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  3. Dev Journal #14: In a Sea of Bugs

Dev Journal #14: In a Sea of Bugs

[p]Have you ever had a home project where you’re dealing with “imperial” units and “metric” units at the same time? The wrench looks like it will fit but it’s just…slightly different.[/p][p]That’s the world of Elemental this past week. We have War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. Each of them have quests and goodie huts and units and 3D assets that are… almost the same, but not quite.[/p][p]Guess what happens when you have a unit with just one more animation annotation than what the system expects. It crashes. And we have had a lot of that. And, of course, with hundreds of units, many of which won’t appear in a given game, it doesn’t show up unless you are the winner of a horrible lottery. [/p][p]So, that is what we have been focused on for the past couple weeks. Fixing bugs.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]Beyond Bugs[/h2][p]If Beta 1 felt a little bit like Elemental: Fallen Enchantress with slightly better visuals, Beta 1A will be the first version that starts to show some real gameplay differences. The Crafting was already in Beta 1 but now there’s a lot more to do with it. Champions are now on the map to be recruited. The AI has gotten some attention. The number of quests has more than doubled. There are a lot more items in the game. The visuals have taken a noticeable (We hope) step up. There are new units in the game. And the framerate, on the typical setup, should be substantially better as we lean into caching memory more.[/p][p]In short, while bug fixing crashes and memory leaks the game also made some substantial gameplay improvements as well.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]What’s Next[/h2][p]We expect to have Beta 1B ready soon. As in, possibly next week, at least in Preview form. That will continue the bug fixing of course but also, we hope, the first signs of localization. Bad localization. Bad as in “Ich sprechen Deutsch.” But it is my understanding that people from Germania like strategy games. We’ll also be working on work for Francia, Spania and other languages that don’t involve special characters before we jump into… Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. Languages that won’t take kindly to char szMyMonsterString\[255];. [/p][p]Our top priorities, AFTER fixing bugs are:[/p]
  1. [p]Localization[/p]
  2. [p]Modding[/p]
  3. [p]Dynasties[/p]