I was chatting with a friend of mine yesterday about what we like to do. He likes to design games and make mods and such.

For me, I'm in it for the community. To be honest, I'm in it for you guys. The only coding part I enjoy is the AI. I don't like designing games really. I write design documents and such for our games but I don't enjoy it. It's a chore. I'm mainly interested in participating on the forums and talking to other gamers.

Elemental's initial release was, as we all know, something of a disaster. It wasn't intentional. We thought it was ready. People really have no idea how crazy it is to release a brand new game in 2010 onto the PC -- especially if you're making your own engine. So much of my original design for Elemental had to be modified to deal with engine limitations and the like. It almost makes me miss DOS. (who remembers monkeying around with QEMM386?).

But we're with you guys for years to come. We're not a publicly traded company. I'm the only stockholder. I'm glad we've been able to start bringing back people we laid off. The Elemental team is actually larger right now than it was during peak development. But why? It's because of you guys. Elemental: War of Magic will never make big bucks. That original PC Gamer UK article killed us commercially - before a single review hit. But it doesn't matter.

Even as I type this, the whole team is working on all kinds of interesting things. Cloud saving for multiplayer games. New modding features for cloud uploads. I spent the day monkeying around with the AI (I found out an interesting thing for other developers reading this - edit and continue in visual studio does not work if you're running it on an external drive).

What got me into writing software in the first place was the community aspects. I like making stuff with other people. Our most popular consumer product, WindowBlinds, is all about making stuff with the community. Over the next several years, I'm excited to see how various versions of Elemental grow and change. I'd like to see the game broken up into DLLs so that people can mod not just with Python but with C++ too (Civ V's SDK can do this btw).

For those of you not into game development, you'd be surprised how close knit our industry is. That's why we get upset when people rip on Civilization V. These are our friends. It hurts us when people criticize Civilization V. You might as well be ripping on us directly. The distinction between Civ V or AOW or FFH 2 or Elemental -- to us -- is very blurred. Many of you would be shocked about how close we all are. I think people often mistake the PC TBS game industry for other "big" industries. It's not like that. It's a handful of people across the board. Behind the scenes, all of us hang out in the virtual sense. Yes, Jon, Kael, Soren, etc. We're all friends in varying degrees in real life.

Anyway, my main point is that our primary motivation on these games is you guys. Not your money (though we need it obviously to keep making stuff) but your comradery. If I had my way, I'd make a game based on a Wiki page from the community. People who know me can tell you that I really have no ego to bruise. I have a lot of OTHER failings (I'm ridiculously obtuse) but there's no idea, big or small, that I'm not interested in. I think of the community as part of our team.

Too much of our industry, IMO, is based on "cranking out the game" and moving on. But not all of us are this way. I pushed back a future GalCiv sequel to make sure we do right by you guys. It's not about the money. It's the principle. It's the community. It's you guys.

What I'd like to see happen is for Elemental: War of Magic to continue to be refined with its existing game mechanics largely intact other than the change to the mana system and UI update scheduled for v1.1.

Beyond that, the evolution of the Elemental TBS would be delivered via expansions, sequels, etc. like every other traditional game. This way, we can introduce pretty substantial gameplay changes without people feeling like the War of Magic version is some sort of test tube of game design experimentation.

For brevity, call these A, B, C where A is Elemental: War of Magic and B and C are some sort of future expansions. B would be free to everyone and C would be free to those who own the game by September 30th.

So with A, the game mechanics revolve around exploring the world, exploiting world resources, expanding your control, and exterminating enemies. A will evolve as we go to 1.1 with more techs and improvements that let players convert 1 resource that they have a lot in to one they are lacking in. Spells will draw from a global mana pool and the UI will be cleaned up and content across the board expanded on. For good or bad, minus bugs, A is what we originally conceived of for War of Magic and it should rise or fall based on that.

B will be a new Elemental title (an expansion pack ala GalCiv II: Dark Avatar). It is important that B come out sooner rather than later. Users who like/enjoy A can stick with A but users who find the combat in Elemental too simplistic or are unsatsified with some other core game element will hopefully have much of this addressed in B.

C will also be a new Elemental title (ala GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor). C involves more wholesale gameplay changes and would take quite a bit longer to come out. A and B would continue to be supported (just like we did with GalCiv and Sins) but I would picture C adding a great deal more depth to the overall game across the board.

So as we move forward, when people say "I think something should be like this" we will think about those requests and put them either in the A, B, or C buckets.

So for example, a user commented today that the combat should support flanking and there should be taxes and that there should be easy ways to convert resources and such. If we concluded that this is a direction we'd want to take the game into, it would go into the C bucket. It's way too radical for A, not doable for B but would be doable for C.

On the other hand, having the tactical battles eliminate "action points" but instead go with initiative on a per unit basis is too much for A (that's not the system we had in mind for War of Magic) but is something we would do for B.

And so on.

So feel free to use this thread to talk about pretty much anything you want. It's just a back and forth with us.

Build legions of the dead to conquer the world of Elemental or play against the Undead and try to stop their rampaging hordes!!!

This week you should start to see the release of web based XML tools (first for reading, later for writing) for manipulating and seeing how the XML works together.

Zombies are now in league with the forces of the undead. Notice the flesh damage and bones sticking out. Not to mention some extra blood and gore.

Undead Rising 2.0 features a Fully Functional Undead Faction. The faction of "Ravenloft" from the D&D realm by the same name. Ravenloft is more precisely known as the "Demiplane of Dread" and it is populated mostly by powerful undead creatures and Lords of Darkness. One of these lords is a powerful Vampire named Strahd and it is he who leads the forces of Ravenloft in Undead Rising 2.0. You can either play as the faction yourself or place it in the world and it can fight against you and the other Elemental Sovereigns. The AI will use both the custom Skeleton Skin OR the Custom Zombie Skin when creating units, so expect to see both. The Mod also allows the player to create either a Skeletal or Zombie Sovereign.

Pictured Below, Strahd, the Vampire Lord of Ravenloft: I may give him some blood on his chin and fangs pointing out or something, I'm not sure honestly. Right now he just looks like a light skinned Kraxis Sovereign with my custom Red and Gold Eyes texture.