Elemental: War of Magic Articles and Video Walkthrough

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Written by BuckGB on September 8th, 2009

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Your character is basically a very powerful magic user who wants to rule the land. There are several ways he can do this. One is by keeping his power inside him and having that power grow so he can use more and more powerful spells. We got an example of that in our demo where the character walked over to a town filled with people and military units. However since he horded his magical power all he had to do was create a powerful spell to wipe them all out. In this case he created a volcano that swallowed the entire town, people and all. Ouch.

Of course you don't have to expend your magical powers in this way. You can also use your power to create your own town and armies. You can actually go down and customize your own units your way in the game. Ultimately your goal is to go up against other magic users like yourself and take them down via spells, armies or a combo of both. There's even a complex system of families in Elemental that will allow you to link them via marriage in order to gain new alliances, special abilities and more.

Every level of the game -- with the exception of the core engine code itself -- is moddable, including all of the game's units, assets, and particle effects, as well as the Python scripting that drives the game logic.

"The game mechanics are done with Python, so if you're a Python guy, you can actually make a total conversion. Someone could make Civilization V with this," Wardell said, then laughed and added, "Hopefully not."

Players can even create high-resolution PNG files from their maps and dungeons to print out and use for tabletop strategy games or RPGs, a feature inspired by the Campaign Cartographer software Wardell used to use in his Dungeons & Dragons-playing days.

While the Elemental's story (and campaign) have a very specific map, the sandbox mode will put you in a randomly generated world every game. These maps need to feel like any great RPG would: expansive forests, towering mountain ranges, dungeons, creatures...all with an interesting back-story to give history and weight. Couple that with the 'full zoom' design decision, where players can seamlessly zoom from cloth map into a bustling cityscape, and you have an incredibly ambitious scope to the playable map.

This is one of the technical reasons for our artistic style - we have to assume all game objects will be present in the world at all times, so requiring 3 textures per object would have been hardware suicide. Going with our illustrative style is what allows Elemental's amazing range of zoom.

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