This week our friends from Ironclad were visiting to discuss strategy on an assortment of future projects. One of the fun things was showing Elemental and comparing notes on different engine techniques – ways of doing cool stuff on screen without having requiring crazy hardware.
One of the things the team here has spent some time on is on fonts. It’s amazing how crappy font handling is in Windows IF you’re not putting it on a dark background. DirectX 11 apparently will fix this but then, how many of you have DirectX 11 video cards? So in 2015, we can look forward to easy to have nice fonts.
If you look at some of the early Elemental screenshots that show UI, the fonts are awful looking. That’s fixed now. W00t. But it’s amazing how much effort it took to create a font system that works on a light background. Next time you look at a text-intensive game on the PC, look carefully at the background. How often is it a light background? Ironic given that outside of games, that’s the norm.
Cleaning things up for the alpha
Another thing we’ve been working on is getting things ready for the alpha. Now, originally the alpha (beta 0) was going to come out in June. Then Demigod happened and I had to pull a bunch of people off Elemental and put them on Demigod to help get things to where we wanted them to be (at least in the areas that we could help on). So we lost easily a month, possibly two.
Fear not, this doesn’t mean we lost 2 months off the overall schedule. What it means is that we lost 2 months from the time we start taking the technologies developed and assembling it into a game.
To make up for those lost 2 months, I assigned myself to the project. I’ve even moved out of my nice corner office and am in the lab area with the rest of the team to help focus on assembling the techs together to make a cohesive game.
To put it in perspective, for a game with a 1Q release, I don’t normally get intimately involved until 4Q. So in this case, getting involved in June let’s us move into the iterative development process earlier.
That said, on Tuesday I’m heading out on a working vacation up north. I’ll still be around but I won’t be in the office. I have a lot of overall Stardock stuff to work on (the annual business plan and lots of legal/accounting and other boring stuff is what I work on during July traditionally and I try to do that from somewhere that involves swimming or other distractions in between mind numbing balance sheet projections, updating the standard contract agreements, reviewing the latest tax statues, and this year investigating the difference between Python 2 and Python 3 and seeing if I can get Visual Studio 2005 to work with Python 3 as opposed to just Visual Studio 2008. So that’s what I do in July.
The downside is that that means that the alpha version of Elemental won’t pop out until August. The current working release day for the Alpha is August 6 with the public beta being September 2 so mark your calendars. 
No promises but that’s what we’re aiming for.
Jobs
BTW, we are hiring right now across the board at Stardock. Particularly for game developers, animators, and artists to work on Elemental and other game-related projects and even general software. Email jobs@stardock.com if you’re interested. Must be willing to relocate to Michigan (Plymouth area).
