As you have probably noticed, I have been less active lately on this forum. It's no because I have lost any interest in board game design. On the contrary, I have more ideas than ever. But there has been an event lately that would require a lot of work, at least I think. So in order to focus more on this task, I need to cut elsewhere.
As some of you might know, I am a big fan of a video game called "Master of Magic" and there has been a new video game recently calle "Elemental" which is some sort of civilization game in a fantasy world. I decided to join the modding team that would be willing to make a Master of Magic MOD for Elemental Video game.
Right now we have an interesting modding team, we are 5 people and there is an professional artist and a musician in the group. The only thing missing is a 3D modeler. I would be in charge of the design of the game. Even if I had many game design ideas of this game, we have concluded that we should stick to the original rules since it's the only way people will agree with the rule design since everybody has their own vision on the rules for the game. But still, not everything can fit exactly like the original game due to elemental's limitations and this is where I should come in to make the right decision.
We are not actively working on the mod, so I don't know how the dynamics of the group will be. The primary reason why we are on standby is because Elemental has been released on my point of view too soon. I consider the game to be still in beta. To be more precise, they made a good modable game engine with almost no game in it. Now they changed the person in charge of the game development and we are actually waiting for updates and game improvements before starting to mod the game. The second problem is that there is no documentation, so even if it should be possibible to change a lot of stuff through modding, we actually do not know how it can be done or if it is even active yet.
I hope we will be able to do something good with Elemental. I still dream one day to have access to the source code of "Master of Magic" and recompile the game. Alas, nobody seems to have the source anymore. I keep dreaming.
Yep, it is still surprising that 16 years after it's release, it is still the best fantasy 4x strategy game. So there is reallay something unique about this game that nobody have successfully reproduced elsewhere.
You don't need an emulator to play in you have windows XP, it can run natively and much faster than with dos box.