Dev Journal #4: Visual Uplift

Let's Talk About 2010

I'm going to be straight with you - Elemental: War of Magic didn't look good in 2010, and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress didn’t really improve on that. Time has not been kind to it.

The Elemental games were our first non-space game at Stardock. We'd been making Galactic Civilizations and publishing Sins of a Solar Empire, and we thought "how hard could it be to make a fantasy game?" Turns out, pretty hard. Terrain. Animation. Magic.

The biggest challenge wasn't what you might think. It wasn't the terrain or the cities or even the spell effects. It was the units. We wanted our units to be unique and customizable by players. Many new character artists have come in and thought it easy to just make the characters and animations look better, but not so fast. There are no characters in this game, they only look like characters.

What we think of as characters in the game are actually just heads, bodies, legs, arms and attachment points put together. They are, if you have ever played GalCiv, a fancier version of the ship designer. They are GalCiv ships that look like people.

The Modular Unit System

Most strategy games cheat here. They have a "swordsman" unit that's one complete 3D model. Maybe they swap textures for different factions. Simple, clean, looks good.

We couldn't do that. In Elemental, when you equip a champion with a sword, that specific sword needs to appear. When you give them plate armor, you need to see that exact armor. Design a custom unit with leather armor and a spear? Every single soldier in that unit type needs to show those exact items.

So instead of one model, each unit is actually built from pieces:

• Separate head

• Separate torso

• Individual arms

• Individual legs

• Every weapon is its own model

• Every piece of armor is separate

• Shields, cloaks, accessories - all separate

Each piece needs attachment points that work with every other piece. A sword needs to fit in any hand. A helmet needs to fit on any head. Armor needs to work whether the unit is human-sized or ogre-sized.

Why It Looked Bad

Here's the killer - in 2010, we were shipping a 32-bit game on DirectX 9. So, we had to make endless tough decisions on how to make this work and many of them came at the expense of the visuals. The textures and model “pieces” had to be very simple in order to keep the number of draw calls under control. We batched draw calls aggressively, but there is a cost.

Remastering the Visuals

If you haven’t checked out Endless Legend II, you should. It’s gorgeous. The Amplitude team really knows art and Endless Legend II, with their crafty and, dare I say, handsome lead, Derek, is working to find the right balance between visuals and gameplay. Obviously, we can’t remaster the game to that level of fidelity and our gameplay is very different (we’re more of an fantasy civ game in an RPG world), but the reality is, we have to improve the game’s looks to not outright turn people off.

So the plan is as follows:

• Remake the heads. The character heads in this game were Nintendo 64 level in detail, which was fine, if you never saw them close up, but you do and it hurts. It hurts so much. So, we’re going to have to bite the bullet and do that.

• Art Direction. In 2010, we were in the GalCiv / Sins of a Solar Empire mindset of units needing to pop, so contrasts were dialed up to 11 and there’s so much garish coloring in the game. We’re addressing that.

• Textures. Now, this part is easier, because we authored our assets at pretty high resolution so that we just have to update.

The Challenge

We have to port everything from the Havok .hkb files of 2009 to FBX so that we can use modern art tools, and that is proving very challenging and expensive.

This game is a labor of love for us, but we have to keep the costs under control. Therefore, we have to be very careful about what we do on this. If there’s enough interest after release, we can look at making a true sequel in the future, but the first step is to see how people like Reforged first.

When can you see it?

We hope to have some screenshots of our progress for you soon. We will also be polling to find out if people want an early access of the game with would help us gauge the real level of interest in this. Having played quite a bit of the Endless Legend II demo (which I highly recommend) and as a fan of Age of Wonders 4, I can honestly say that this game definitely has its own spot in the fantasy strategy genre that is very distinct for those who want to play a sandbox fantasy civilization style game. Ultimately, you guys will decide where things go. Let us know what you think.