Dev Journal #13: Overwhelming Response & Technical Foundations

THANK YOU!

We're shocked and grateful and humbled by the community response to Elemental: Reforged. In the first week since Beta 1 hit Early Access, we’ve hit wishlist numbers and sales approximately 6X higher than our most optimistic projections. The game is already in the top 1000 overall wishlists.

When we started working on this a few years ago, we were just really doing this for ourselves. A kind of therapy . So this has all been overwhelming in a good way.

Your support means I get to steal er borrow er assign more engineers and artists to the effort.

So let’s talk about the exciting world of bug fixing.

This Week's Focus: Bug Fixing and Memory Leaks

With Beta 1 now in players' hands, this week has been all about stability and polish. Our primary focus areas have been:

Bug Fixes and Memory Leaks

We've been systematically hunting down and eliminating memory leaks and various bugs that emerged during early testing. One particularly interesting challenge we've encountered is dealing with race conditions that never manifested on older hardware. Modern systems are so much faster than the machines we originally developed for that timing-dependent issues which were effectively "hidden" by slower processors are now surfacing. It's a fascinating reminder that performance improvements can sometimes reveal bugs that were always there—just waiting for the hardware to catch up.

Localization and String Tables

Before Beta 1, we made great strides in transitioning the game away from hard-coded strings to proper string tables. This week, we've continued that work with a critical focus: variable ordering for different languages.

Here's the challenge: In English, you might see:

"You have hit the bandit for 5 damage and taken 3 in return."

But in other languages, the natural word order might require those numbers (5 and 3) to appear in completely different positions within the sentence. We need a robust system that allows translators to reorder variables while maintaining grammatical correctness in each language. Getting this right is critical for the game's long-term success and ensuring players around the world have an authentic, high-quality experience.

The Road Ahead: UI Modernization

One of our major ongoing initiatives is modernizing the game's input systems. Currently, too many actions require mouse clicks on specific buttons and UI elements. We're committed to ensuring that players can:

- Navigate and control everything via keyboard
- Use game controllers for full gameplay
- Avoid being forced into mouse-driven interactions

This is a substantial undertaking and will be an ongoing challenge, but it's essential for accessibility and player comfort. We want Elemental Reforged to be playable the way *you* want to play it.

The original Elemental was the first game we made to support the detailed breakdowns of stats in tooltips. Internally we call them “Chicks” (named after Tom Chick, a well respected journalist, writer and thought leader). We’re expanding on this now that we have more resolution to work on.

We also plan to add tooltiips within tooltips as well as some sort of Shafer button (both concepts popularized and/or invented by Jon Shafer, the designer of Civilization V and Galactic Civilizations III). The Shafer button is pretty common in games now where the Turn button leads the player to whatever still needs your attention. Our plan is to eventually get that in here but with the addition that you can hold down say the SHIFT key and force it to the next turn. Note if you look at the screenshot we have a bug. Can you spot it?

Expanding the Art Team

Thanks to the overwhelming interest in the game, we've been able to bring additional artists onto the project! This means we can accelerate visual improvements and polish.

We want to hear from you: What are the top 3 things you'd like to see visually improved in Elemental Reforged? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Your feedback directly influences our priorities.

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Bringing Back The Past

We also have added around 200+ new quests and Goodie huts and a begun bringing back lots of author Dave Stern’s writing back into the game which was lost due to having to reduce the number of quests for War of Magic (and Fallen Enchantress had even fewer quests than WOM). We also restored some of the units that were removed before War of Magic shipped (and never appeared in Fallen Enchantress) so you’ll be seeing those.

We also began adding in the quests from Sorcerer King which were written by author Chris Bucholz, and amazing writer.

Little Bit of AI

We haven’t really started on the AI overhaul yet, but we did a few things to make them a bit tougher.

Champion Recruiting

The Champions are back on the map! As you gain fame, you can recruit them. You still will get champions offering to join you but it’s far less frequent. Instead, most champions will be the ones you find on the map and win them over to join you.

Better Performance

The game already runs pretty well. After all, it was originally made when computers were very slow. But there is always room for cleaning up code. Hopefully it’s noticeable. However, loading the game will, for now, take longer as adding hundreds of new quests and more units and more points of interest means loading up the XML will take longer. We’re working on that.

Preview Builds

One thing that we have seen is that the original intention of Early Access has been ruined, imo, by studios using it as a late development demo or marketing effort rather than the original idea which was to bring players on the journey of development, warts and all. Which is a real shame. Thankfully, most people do realize that these are early betas and intended a such. With finite development resources, the point is to work with the fans to determine where those resources go and that’s where Early Access goes.

Nevertheless, we also need to recognize the reality that many, if not most, gamers have a limited tolerance for bugs and instability. Therefore, we are going to create a Preview Branch (“Even buggier”) branch that shows off a lot of new features and improvements that might be even buggier than the main branch. These builds still go through QA so they’re not untested. But they will have things in them that we are trying out that might prove to have been dumb ideas and they will have more bugs than the main version.

For example, if we’re adding 200+ quests, we have obviously not tested them all yet. They should work, but a treasure might not show up or an icon might be missing. But through it, we’ll find out what kinds of quests players tend to like more and would like more of.

Just the Beginning

I was asked what the long-term plan is for this game. My answer is that the plan is to keep actively working on this game for as long as there’s a reasonable number of people playing it, which I suspect will be many years.

I’d like to keep early access short. Get the bugs out. Clean things up. Polish. Balance. Make the AI better. Etc. I don’t know how long that will take, the game is pretty buggy. But once that’s done, you put it out there and then we keep doing updates for the next several years. That’s the plan!