Elemental: Destiny's Embers is due out in August.  Published by Random House, the story revolves around the Kingdom and the Empire trying to regain mastery of the world. Myself and the editors and writers at Random House are collaborating on a single set of lore that the game and the novels make use of.

The novel helps underscore how serious we are about delivering to gamers (and readers) a world that isn’t simply generic fantasy. Starting with beta 3 of Elemental, the lore starts to get integrated and there is a lot of it. The novels don’t focus a lot on the races of Elemental since it is told largely from the point of view of an ordinary person who is discovering the greater world as the story progresses. 

One of our principle goals was to make a story that was not based on a game or a game based on a book but rather to collaborate on an epic world in which the game and the book could both readily draw on. I think those of you who enjoy Feist or George R. R. Martin in particular will appreciate a lot of the subtlety.

For those of you not in the beta

In Beta 1 (and 2) there is basically no “lore”. It’s just features. I click on a city and it tells me its stats. I click on a spider it tells me its stats. There’s not the slightest bit of character in yet. It’s one of the reasons I have strongly recommended against people joining the beta unless they were interested explicitly in developing the game mechanics because Beta 1 and 2 are completely soulless.

The Hiergamenon

The Limited Edition of Elemental will include a book called The Hiergamenon. As someone who used to spend hours looking at the D&D Monster manual or reading Gnomes I have missed the days of being able to to sit and read a book that presents me with a world as a kind of encyclopedia. Luckily, The Hiergamenon will also be integrated into the game itself as a virtual book. Thus, clicking on a city or an NPC or a monster will bring up its entry in The Hiergamenon. 

Dave Stern is my mentor/editor on the book so he gets to torture me with masses of suggested edits and changes. On the game, the roles reverse as he leads the Random House team in producing the Elemental in-game lore.

This week we’ve put up a couple of journals that are soliciting input from players on what they’d like to see in terms of faction customization.

My journals were clearly too wordy as I failed to convey the fundamental questions at hand.

So I’ll put it in bullet point form.

• We are rapidly nearing Beta 3 where the “game” itself comes together.
• At that point we will need to decide where to focus our asset creation (read: Artists and Random House writers).
• Presently, Elemental supports Alignment (Kingdom vs. Empire), Faction (Altar, Pariden, etc.) and Race (Men, Urxen, Trog, etc.).
• Presently, the assets (read: Art and Writing) has not been put in place which means we can still make pretty significant changes.
• There are two general directions to take:
• Eliminate the race distinctions and instead build out the Factions with more lore and artwork. Current customization of factions would remain.
• Expand the race distinctions and provide more assets and code to support players creating their own custom factions made up by their own custom races.

There are pros and cons in either direction. 

Some people might find it confusing that factions and races are different. Kraxis is a faction that is made up of men that is part of the Empire. Umber is a faction that is made up of Urxen, a Fallen Race that is also part of the Empire.

On the other hand, having factions and races that are different provides us the ability to provide customization in terms of culture and genetics.

In Civilization, the differences between civilizations were ones of culture. They’re all humans.

In Master of Orion, the differences between civilizations were purely genetics. The factions were the races.

In Elemental, the difference between civilizations is based on their culture (Altar vs. Pariden) AND based on their race (Men vs. Trog).

So the question is, where would people like to see the focus? More emphasis on making the game lore with the 10 factions.  Or more emphasis on making it easy for players (in game) to customize their own factions/races?

 

…In the beginning there were Men and Dragons…

When the Titans came, they saw the creatures of the world as building blocks and created many new creatures from them. These creatures are called (by men) “The Fallen”.  There are four known sentient races of The Fallen (see the Lore for more details).

In previous discussions, we have used analogies to Middle Earth.  In Middle Earth, Illuvatar created only two sentient races. The Elves and then Men.  All other sentient races were created “unnaturally” (the dwarves and Orcs being the best example. The origin of halflings is unknown). 

In Elemental, there are more factions than there are races. This is similar to Sins of a Solar Empire where there are many factions but only 3 races.

When we use the term “race” we really mean species in the specific sense that they cannot interbreed except for Channelers and their offspring.

...Fitting Lore into a Game...

SciFi/fantasy lore that evolved outside a game (as was the case with both Galactic Civilizations and Elemental) can be difficult to fit into a game universe.

In Galactic Civilizations, the universe -- its lore, was never published so I had a free hand to tweak all the civilizations to fit the needs of the game.

Elemental is a bit different because its lore is being presented in a book (Elemental: Destiny's Embers).  In the book, it's fairly straight forward. You've got two general aligments - The Kingdoms and the Empires.  The Empires are dominated by races of the Fallen and the Kingdoms are dominated by the races of Men. Simple right? Well... Read on to see the complexities and why we're brainstorming with you guys on other directions.

 

….Pre-made Races vs. Player Created Races…

Yesterday we discussed what priority should custom art assets versus canon art assets should take. If we focus primarily on canon factions and their corresponding races, we can greatly expand their stories and the art assets for them.  However, if we focus less on the canon factions and more on providing assets we can let players create their own unique races and factions that are more rewarding visually and game play wise.

The question thus becomes which direction to take? 

…Understanding Game Development…

By the end of this journey, I suspect many of you will have a much better understanding of what game development is like.  The “game” itself is the tip of the iceberg. What you see in these betas is only a tiny piece of the whole “product”. Underneath the covers is the engine and art assets. The game itself we can monkey around with any dozens of ways based on player feedback.  The expensive part is building the engine (which isn’t even in the beta yet) and creating the art assets (only a bit are in the beta).

Thus, once we begin to commit to things that involve changing the game engine or the art assets, they’re pretty much set in stone. By contrast, changing research or economy or spells or what have you is largely just changing text in XML.

So we are reaching the point where we will have to make decisions on whether to focus more on canon assets or assets to be used by players to create their own world.  I.e. Dragon Age (canon centric) or Spore (non-canon centric).

We don’t have to go to either extreme.

…Fantasy Races…

In traditional high fantasy, you’ve got men, dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins. People have a pretty good idea the pros and cons of them because they appear in so many games.  In our world, we don’t have dwarves or elves or orcs.  We have the natural races and the races made by the Titans. They’re not good or evil based on their race but rather on their faction. The Krax are men but they’re real bastards. There are Fallen races out there that aren’t evil at all (but they don’t come into our particular tale right now, you’ll need to read the book).

…Complexity…

We don’t want to “dumb down” the game in any way but at the same time, we don’t want to have unnecessary complexity. The fact that we have Empires/Kingdoms and then Factions and then Races is pretty complicated as is.  It would be so much easier if the Empires were all Fallen and the Kingdoms were men but that would be simplistic and frankly, to me, distasteful. It’s bad enough that the unnatural sentients are called Fallen but that’s only because our tale is told from the point of view of man and thus can identify their bias on our own.

In our game, there are 5 true races (Men, Urxen, Trogs, Magnars, and Wraiths).  But even amongst these 5 there are sub-groups (The Ironeers if Gilden and the Krax are visually very distinctive but genetically compatible).

You can see how this gets complex in a hurry and why there is the urge to simplify to appeal to a wider audience. Will the fantasy strategy buying public be interested in learning the intricacies of the lore that’s been developed here over the past two decades? Or would they prefer us to simplify it into a couple of basic races (Men and Fallen) and let people get on to making their own races.  You would still have the same factions, they’d simply just be made up of two races (men and fallen) and then players could make their own races.

So that’s the discussion we have going on.  My bias is to focus on our own canon and introduce players to it. Players could still create their own races but they’re not going to be making any half-dragon half man races or Ents or what have you.  That’s my bias on it because that sort of thing can be added later in post-release if the game’s successful whereas we only get one opportunity to really explore the depths of the rift between say Kraxis and Capitar or the doom of Pariden and Procipinee.

…Implementation…

Here’s how races could be implemented:

First, when creating a faction you would have a new tab called “race”. The existing races would be there. 

You would choose a specific (easy to understand) ability that makes that race unique. Hard Workers might produce pioneers that get more out of resources. Fierce Warriors might get a combat speed boost. Good Traders might be the only ones who can reach paved roads. Fast Travelers go faster. Great Archers can shoot further (maybe attack on the strategic map from a tile away even).   The difference would be significant.

Then you pick the Appearance and that’s where we really hit the art asset budget. Skeletons are expensive because you then have the clothes and equipment to go on them (in Spore, you may have noticed nobody had clothes you could put on them).  The rest is fairly easy. But obviously no Centaurs or Quaddies.

Then in your cities, you would see next to the current owner of the city what race populates the city. A faction may conquer another city but the race in the city remains the same.  The part with enchantments you should ignore – you don’t know about that yet.

Now obviously, people can get into mixing (ala Civ IV and such) but there is so much going on in the world that we want to try to avoid having potentially 30+ different races making up a city (i.e. if we let players create their own races as well as factions, we have to be careful about how convoluted it gets).

Your thoughts

I hope you guys are enjoying these journals and their peak at the kinds of things that go on during game development. Marketing hates these journals because they expose the world to the “sausage factory” that is commercial game development.

Please feel free to share your thoughts.

We have been pleasantly surprised at how this has worked out because it gives us the opportunity to look at seeing if we have time to do something we have wanted to do: Develop the RACES further.

The Kingdoms are made up by a single race (Men)

The Empires are made up of three races presently (Men, Trogs, Urxen).

However, with the reality being that people seem to much prefer to create their own factions, it may make sense for us to return to TWO pre-made races (Men and Fallen) and then use the resources saved to put in more content to let people make their own races.

So in the Faction creation screen, you would have a “Race” tab where you would design what they look like along with a very simple Strength and Weakness list.

Illustrating the point

One of the things we thought we would have to wait until a sequel would be to let players mix their races together when they build up their kingdom or empire.  Right now, you capture a city, all the people simply become your faction (and its corresponding race).

So even if you made a race of those Avatar blue guys, when you capture a city from Pariden, the city would remain populated by Men.  You would then be able to created a mixed army where they all have their strengths and weaknesses and visually look different.  So you could create a true “Last Alliance”.

Now, the trade off is that the 10 factions would be made up of only 2 premade races (Men and Fallen) but there’d be enough assets available then to let players create their own Orcs or Dwarves or Elves or Space Smurfs or what have you and then let players create a mixed empire.

So Men might have a +1 bonus to say Economy. Fallen might get a +1 bonus to their attack rating. Then players could also create (for instance) Elves who get a +1 to the range of their archers or any number of other differences plus they would visually look different.  From this, in post-release we could explore other ramifications.

What do you think?

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 with the polling unless I can get IT to spend time to filter out users who don’t actually have the beta (incidentally, the votes include the user ID and the IP address for the guy who put in 11 no votes with the same IP with different accounts, tsk tsk). 

The forum discussions alone were enough to convince me that one additional beta 1 build made sense.

It IS important, however, that anyone who experiences problems report them. Don’t assume that we know about them. Read this post.

The third pass of the conclusion of Beta 1 is going up today.

Here’s what’s new from last Thursday:

* Item Swapping *

Overview: You can now swap items between units by opening the ITEMS tab for a selected unit and dragging/dropping the item icon to either a unit on the map, a medallion on the empire tree, or a medallion in the army/stationed units context list.

+ Added ability to drag (non-equipped) items out of a unit's item context list and drop them either on a unit on the map, on a unit entry in the main game wnd (the list that shows up to display subunits or stationed units), or on a unit entry in the empire tree
+ If you drag an entry for an item type that you have more than 1 of, it will just trade one of them for now, maybe it will ask how many to trade later if we make a message box for it
+ Fixed bug where you could unstation units using right-click on a tile inside of the city, causing them to either sit there stupidly or restation themselves
+ Fixed bug where, when ejecting multiple units from a city at once, they wouldn't join together into an army at their destination tile and would just stack
+ Made it so that unstationing units will select them again after they've been unstationed, so that you can control them without having to click them again
+ Added basic spellbook to the basic sovereign unit types, so custom sovereigns will start with the basic spellbook
+ Items that aren't available in the create sovereign screen aren't automatically restricted from the unit design screen anymore

* Data Loading from Saved Games *

Overview: All game data (stuff normally read in from XML) will now save out to the saved game file. This meens you can now reliably send saved games around without needing to send any custom units/factions/etc. It'll all save out then load back in right from the ELESAV file.

+ fixed a bug that was causing a byte offset.  In LoadPropModelTypes(), changed a pGameSave->AddElement() call to be a pGameSave->GetElement() call instead. In this case, it was messing with the ability to load a fullmode gamesave

+ removed the "if ( !IsBasicMode() )" calls so that a fullmode gamesave can be used in basicmode and vise versa

+ added member variable TString m_strNPCRecruitmentText, initialized in ctr, copied in copy ctr, cleared in Clear(), added to save/load code.
+ added member functions Get/SetNPCRecruitmentText()
+ updated AddStat() to call SetNPCRecruitmentText() when it finds tag <NPCRecruitmentText>

+ in StampTile struct, moved function bodies from .h to .cpp, since they have long bodies and I needed to add more functions with bodies too.
+ In StampTile struct, added function SetTileInfoParent() so I could call it from CMapStamp
+ In StampTile struct, added function SetStampTileInfoParent() so I could call it from CMapStamp
+ In CMapStamp::Load(), for each StampTile it loads, it now calls SetTileInfoParent(this) and SetStampTileInfoParent(this)

* Bug Fixes *

+ Fixed crash where pUnit was not being checked to see if it was valid (world.cpp)

+ Changed code that called m_PathTiles.clear(); to call ClearPath, to fix stuck turn bug

+ Fixed bug where mountain gfx would not always show up when moving around the map or loading a saved game

+ Fixed startup crash on computeres with NVidia 8800 running Windows 7 with multiple monitors

+ Fixed bug where mountain icons and gfx did not appear in exposed FOW areas after loading a saved game.

+ Fixed T-pose characters caused by changes to make animation multi-threaded

+ Fixed crash when creating a new faction and pressing the appearance tab caused by the new faction not having a valid sovereign unit type set yet, instead using a hardcoded unit type that doesn't exist anymore

+ Fixed city improvement stats disappearing after one click and the Demolish button becoming unusable after clicking on a non-buildable improvement.

+ Fixed bug where unit quality types (veteran, elite, etc.) would apply correctly in the train unit wnd but wouldn't make it to the actual created unit, making them use the normal quality
+ Fixed bug where unit battle rank calculation was getting the troop count from the wrong place, causing the battle rank to not be multiplied by the troop count

+ CalcBattleRank now calls GetTroopNum on unit passed in, instead of asking the unit formation for the troop num

+ Fixed extra release of guardian units when intersecting a goodie hut, would eventually delete them and cause a crash

+  Fixed two problems with the new citybuilding code - icons weren't getting shaded right because they were getting the wrong alpha set, and the player could build improvements they shouldn't have been able to because the improvement selection wasn't getting cleared when the improvement was no longer available.

+ In OnClickTab, fixed various city context cases to use the m_pContextSelection to get the city to display info for instead of GetFirstSelectedLocalPlayerCity, this makes it more consistent with how the rest of the screen behaves and also fixes a bug where city contexts sometimes wouldn't fill up even when selected

+ Fixed bug where selecting a city from the empire tree and clicking one of the other context tabs wouldn't bring up the context, because OnClickTab wasn't using the current context to fill the info but the first selected city, which hadn't been set yet

+ fixed bug where some auto-quotes were being set as the DisplayName of a unit type

+ City Balance Pass 1.0

·         Outposts (1)

o   Get 12 buildable tiles

o   Require 40 population to level up

o   No Defense bonus

o   Can only build 1 of a standard improvement

·         Villages (2)

o   Get 20 buildable tiles (+2 additional game tiles)

o   Requires 150 population to level up

o   50% HP bonus to defending units

o   Can build 2 of a standard improvement

o   Required for

§  Arcane Labratory

·         Town (3)

o   Get 28 buildable tiles (+2 additional game tiles)

o   Can build on tiles that are not adjacent to an improved tile

o   Requires 400 population to level up

o   100% HP bonus to defending units

o   Can build 3 of a standard improvement

o   Required for

§  Town Hall

§  Town Council

§  Theater

§  Library

§  Houses

·         City (4)

o   Get 36 buildable tiles (+2 additional game tiles)

o   Can build on tiles that are not adjacent to an improved tile

o   Requires 750 population to level up

o   150% HP bonus

o   Can build 4 of a standard improvement

o   Required for

§  Tower of Sorcery

§  Conclave

§  Arcane Academy

§  Academy

·         Metropolis (5)

o   Get 52 buildable tiles (+4 additional game tiles)

o   Can build on tiles that are not adjacent to an improved tile

o   200% HP bonus

o   Can build 4 of a standard Improvement

o   Can build 5 of a standard improvement

o   Required for

§  Universities (10 research per turn)

* Gameplay / Data *

+ Warehouses now provide 20% build time reduction
+ Town Halls now require the settlement to be at least a “town”
+ Town Council requires settlement to be at least a town
+ Tower of Sorcery provides a 25% boost to spell research in target town
+ Temple Added to initial start.
+ Library requires a town
+ Houses now require a town
+ Conclaves require a city and now provide a 50% boost to research
+ Arcane Labs require Villages and cost 100
+ Arcane Academies require Cities, provide 5 spell points.
+ Huts now hold 32 population (instead of 30)
+ Houses now hold 64 population (instead of 50)
+ Villas now hold 72 population (instead of 60)

+ Mana regen rate gets a bonus of Wisdom/10 per turn

+ Added Female Sovereign Idles
+ Female Sovereigns now use proper Idle
+ Renamed Gold to Gildar in various in game strings
+ Added/updated Animations/Meshes

+ New Medallion PNG's added to repository
+ New Hero, Champion, and Titan Technologies
+ Created New Improvements: Bazaar, Emporium, Magistrates Office
+ Quests also now refer to Gold is Gildars
+ Added MainIdle Variation 3 to the Sovereign Idle Animation pack so that it is the most likely to be randomly selected
+ New Main Ingame Idle Variation 2 and DefaultPose9

+ Created new Sovereign Equipment
+ Sovereign Equipment HKB files added to repository
+ New Sovereign Skins added to repository and XML file
+ New Sovereigns created
+ Trolls are now significantly less powerful

+ Wondering Heroes must be within a player borders before they can be recruited

+ Event List: Report Item when a unit levels up
+ Event List: Hide numbers when a category is rolled down 
+ Added a shading effect to the empire tree. Units that have no remaining moves, and cities that have something in their build queue, are shaded darker.
+ Fixed an issue with the show/hide buttons on the parent empire tree nodes.
+ Tweaked the hit detection on the show/hide buttons in the empire tree.

+ If a unit attacks an undefended city, it now stations itself in the city after the city ownership is transferred
- This is to be consistent with when you attack a city with units in it, you are stationed in the city after taking it

+ Completely removed city actions for road building.

* Engine Fixes/Tweaks *
+ Fixed bug where changing the "cloth map only" option did not update the unit graphics animation
+ Tweaked the height at which the unit shadows are rendered in standard mode
+ Fixed bug where transparent objects added to character's head did not render properly with the face
+ Fixed compile error where TacticalUnit did not compile under ElementalServer
+ Added in new cliff end piece models.

+ Cleaned up the terrain transitions between cliff and beach tiles.

+ CResourceTypes can now have a preferred terrain type assigned to them, just like CGoodieHutType. When resources are randomly placed on the map, it will look for a resource specifically made to work with that terrain type. If one cannot be found, it randomly selects one using the same algorithm as before.

+enabled the multi-threaded animation
+ Pewter pieces now always update their animation (so they don't get stuck in wierd poses or t-poses)
+ Portrait generator disables multi-threaded animation for the nodes it uses so they update at the correct time
+ Fixed bug where GetSuccessionOrderStringFromNumber returned 11st, 12nd, 13rd  instead of 11th, 12th, and 13th

+ Added support in GameLoop for processing jobs in the animation core

+ Rewrote code for moving within a tile to support new movement system
- Added new SetDestinationWithinTile and HasDestinationWithinTile functions to handle it
- Moving within a tile only rotates the main character now (the other characters no longer rotate to face you)
- The main character returns to his original position before moving on to the next tile
- Added code to allow moving within a tile when you have no moves left

+ Zoom to cursor no longer causes the distance fog to activate on units
+ Zoom to cursor now properly updates the LOD zoom levels for units

+ Fixed the inertial problems with zoom to cursor. It should now work as intended.

+ Fixed an issue with the cloth icons not updating properly after an alt-tab.

Over a year in the making, the new WinCustomize has launched!

Welcome everyone!

Sometime after July 4th we expect to have the Elemental modding beta.  Modding isn’t something that we plan to work X weeks on and then finish. Rather, the modding budget involves full time Stardock developers assigned to it for the next 18 months.

The modding beta will comprise making available the core tools that modding will need. Namely:

1. Making your own maps
2. Making your own creatures
3. Making your own items
4. Making your own buildings
5. Making your own conversations
6. Packaging and sharing your mods within the game with others

This, however, is only phase 1 of modding. Our current strategy for modding will be to work with active modders to see what sorts of things they need us to expose to modding that we haven’t thought of.

The way things will be exposed (as previously mentioned) will be via Python and XML.  It will be through Python and XML that players will be able to make their own AI, change the economics and balance and eventually create their own games.

I’ve mentioned in past that I plan to take time off after Elemental ships to focus on modding on my own time. I plan to use Elemental to make other games that I’d give away to others to help build up the mod ecosystem and help learn first hand what sorts of engine APIs need to be exposed.  Temple of Apshai and an Ultima IV-style game are things that would be on my list.

The above is a video of Ultima IV.  I am no artist so I would probably stick with that “style” of graphics.

I would imagine other modders would use Elemental to make a literal Master of Magic style remake or what have you.

Is Modding hard?

It depends on how much you want to do.  The key tools are included with Elemental.  The ability to make a map/level and then load it from your mod and load additional maps/levels in  your mod and go back makes it relatively easy for someone to make “dungeons” or have cities be a simple icon that when they go into expands into a full blown city.

The character edtior is obviously a major part as well since you will want to be able to create people and save them.

If you look in your documents\my games\elemental\units you can see your units right there. There is an icons sub directory where the art for your unit is generated as a .PNG.

This unit is one I made and is just saved as a .PNG that you can use.

And of course, the item and building editors are very important since you’ll want to create your treasures and weapons and rings and potions and what not along with your castles and shops and whatever else.

How does Python and XML fit in?

We picked Python because it’s the modern-age version of BASIC. When my generation learned programming, we did it in BASIC.  Nowadays, it’s ridiculous how much work it takes to get up and going with programming. I tried to get my son into programming and quickly realized that it’s far too much work to do anything.

With Python you get a very easy interpretative language. Easy to learn. By exposing APIs from Kumquat (our game engine that includes the 3D graphics rendering) people can quickly put “stuff” on the map. 

Want to make a mod that’s a new game? You would create your guys with the character engine, the level with the map editor and then use Python to load up the guy and pick which animation you want and run him around based on mouse or keyboard input (all provided by Kumquat).

Our style of XML formatting is kind of old school and we admit it.  We use it not for programming but for data structures. 

If you look in games\data\English you can see how data driven things are (basically everything is stored in XML, no binaries).

In the current betas, there’s no modding allowed because we stream the data from our servers so that we can constantly tweak them without requiring a download.  This will be taken OUT of the final version of the game since we don’t want to require an Internet connection to play the game. But during the beta, it’s a big time saver for us.

Post Release

During the modding beta, we’ll be selecting promising mod projects and assigning development resources to exposing Kumquat APIs (written in C++) to Python so that modders can do interesting things with them.  We think it makes more sense to adapt ourselves to the needs of the modders than for modders to have to adapt to us.

Before people groan, progress on Elemental continues across the board besides just the “game” aspect (if there are any developers reading this feel free to explain to non-developers what I mean).

Anyway, Beta 1Z2 that went up yesterday is much better than Z1 was in terms of stability and such but it’s not quite there yet.

Namely, the stuck turns and saved games need to be addressed more.  There are still reports of crashes but memory and stability seem to be adequate to proceed.

I don’t have an exact date of z3 yet but hopefully in the next week or so.

Sorry to be such a stickler here. We’re not trying to be perfectionists. We just want to make sure we produce the best possible game we can.

One other thing to note: Be wary about getting invested in the gameplay. There are already debates on various balance things. While the underpinnings are there, we expect to make a lot of radical changes between now and release.  So if you’re having fun with the beta, please don’t get too attached to anything.

Putting together a fantasy book for mass production is definitely no small task. There’s a lot of people involved.  But it’s almost done.