The longest part of my day is waking up to early to head into the Stardock office. I'm anxious to get back to work. What a great job.
I spent yesterday helping to make the spells more exciting, but so far my focus has been on process. We will create a consistent design, we will document that design, we will march toward implementing that design. Flexibility is important in creating games, if something isn't working it has to go, but we aren't going to simply "try things". There is a great game in Elemental, we have to bring it out.
It's worth saying that the great game in Elemental isn't Fall from Heaven (for those hoping or worried that I'm going to try to make Elemental into FfH). That doesn't mean there aren't ideas in FfH that are valuable here, such as faction differentiation, but this is a very different game. This is about exploring a shattered world, engaging in great tactical combat and building a fantasy empire. Master of Magic is the inspiration here, not FfH.
There is great background lore in Elemental, but we need to bring it into the game. There are great opportunities, but we need to make them more fun. There are some problematic mechanics that we need to get out of the way.
My main focus is really on the post 1.1 work, but I've been able to help on the 1.1 side. Tighten the feature list, make sure everything is moving toward the next steps, help with ideas and flavor. There is a great team here, I'm honored to be able to work with them.
We will be starting a community design contest soon. I appreciate all the great ideas everyone provides, and we are going to have some fun with it (we were just going to use my ideas but then we realized we wanted the game to be good). Watch the boards, the full details will be announced next week.
