Plan for Tony Richards

Renegades update

Ok, it's been a couple of months since I updated my .plan with Renegades information... I've been sidetracked by TSE a bit and my MMORPG project, but I've still been working on Renegades a lot.

All of our coders now have TSE, so we've started our port. Luckily we're not so far along with modifications to the game engine that the port isn't going to be easy. Mainly the encrypted containers, radar, skiing, deploying and a few other basic enhancements will need to be ported, but most of the actual game-play has been done in scripts and don't require any modifications. Our existing maps that have terrains will stay the same, but some of our maps were created with flat terrains in anticipation of Atlas, and so these terrains will have to be created (not re-created because the TGE versions we simply skipped and we used a flat stand-in)

The plan is to reach the first milestone by Thanksgiving. This will give us a fully playable base game with several maps, two game types, three player armors (the base Heavy / Medium / Light) and a subset of deployables. Other armors that are Renegades specific will be completed, but gameplay balance won't be correct without all 8 Renegades armors, so they won't actually be part of the game yet. Base game-play with the three basic armors will be balanced, but won't be Renegades yet.

The team is picking up steam and refocused. We're going to get a subset of the game operational, even if we're not going to actually distribute that. This will help us work out some kinks in our development method and give us something tangible. Once that's finished, we can concentrate on adding the Renegades armors and community features. After that we'll work on the Renegades deployables, then finally we'll add the rest of the vehicles. In a nutshell, that's the milestones we've set... our goal is to hit the final milestone in about a year from now, but at each milestone we'll have a fully functional, playable game with more features than the previous milestone, keeping gameplay balanced at each step.

This will allow us to create maps and game types based on a combination of 3 base armors, 8 specialized armors, basic deployables, advanced deployables, and vehicles, yet still remain balanced. This will make our game quite a bit more flexible than a typical first person shooter game, and hopefully will make it more fun for everyone.

One thing we're missing is sound artists. If you read this and you think you might be able to contribute things like sound effects and music, please contact me or visit our web site at www.renwerx.com.