Yeah it's just a contest for fun. Don't read anything more into it than that. That doesn't mean the ideas expressed in threads aren't valid or that we are limiting ourselves just to spell ideas from the contest (or the many many spells that have been used in other games over the years). We welcome ideas from the community, and a contest is a fun way to celebrate that.
The Design a Spell contest was launched today. I'm excited to see your ideas. I know a lot of people will want baselines to create within, after all its hard to design an implementable spell if you don't know exactly what can be done. But I encourage you to forget the technical limitations for the moment and just design spells that you would love to play with. Sure it means that some great ideas might not make it to the final 5 because they a
This is a great thread! I could do much worse than just making a project plan from this thread and working hard to get it all implemented. I'm glad to report that many of the things requested in thread are coming, some in 1.1 (sovereign/hero hit points increasing per level), some are speced for later (more distinction between the races) and I've stolen a few requests from you lists to add to future design docs (game option to set early mons
[quote who="marlowwe" reply="14" id="2817990"]In order to get a better understanding of where you are going, can you guys tell us the relationship between these special abilities and the decisions the player will be making during a game? In other words, are these special abilities just small bonuses that are independent of what the player will do or will our choice of ability influence us to research a certain tech path earlier, pursue a certain strategy etc...?[/quote] Its a balancin
I have a big list of stuff I'm working on. One of the tasks I could use some community creativity on is coming up with some special abilities for the premade sovereign units. Use the following guidelines: 1. These can't be to powerful since they are the starting abilities for the units, or the ability must scale appropriately. So an ability that gives Verga +10 damage is to much, but an ability that gives him +1 damage per level might be interesting.
[quote who="Lavitage" reply="56" id="2817666"]Are you going to be as active in discussing design choices, balance and such on the forums as you were in the early and mid stages of FfH?[/quote] I will post as my schedule allows. The nice thing about making a mod is that I could not work on it for 2 weeks and just chat about it on the forums. That isn't going to happen with Elemental, we have work to do. Im especially busy this week but I expect to be spending more tim
[quote who="Marks1381" reply="32" id="2817416"]Hi Kael, I was wondering if you could give us a Bio on yourself because I really have no idea who you are I've researched a little and read the forums but for example Frogboy we all know and like. I'd like to see things like what is your specialty as a game designer? Like frogboys is AI. Also we really got to KNOW frogboy as a person and I know you're new to the team but Id really like to get to know you as well just accelerated
[quote who="Lord Xia" reply="7" id="2817124"]What happened to Kunta, aka Toby? He's not back from that mysterious part of the world where there is no internet?[/quote] Toby is my associate producer (I'm the senior producer for Elemental). Toby is responsible for 1.1 (since I just started Monday and 1.1 has been in process since well before that) so he built the feature list for it, and he is managing the build. Toby got back Tuesday so I've been working with him
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
Beautiful work on this Cephalo!
I am not Kal-el of Double your Pleasure fame (though I loved that mod and played it to death back in the Civ3 days).
I'm not involved yet. My life is busy getting my projects at my current job transitioned smoothly. I work here until 10/22, then I take a week off and start at Stardock on 11/1. As of this moment I'm just a fellow player, fan and poster.
Thanks for all the good wishes, I am very excited to work on Elemental. I made over 16,000 posts at CivFanatics while working on Fall from Heaven so it's safe to say you will all be hearing a lot from me (and that I hope to hear a lot from all of you). The sad truth is I spent way to much time looking for a non-dorky picture of me and that's the best I could come up with. If it helps, Im not wearing any pants in that picture.
As impressive as "Derek Paxton the creator" sounds I think you may have left off the "of Fall from Heaven" part of that sentence. Regardless, thanks for the link. I think the podcast is worth listening to because the 3 moves ahead guys ask great questions and Soren does a great job of discussing the business issues that come up with modding (not that he agrees with them, but they are real concerns companies have around modding).
System 1 is Colonization. That system worked well in Colonization because that was the heart of the game. There wasn't an elaborate military game (battles were typically shorter and against fixed enemies), and most importantly it didn't have the scale of time and change to deal with. A turn based strategy game needs to have deep mechanics to work with. But it needs to decide where its core is. In Colonization it was in the economy, so re
[quote who="Ellestar" reply="13" id="2178480"] Quoting SimRex, reply 12 Python was fast enough to script a third-person RPG (with perhaps the best real-time swordplay combo system I've ever seen in a game) as early as 2001's Severance: Blade of Darkness, and a 3D space sim, Star Trek: Bridge Commander, in 2002. In both games, all of the actual game logic is in Python. In 2003, Stackless Python (a variant) was used, and continues to be used to this day, for the serve
Art detail is always good. So its hard to ever say that it doesn't make the game better. But I would hope that the changing world (say an evil soverign's regions begins to shift to bleak hellish lands) would also indicate some strategic value. So the art isn't just an effect of the world but an indication of a real changes. For example. A wild forested region could begin to be harvested by nearby cities as they advance. &n
There is always a trade between ease of use and power. The HOMM events were very easy to create, but limited in scope. You could pick from their preselected actions for what you wanted to happen. Civ4 erred on the side of power. It was more difficult to setup the events but they could do anything. They could give a magic sword to the unit, cause nearby mountains to explode into volcanoes, spawn a new civlization that decla