Elemental: Dev Journal #31: Growing Pains

Elemental: Dev Journal - Growing Pains

June was pretty rough for this game. At some point, we don't know when, there was what we think was an OS update that slightly changed the way the game's audio system integrates with the OS, which resulted in what seemed to be (but weren't) random crashes.

So what happened?

In the game there are WAV files and MP3 files, and previously, for the last 15 years anyway, if a file name had a typo or something the game would just silently fail and go to the next one. So a given sound effect or track of music would try to play, and if the file wasn't there or the file name was not the right case, it would either not play or just skip to the next track.

But then in June this stopped being the case, and the game would either plain crash or the music would do something funky (like go into a loop) and then crash.

This issue mostly happened if you were playing as one of the Empires. That's why there was some consternation in the forums and Discord, where someone would complain about random crashes and others would say "well, it's rock solid for me." In truth, they were both right. If you were playing as the Kingdom, it probably worked. If you were playing as one of the Empires, you probably got crashes at seemingly random intervals.

To address this, we've been updating the game in two ways. First, we hardened the calls so they no longer rely on the underlying sound libraries to fail gracefully, for example when a file is named "WarDrums.mp3" on disk but referenced as "Wardrums.mp3" in XML. Second, we fixed a lot of the missing tracks, so if you play the game, especially as an Empire, you will probably hear a lot of sounds and tracks that are "new" but were always there.

Needless to say, it didn't help the game's review scores, and it's just another blip in the game's technical history of being a very big-scope game made by a lot of very young (back in 2008 anyway) developers.

Making it up to players

So besides fixing the problem, we also moved up the release of some of the additional Sorcerer King quests. In version 1.3 you will see a lot of new quests.

We also moved up the release date of v1.3 from August into July. We expect to have a preview build up by the end of this week.

Version 1.3 has a loot balance pass across the board that we think players will like a lot. It also adds a new tactical battle tooltip that shows what effects, abilities, and tactical items a given unit has on them, so players can make better decisions about who to target. This feature has me excited because now I want to give bandits and other enemies interesting items to make use of (at least a health potion or the occasional scroll, for instance).

So there you have it. Once v1.3 is out, we'll be moving on to v1.4. Let us know in the comments what you'd like to see next.