http://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/meet-the-mob/

Clearly sent there by “big insurance companies”…

Greetings!

Today I’m evaluating the Elemental Alpha.  All the various “platforms” come together to start putting together a game. Next month, the Beta of Elemental will be released for those who have pre-ordered it.  Shortly after, we will

Downloading…

First, I have to download it from Impulse.  This is the version of Impulse that people will be getting by the time the beta comes out. It’s “Phase 4” and has a lot of new stuff but we’ll talk about that soon enough.

For those who aren’t in the alpha, you’re not missing much. There isn’t much “game” there yet.  The primary purpose of this alpha is to let us just get some early feedback on the basic engine and let us get things set up for the beta.

The Alpha intro screen.

The Alpha, like Beta 1, will all take place on the cloth map. The idea here is to take all the eye candy away and let beta testers focus first on just the game play. So again, people looking to have “fun” with the alpha or beta 1 should stay far far away from this. The whole point of a Stardock beta is to let people help mold the final game.

When a player starts the game, they have just their sovereign. If he (or she) dies, you die.   You will want to build cities near fertile land which, in Elemental, is relatively rare. Fertile land is designated (for now) by a green and yellow flower tile.

Once you build a city, you can begin researching techs.  This screen is still a work in progress (like everything else) and not likely to resemble the final screen. Suffice to say, as you research technologies, new paths open up which are displayed at the bottom.

Clicking on a city will allow players to build new things right on the map. At first, there won’t be much to build. But over time, lots of different things will become available (though in alpha 1 we have purposely limited it to just a handful of things).

Early on, you will want to build units to protect your cities. You can also design units (though it’s pretty basic right now). 

As your influence grows, your zone of control will grow (which as you can see in this screenshot, I’ve asked to tone down a bit).

In Elemental, the power of your empire will rest on your control of the magical shards which give your side the mana necessary to cast ever more powerful spells. In addition, your economy is based on your control of key resources.  Elemental (unlike Galactic Civilizations) has no concept of “industrial units”.  You want to build something, you better control the necessary resource otherwise it’ll take a ridiculous amount of time.  The more of those resources you control, the faster you can build things.  Thus, control of one iron deposit is not as good as controlling two or three iron deposits when it comes to making steel weapons.

So over the coming weeks, the economy and magic of Elemental will begin to take shape and beta testers will, ideally, find the game fun despite the Commodore-64 style graphics.  Then, when the full environment is added in as well as the tactical battles the fun will be greatly amplified because you’ll be able to see the true effects of your power and we can convey a lot more information visually in a way that is pleasing to the eye (which we can’t really do without the cool graphics easily).

Once the Alpha program gets complete, assets and features will start getting injected into the game at an accelerated rate.

I’ve been reading through a lot of resumes lately as we are now in full hiring mode here at Stardock.

We’ve got openings almost across the board (here are some samples)

1. Game Developers
2. Artists (general)
3. 3D Modelers
4. Concept Artists
5. Web designers
6. .NET developers (all kinds, big demand here)
7. Web developers (Microsoft centric)

With that in mind, I’d like to give a few suggestions to people that I think might help them not just here but everywhere.

Suggestion #1: PLEASE provide a cover letter that includes your willingness to relocate (if applicable) and provides some background on the company you’re looking to work at along with how you might be ale to help them.

Suggestion #2: If possible, include a URL to your own website.  The decision makers are extremely busy and as a result there is a tendency to just weed out those who don’t include a link to their website in their resume.  We want to see your art, code, etc.

Suggestion #3: If you only are into “computers” at work and turn off at night, you probably won’t get looked at beyond an interview at most small companies. We are looking for people who are into this stuff.  One of the reasons we’ve done so well here, for instance, is because we love doing this stuff. It’s not just a job.  We don’t work crazy hours but when we go home, we like to play games still or like to tinker around with things. 

I spent part of my vacation learning Python. Why? Because I enjoy doing it, not because I have to. I know that most people go home and live “normal lives”. That’s great but a small tech company may not be a good fit for you then.

Those 3 things would be extremely helpful in getting people to the front of the pile.

Today I spent a lot of time working on the story elements and timeline for Elemental to make sure it goes along with the book. There, I said it. There’s going to be a book that comes out at roughly the same time as the game. 

There’s ten thousand years of history to work through, quite a big difference from what we’ve done in the past where we had just enough story manifested for the game (like in Galactic Civilizations) to proceed.

Having the game and the book being developed at the same time is proving to be marvelous as it allows the game to have a lot more depth even though it’s “only” a strategy game. The scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into.

Of course, since I worked on that, I wasn’t able to do my walk thru of the alpha. I plan to get on that tomorrow.

Greetings!

The first update for August has arrived. 

Here are the highlights:

• Fixed an exploit regarding minions and the citadel that cropped up recently.
• Fixed the Sedna Healing wind buff with High priests issue that has been discussed.
• We’ve temporarily disabled hex scroll, ring of divine might, and the horn of battle until the timeout conflicts are dealt with. Stay tuned.
• Fixed a bug that was causing a LOT of statistics not to be saved accurately. We are hoping, and you be the judge, that the statistics are now robust enough that we’ll be able to move towards official tournaments and Epoch 3.
• Updated the algorithm to find the best proxy server for people who need them.
• Lots of other little things.

Next on our list are the rematches, LUA decompression crash issue, Alt-Esc issues, and replays.  No promises on an exact date but (fingers crossed) in the next week or so depending on QA.

Tomorrow, I am going to really try to get up a preview of the first of the new Demigods up on a journal so you can start discussing him.  We’ve also been discussing with GPG new map ideas and new item ideas and have started work on the modding guide.

Cheers!

We’ve picked a tiny handful of the pre-order group to become alpha testers based on how many other betas they’ve participated in, forum karma, and a number of other criteria.

Those of you not in the alpha, fear not, you’re not missing very much. The beta is scheduled to come out around PAX (Penny Arcade Expo).

Be forewarned, we plan to close the beta shortly after PAX and it will remain closed for some months. Those who want to get the beta can pre-order the game.

I am leaning towards beta 1 being only cloth map in order to let beta testers have more input on the game mechanics (fewer assets to change if we accept a suggestion).

There will be an Alpha tour later this week (possibly tomorrow). Stay tuned.

Did people think they’d have to wait until the August to start getting the meaty goodness of Demigod v1.2?

I don’t know about you but I just don’t have that kind of patience.

So instead, GPG and Stardock have decided to release the updates as they are completed.

Internally, we’re doing testing and work on Replays and Rematches. Rematches are where your game ends and you just want to play again without all the fuss.  Replays are where you can go back and look at the game you just played.  This first update is also designed to fix a LUA decompression bug that is causing some people to get instability when playing online. Plus, it fixes (I hope) the lingering issue with stat tracking. Plus it fixes an exploit issue with Erebus.

With the demo out, I am hopeful we’ll see this in the next week or so. No promises of course. There’s always the unexpected but that’s what’s happening internally right now.

In my mind, the fun of Elemental resides in the fact that you’re not just trying to conquer some fantasy world but the world itself is designed to be so organic and unique from game to game.

A lot of the difference between games is a result of things like a tech tree that has different techs in it, a huge library of special content that is integrated into map generation randomly each game, quests, integrated community content, and the divergent paths to victory.

Now, as some of you know, Stardock’s bread and butter isn’t from game development.  Our desktop software and enterprise software have always given us the luxury of being able to take as long as we want to develop our games as well as take “risks” on the way we release our games (no copy protection for instance – which, in case people are wondering, the retail version of Elemental will not have copy protection).

And that brings me to a question I wanted to pose to you folks.  Would you be interested in us extending the beta?  Since anyone can join betas by pre-ordering, we could try something that really hasn’t been done before as far as I know – make the beta experience something truly outstanding unto itself.

Right now, the schedule is this:

• Beta 1 in August
• Beta 2 in October (adds tactical battles)
• Beta 3 in December (polish)
• Gamma (private) in January
• Release in February

This is pretty much the same schedule we’ve been doing since Galactic Civilizations I back in 2003.

But imagine this kind of beta instead:

• Beta 1 in August
• Beta 2 in January
• Whatever

So what would be the point of this?  The point would be to make it a lot more fun to develop the game with the beta testers.  Rather than have v1.0 come out in February and then have v1.1 in say April and so on, we simply keep working on the game with the beta testers.

Then, when we release the game, it’s got a ton more stuff. 

Here are some thoughts that come to mind:

How many players should/can we allow in a game? 8? 12? 32?

How sophisticated can we make dungeons in the game?

How sophisticated can we make quests in the game?

How sophisticated can we make tactical battles in the game?

How big of a scope can we give the campaign?

We don’t have the financial pressure to release the game in February and because of that, we have an opportunity to try something we’ve not done that we think might be really special and that is vastly increase the contribution of the beta players into the game than what we’ve done before.

The end result would, I think, be a game that could very well be a classic. A year’s worth of player input before it was released to the general public. 

Tell us what you think.

WindowBlinds 7 is really coming along.  If you have Object Desktop, which is our flag ship suite of programs to turbo-charge your Windows experience, you’ll be getting beta drops of WindowBlinds 7 which adds Windows 7 support along with a ton of new features designed to make customizing Windows a snap.

So we're starting to put together stuff for the alpha. 

This week we're putting together the list for the private alpha group (basically a lottery).

The exact day of the release of the alpha remains to be seen. Part of it depends on the weather up at Higgins Lake (where I'll be on vacation until early next week). If it rains, I'll be going home sooner which means the alpha will likely come out a bit sooner. If it's nice, I'll be staying a bit longer and the alpha will have a couple more days to bake. Kind of a reverse groundhogs day.

In either case, we plan to start making public to those interested in seeing the sausage factory that is game development our internal bug reports.

Those of you not used to a Stardock beta will find these quite...something I suspect.  Most people don't realize how games are made. 

A game, at the end of the day, is a piece of software that is tuned to be "fun" where fun is a debateable concept.

On a new property like Elemental, that means the software is taking a bunch of technologies that have been developed over the previous year or two and integrated together.  

If a game takes say 3 years to make, 2.5 years of that time will be spent on the underlying tech. The lsat 6 months spent putting that tech together into a working "game".  That is where we are now, taking the techs and integrating them together.

You'll be able to see all our foibles in the journals area starting next week as the good, bad, and ugly of the game's develpoment starts to come together. 

So if you have any questions for the August FAQ, post them here. 

Cheers!