Elemental announced!

Elemental announced!

Elemental announced!

Ever played D&D or some other role playing game? Ever wondered about the poor sovereign who ruled the land you were running around in stirring up trouble? You're about to find out in Elemental!

Elemental puts you directly into the game as the powerful sovereign of a fledgling kingdom who has the relatively unique ability to channel magic from the shards of magic.  You can imbue your minions with the ability to channel this  magic too as long as you are willing to give up some of your essence to them.

Over the course of the next year, we'll be launching a public beta -- by the end of next Spring and while the release date is tentative February 2010, that date is subject to the public beta. No NDAs. We don't ship until it's the best game we can make it.

In these forums you'll see debates, discussions and ideas on how to make the game better.  On some things we'll agree, in other places we'll disagree and explain why.  If we don't agree with an idea or suggestion, we'll try to explain why we believe the way we do and defend our design choices when possible.  All players are encouraged to participate.

If it's like the betas of our other games, it should be a lot of fun and should result in a much better game as the final result will take in the combination of the coolest and best ideas from the community.

We are so excited to finally be able to talk about the "fantasy strategy game".  Here are some answers for questions we suspect will come out.

Regarding the title...

We wanted to just call it Elemental but but trademark reasons we needed to come up with a sub-title. We wanted to give it a sub-title that was a bit corney to harken back to the classic 4X days when game names were a little more generic.

Screenshots...

The graphics seen in the screenshots are still very early on. The lighting and such aren't really in yet. The idea is to convey a general style and show a bit what the game would look like.

Persistent Multiplayer...

So one of the things we will be doing is hosting the multiplayer games ourselves. That is, when someone launches a game, it will all be supported by the Impulse Reactor back-end. Your game will effectively exist on the Impulse cloud so that you can access it anywhere anytime and make connecting with other players easy.

Modding...

The idea is to allow the game to expand itself through user created content (all optional). Our own content will be submitted in this way in order to make sure the system is very robust. 

More to come...

I'm a bit late in getting this out but check out the October FrogBlog to find out what's been going on around here. Lots of good Vista 7 stuff, Object Desktop stuff, GUI Champs and beyond!

View: FrogBlog October 2008

Seems like it was only yesterday that we were discussing Longhorn/Windows Vista.  And now here we are talking about Windows 7. There's been some great coverage about Windows 7 on our partner site, Neowin.net which you can get to here:

• Windows 7 GUI
• PDC Round-Up
• Windows 7 Usability
• Windows 7 Demos

I personally wish Microsoft would make Windows 7 64-bit only.  It would make everyone's lives better.  Oh well, another N years of dealing with two different versions of Windows it appears.

One thing I am excited about is the "Super taskbar" in Windows 7:

First, be aware it's super configurable.  But what's a big deal about this is the skinning possibilities for this are substantial. With the extra space, a lot of cool stuff becomes possible to do that we couldn't really do with the existing taskbar.

Object Desktop News

Meanwhile, things are going very well with the upcoming Object Desktop 2009.  Hard to believe it's only 16 days away (November 19). 

Check out these screenshots:

The completely rewritten Theme Manager 3.0 should bring a smile to people's faces.  The .suite format gets revitalized and MyColors support is integrated in as well. 

One of the reasons Theme Manager 3.0 is so important is that it will allow Stardock to release a .suite version of MyColors themes that don't use licensed IP so that skinners can more easily make use of them.  Right now, it's extremely difficult for us to do that which has caused some consternation in the skinning community.

Of course, the other big updates to Object Desktop 2009 include a Vista version of BootSkin and an XP version of DeskScapes.

Mega Games Week

This week there will be a ton of big announcements on the game front.  First, Demigod is heading towards Beta 2 which will introduce a bunch of new elements to the game (the details will show up on Gamespot, IGN, GameSpy, XPlay, GamesRadar, 1Up, and beyond).

The second big announcement happens tomorrow with the much anticipated announcement of Stardock's next major PC title after Demigod, the fantasy strategy game that has been described as a spiritual successor to Master of Magic. 

GUI Champs

The GUI Championships have continued in earnest. There's been some great entries already. This year we've gotten a ton of prizes for the contest (over $15k). If you're an artist or skinner, you should definitely check it out. 

The current deadline to get stuff is still weeks away so there's time to create some cool stuff. It'll be interesting to see how much gets made.  It's always exciting to see skinners from around the world create this stuff.

Sinning...

I don't know about you but I'm waiting on pins and needles for Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 and the micro-expansion pack, Entrenchment.  I hope to have some news on that shortly.

Working on the final play balancing for the upcoming release of GalCiv II v2.0 (November 5!).

We've made tourism bring in more money and military ships cost less to upkeep along with significant changes to how much research costs, especially late game.

My class 30 planet.  Don't hate the player. Don't hate the game....on second thought, don't hate the game either..

Ah, love those updated textures.

Impulse continues to progress.  Here I'm going to put together my wish list for changes in Impulse. Feel free to add your own.

#1 Impulse is too big.

Impulse is currently 846x708 minimum in screen size.

Instead, it should be 640x480.

If people want to resize it larger, that's fine.

#2 Fast load should be OFF by default.

#3 Load time needs to be incredibly fast.

#4 The dock should be a free option, it shouldn't be bundled.

#5 Fewer tabs when possible

#6 Less space when possible

#7 Make the "Store" have more cool free stuff

Note: I'm not sold on calling it "store" as it implies that people have to buy everything when the long-term goal is to have most of the content on it be free.

Windows 7 is introducing the biggest change to the Windows taskbar ever...

Learn more about it.