with the team to design a solution and then gather the resources to make it happen.  In Demigod’s case, I brought in the Impulse team to fix it. That was something only the CEO could do since Stardock’s game publishing group obviously had no say over the Impulse dev team.  In Elemental’s case, we lacked sufficient management to implement the game design and in this case, my intervention involved personally jumping into the code to see what elements of the design could get in.  In the end, it was not even close to sufficient –- though if you work enough 100+ hour weeks in a row and you’d be surprised how your mind can fool you into thinking everything’s fine (it’s still good! it’s still good! it’s just a little slimy, it’s still good!).

The point being, when you are online, the more activity that surrounds you in one way or the other the more people will want to fill in the gaps of your public persona.  The narrative can be positive or negative.  Sometimes the narrative works in your favor beyond any reasonable justification and other teams it works just the opposite.

My advice to those who, like me, “live on the net” is this: Don’t get too invested in your online persona. You will never be able to control how people perceive you because human nature abhors a vacuum and they will fill it with their hopes, dreams, and prejudices that have nothing to do with who you really are. 

It’s been a long while since we’ve visited WindowFX. 

When WindowFX 1.0 came out, its claim to fame was its ability to give windows alpha blended shadows and make use of transparency.  Later, it was updated to have even more gratuitous effects.

With WindowFX 4, we’ve taken a totally new direction.  Now, we’re focusing on things that are less cosmetic and more useful.  For instance, WindowFX 4 will allow users of all versions of Windows to drag a window to the side and have it automatically resize it. Windows 7 does that now.  However, WindowFX also lets users drag a window to a screen corner and it’ll resize the window to use a quarter of the screen.

Another nifty feature is the ability to set individual windows to have a custom maximize size if you hold the shift key down when you press the maximize button on the title bar.  Say you’re running at high resolution but you want one window to max at 800x600 and another at 1024x768. No problem, right click on the title bar, set its custom max size and then when you hold down the shift key when pressing on their maximize button, voila. Customize max size.

Another new area we’re working on is a new concept called “Window Flicks”.  The idea here is that users can grab a window and “flick it” in a certain direction and have it behave in a certain way (such as maximize it or send it over to a second monitor or have it vertically maximize). 

Speaking of which, another neat feature is the ability to double click on a window edge to have it maximize out in direction you clicked on.  Very handy if you’re running lots of windows.

These are just a few of the things in the all new WindowFX 4.  Users of Object Desktop will begin having access to the beta next week.

If you haven’t gotten it already, go get ObjectDock 2 (www.objectdock.com). The price is right (free).

The accessibility features are really killer. But ironically, I turned off nearly all the cool glitzy stuff in order to have this decidedly boring dock. Maybe I’m just getting old. 

As mentioned last week on November 1st I’ll be resuming my traditional position as Executive Producer and lead designer (the position I held on our previous games) so that someone who can dedicate their full attention to Elemental can succeed me. 

My successor, Kael (Derek Paxton), is well known in the Civilization community for Fall from Heaven, a rich, fantasy-based mod.  If anyone is qualified to take over the reigns of Elemental, it’s him.

In addition, we recently brought on something we haven’t previously done, an Associate Producer. This is something we should have done on Elemental but we were still structured like we were when our games were just a half dozen people projects.  Toby Sarnelle was recently added to the Elemental project to work with Kael.  They shall bring order to the chaos.

I want to emphasize that I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be part of the project and posting plenty but my journals will increasingly be about the part of the game I’ll be involved in most – the computer AI.   For v1.1, I’ve started handing the producing efforts to Toby in preparation for Kael’s arrival on November 1.

So how does game design differ from being a producer?  Let me give you a few examples from v1.1’s work.

The Design:

v1.1 technology tree has a cavalry sub-tree now.  The design calls for the new technologies to give new abilities to your existing cavalry units such as “Charge” and “Evade” (to evade arrows).

Producing:

v1.1 engine doesn’t support adding abilities to existing units. Alternative proposal: Those techs provide new types of mounts: (e.g. War Horse) that do have these abilities.

The Compromise

The Executive Producer thus has to make the call as to whether that is an acceptable workaround or if they are willing to increase the budget and due date for the release in order to extend the engine to support that.

Those are the kinds of calls that have to be made all the time in game development.  The challenge is making the right judgment call on when to implement the work around and when to spend the time/money to update the engine.  On a new game, this can be perilous (as we have already seen) because you make the wrong call on something and you can cripple the entire game experience.  This is why sequels tend to be better because you already have a feeling for what game mechanics will work and which ones won’t.

It’s also why the Designer and the Producer are generally not the same person. Checks and balances.  One of my funnest experiences (on development) was with Demigod.  On that project, I was the Executive Producer, Mike Marr (GPG) was the designer and Bartosz Kijanka (GPG) was the producer.  One of the reasons why Demigod is such a good game was because of how effectively the 3 of us were able to work together.

The importance of the triumvirate

These days, it seems like everyone wants to be a “game designer”. People ask me what does it take to be a game designer? The answer is you had better have a good handle on how games are actually made.  Anyone can sit down and whip up a 300 page design document outlining their ultimate sci-fi vs. fantasy real time strategy/RPG/FPS game. What makes someone a good designer is how well they can design something that can actually be made profitably: Time, Scope, Budget.  So for starters, make sure you know how to program. Have you ever made your own game? Have you ever made a substantial mod? These are important basic skills to get started.  Hence, people who want to be game designers, IMO, should get a degree in computer science or some other technical field – not “game design”.

Similarly, if you want to be a Game Producer, the key skills here are project management. Can you make sure your artists, developers, balancers, etc. are all moving according to schedule? It’s like juggling.

In my case, I’m a good but not great game designer. I’m a good but not great Game Producer. My “special” skill is that I’m good (but not great) across the breadth of game creation.  This is an important skill if you want to start your own game studio but can be detrimental once it becomes successful because you need to begin stepping back to replace “good” with “great” at the earliest opportunity and that can be hard to do.

Anyway…

I don’t really have a particular point I’m trying to make in this rambling journal other than to give those of you who are interested in the game industry a glimpse of what things are like.

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?