Frogboy

With the benefit of hindsight here's how I'd rate the game: v1.0: 4 out of 10 v1.1: 6 out of 10 v1.11: 7 out of 10 It's getting there. I'm thinking v1.2 will bring it to an 8 out of 10. My biggest pet peeves are the AI and the UI. The diplomacy part of the game still needs a lot work to get it to GalCiv II levels. The UI is still very obscure. Jon, Derek, and I have spent some time going over it. Luckily, the UI is all done with DesktopX (ht

I'd say from a "fun" point of view, v1.11 is almost as significant as v1.09 to v1.1 but that might be because I'm an AI guy. I'm already on v1.12 as there are some stupid sovereign stuff I saw last night that cost the AI the game. But it's good to see the AI doing some rather nasty stuff magically on the strategic map. I am *hoping* to be able to take over some of the AI on tactical battles but that really depends on how my "day job" work goes this quarter on our main b

[quote who="the_Monk" reply="175" id="2861154"] Quoting Valkrionn, reply 122 Of course some blame goes to everyone involved. My point is that attributing the lion's share of the blame to people who more than likely had very little to do with the issues is ridiculous. And saying that he should have left with a partially completed game... No, that really would be worth blaming him for. Instead, he did his utmost best in order to release the game in the best state he could,

[quote who="bryanw1995" reply="116" id="2861051"]I think that stardock is on a roll. kael, the sci-fi writer, shafer...frogboy has been a very busy ceo.[/quote] :) Last Fall I said we were committed to making sure Elemental became the defacto fantasy strategy game of its age. But words are easy. So hopefully people are seeing that we're backing those words with deeds. We never abandon our customers. While it is true that our non-games are the main source of our p

[quote who="Lavok47" reply="4" id="2861000"]Hopefully this patch fixes the "Out of Memory" crash. This is a pretty good game, but that OOM crash prevents me from playing it. [/quote] It doesn't unfortunately. It's going to be more complicated to fix because it's not a memory leak but a memory load. The problem with the AI getting better is that it's using more "stuff". The memory thing is our #1 priority for v1.2.

At the end of the day, my job is to make sure we produce incredibly good games. We don't make decisions based on Internet politics. Good games sell. Jon is a key ingredient in our ongoing strategy. Without Jon, there's no realistic way we can take our game engine and make it extensible via Python and such. I would challenge any Internet person to name someone more qualified to make a game extensible than Jon Shafer. Anyone.

[quote who="Cruxador" reply="15" id="2860007"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 14Well if you've been a customer a long time then consider this: If you listen to the Internet buzz, I'm a moron who couldn't design a game to save his life. Elemental being crummy at launch was due to my incompotetence. I ruined it. That's the Internet buzz. Do believe that?I seem to remember you yourself saying something of that nature after the game launched, although you did attribute your poor dec

[quote who="rebelito" reply="6" id="2859951"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 4Don't be insane. Do you have any idea how much of the design process as well as scheduling is altered when you're dealing with a publicly traded company? Seriously. If you don't like Civ V, think carefully about what it is you don't like about it. Seriously. Moreover, as some have already observed, Kael is the one taking over design on Elemental from me. We despe

Don't be insane. Do you have any idea how much of the design process as well as scheduling is altered when you're dealing with a publicly traded company? Seriously. If you don't like Civ V, think carefully about what it is you don't like about it. Seriously. Moreover, as some have already observed, Kael is the one taking over design on Elemental from me. We desperately need someone who has AAA experience in extending game engines.

Well, true but...look over there!

The internal build was much better. Look at Beta 4 and compare it to the release. It just wasn't "better enough". In the future, the betas will go through the beta groups. There was way way way too much concern/worry that we were ruining the game for the beta testers so we tried to hold back as much as we could. Bad idea.

Let me tell you guys something that has come up a LOT internally: If Elemental had been released in February 2011, it would have still sucked. I'm going to be giving a talk at GDC 2011 that goes over the details of this and some of you who are familiar with Stardock are already aware of some of the issues that led to Elemental's crappy launch. But in a nutshell, most of Stardock's revenue comes from non-games. The games don't pay the bills. They were treated as a

They're coming. Today was 10 hours of planning meetings. Frankly, I'm surprised some people haven't figured out at least one of the announcements.

Re Magic. I think some people are not understanding fully what a magic "system" is. The magic system in Elemental is fine. It's the details that need to be improved and how it manifests itself in the game (tactical battles and such). I don't envision us doing away with the concept of mana, shards, etc. We plan to make use of existing capabilities that we're not currently using (cool downs, cast times, etc.). Probably the biggest change we are t

[quote who="Werewindlefr" reply="11" id="2857979"]Hmm, isn't Kael the lead dev' aleady ? Why do you need another ?[/quote] Kael's the Project Manager ("Producer"). If you were to look at a tree it would look something like this: Product Manager -> Project Manager -> Lead Developer, Lead Artist, Design Lead Right now, I am still the Product Manager (Executive Producer) and substituting as Lead Developer as well which is not doable in the long-term (

This is by no means a complete list of things that are on our mind for Elemental for 2011. For those of you just joining our community I should first start out with an explanation of what Stardock is about and what makes our games a bit...different that is the norm in 2011. It might be more accurate to say that Stardock is how game companies in the PC industry used to pretty much operate prior to the flood of IPOs in the late 90s that changed our industry so dramatically. At GDC

[quote who="Alstein" reply="10" id="2856253"]If you consider 1.1 to be the 1.0 of Elemental, and 1.0 the last beta, Elemental looks a lot better. 1.1 has some real issues still, but is a working game with some good points already.[/quote] I consider 1.0 to be 1.0. It wasn't a beta. It just wasn't a very good game (with the benefit of hindsight and sleep). Players got their pound of flesh out of us and so did reviewers. And rather than just cutt

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="5" id="2856052"]Frog, I've played the hell out of the game and still do, and maybe that statement was too harsh, but until 1.1, the game was pretty unplayable except to the really hardcore loyalist. I play it, I just created a thread for it's improvements, I want the game to be better. Sorry if you have thought the game is more than it is, but right now, the game is playable and bland, when before 1.1 it was a struggle to even play and was bland.

Rats. Can you post your debug.err? It's in your my games\elemental directory.

It has nothing to do with AI. The AI is told that it can use fertile land plots. But the game put a fertile land plot on a swamp. So when the AI tries to build a town, it fails but does not know why because the condition should never occur in the first place.

[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="3" id="2856021"]No, they are still making the game worth playing at all, so we have another 6 months before an expansion will come out, I'm guessing. [/quote] You know, Xia, that's pretty uncalled for. While I agree that v1.1 of Elemental is only the start of what we plan to do with the game, it's far from being not worth playing at all. You may need to just recognize that this game may not be for you.

I'll be talking about how modders can do "stuff" to the AI via the XML more in the coming year once Stardock's new Mod Czar starts.

Seriously, these cool units in your game. Where did you get them? These are awesome.

Oh a Zombie captain too. Man, this is awesome!

I tried it here. No problems. I like the Darkling Giant. Did you make that?