For those of you who aren’t game developers I thought I would write up a quick article on how modern games are made.

In the old days…

You would code up the game.  There was simply “the game”.  The development team would code their largely from scratch.

Now…

Games are broken up into many different parts. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll divide it into the two main parts: “The Engine” and the actual game.

Civilization IV licensed Gamebryo for its engine.  Demigod uses the “Forge” engine (which Supreme Commander was built on).  Sins of a Solar Empire is powered by the Iron engine.  Galactic Civilizations used Pear. Virtually any modern game you look at has an engine that is fairly separate from the game.

The Development of Elemental

The biggest challenge we had for Elemental is that we needed to create a modern game engine designed for land-based strategy games.  This is a non-trivial endeavor.  Much of the initial work had been done with Society but that was really just the tip of the iceberg.

A modern game engine isn’t merely about displaying graphics in 3D. There’s the editors and tools to support content for it, the scripting language to interact with it, the user interface tools, multiplayer tools, etc.

For Elemental, before we could even consider writing “the game” this engine had to be built.  That’s where 90% of our development time thus far has gone.

The BETA of Elemental

The first two betas (beta 1 and beta 2 – which won’t be out for months) don’t include this engine.  If you were at PAX, you saw the engine connected to the game.  But for the beta, it’s stripped out so that we can focus exclusively on the game design in such a way that the beta testers themselves are involved in the actual design.

What Beta testers don’t get to see yet

When we play Elemental, below is what we see:

And these screenshots are actually a month old – the engine is being developed at the same time as the “Game” betas (if you critique the screenshots you can see all kinds of flaws still such as places where shadows aren’t yet working and lighting and bloom flaws and temporary graphics and textures, etc.).

So why are they so separate?

The obvious question is, why not have both be tested at once? The reason for that is that once you start tying “the game” to the engine, you lose a lot of flexibility in making game play changes.

For example, this week we put out the Elemental beta 1B which has the beginnings of the game economy.  Users have concluded, and we agree, that resource inventory just isn’t that fun.  Because the game isn’t part of the engine, it’s literally a 2 hour change and balancing is all data-driven.  By contrast, if the engine had been hooked up there would have been the temptation to display resource inventory visually (piles of wood or stacks of wheat bags for instance). That’s just one example.

That’s why what beta testers in Elemental see right looks like this:

I’m in pain!

The objective

The motivation to have the beta be drawn out like this is that for us, creating the game, with you guys, is very important to us – as gamers.  It has been many years since a new turn-based strategy game was made that wasn’t tied to the limitations (both hardware and design-wise) from the 1990s.

And there are a lot of people in this beta who, like us, have been waiting a long time for a game like this to get made and have a lot of good ideas.

Personal perspective

There are many outstanding strategy games out there from Civilization IV to Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic to Dominions 3 to Heroes of Might and Magic to the grandaddy of this sub-genre: Master of Magic.  What I am looking for us to do is create a PC game that has the kind of depth that is found only on PC games these days but at the same time isn’t bogged down in detail and minutia. 

The delicate balance – making sure the game isn’t dumbed down or “consolized” and yet not so complicated that it feels like work is the journey that we’re hoping to make together with you guys and the best way we believe to do that is to have the on-going game “prototype” not be merged with the game engine until the game is fun to play in it’s current “fugly” look.  Because if it’s fun with Commodore 64 type graphics, then it should be amazing when it’s played with a state of the art game engine behind it.