Plan for L Foster

A Short Rant, and some new information on Dark Horizons Lore 1.3 and GravRally?

The real beauty of plan files is that they are a great excuse to not work on something else for a short period of time, in my case this evening it's a CBT (Computer Based Training) project that I have been working on and off again for the past 6 months using my least favorite program ever created... Macromedia Flash. As many of you on IRC can attest using this program always puts me into a really bad mood, ranting and raving about it's inconsistencies, problems, half implimented features and so forth. Not only that but it seriously cuts into game development time :( The only real positive feature about using it is that when this project is finished I can finally get myself out of the 'black' and back towards investing my resources into game development more.

Well I guess I have been allowed to voice my two cents on a subject that's on my mind, so it's time now to update everyone on the real meat and potatoes of this plan.



Dark Horizons Lore 1.3

As I mentioned in my last plan, everyone here at MaxGaming is busting their balls to get a new build out of Dark Horizons Lore. Many of the changes come from either items that we have found, or been reported, and from a really great 'pow-wow' session that we had at E3 with the team and with Jeff Tunnel.

So what are we including in 1.3?
-We are planning on releasing a smaller Demo for everyone to download. This demo will feature limited missions that you can participate in, but you will be allowed to play for an unlimited length of time. This on it's own is no undertaking as we have to revamp and rebuild a lot of things as well as do numerous tests on Windows, OSX and Linux, but we feel that people will benefit from it more. We (ie. Maxgaming and GarageGames) felt that at the time offering a time-limited version was a good idea but after some careful consideration it ended up becoming a failed experiment, but this is how you get your feet under you and learn how to walk IMHO by making mistakes and learning from them.
- New and improved Assault Missions. Some of you are probably wondering just what an 'Assault' mission is. Well it's basicaly a mission where your team as either the defender or assaulter on the map are given a series of objectives to meet in the alotted time. Just think of Return to Castle Wolfenstein style of multiplayer missions with the added bonus that the missions are tied into our online world system (COMCENT) so as that particular mission gets controlled by the other team, so do the roles of who is the assaulter and who is the defender. It's definately an awesome feature to have and as you can probably already tell it really allows the game to be a bit more dynamic and intersting experiance. Note: I haven't actually had the opportunity to design any new missions for this next release, just suggest various changes that are required. It's unfortunate since I think this will be one of the first releases that doesn't contain a new mission that I built. But my time was stretched fairly thin since E3 and there are other priorities for me to do.
- We have completely revamped the UI for Lore. Everything is much easier to access and also presented to the user better. Essentially we learnt a few things here since release from user feedback and some focus testing that we felt needed to be changed. We have also gone ahead and made the buttons in Lore more dynamic, this should allow us to use up less memory and also be easier for us in regards to Localization down the road.
- More Destroyable Objectives. This has been my primary area of focus (after helping redesign the UIs). People want to see more stuff blow up and we need more destroyable objectives for our Assault missions. I will try to post some shots of the new destroyables soon.
- Fix to the conform to terrain bug with the tanks. This is a huge fix for us since this bug caused a massive problem with aiming, and the wierdest part is that this has been a problem with the resource since day 1 and yet there really wasn't a valid solution available until Ace tried a different approach when we came back from E3 :) It goes to show what a little vacation can give back to you.
- Other fixes and tweaks.

Note: While I was writing the Lore info, I am reminded of an interesting topic that Paul Dana and I were chatting about earlier today on IRC. Namely that it has been intersting to sit and watch the development of our games (Paul is working on a cool little game called BitShifts if you didn't already know) and see all the mistakes that we made and how we have learnt from them. I really wish that I, or anyone else at MaxGaming, had made an effort to keep a really detailed journal of all of this because it would really make for an intersting read. I know that Paul is keeping one for Bitshifters.


GravRally

Now I bet that you are confused wondering why the heck I would be talking about GravRally when its a 21-6 game. Well the simple answer is that at E3 we, as in MaxGaming, had a lot of time to chat with 21-6 in regards to the limited resources we have available to us and why either of our groups would need to reinvent the wheel when sharing what we have would be more beneficial. With that said both groups left E3 with a 'hey lets try sharing out resources' idea in mind and this is one of the first results of it.

I am really enthused to be doing this not just because GravRally is a cool game, but because I get to work a bit again with my good friend Pascal Bos. Together he and I are already working on some new Grav Bikes that are based on some sweet sketches that Pascal has done. Hopefully I can post some shots of the bike as it gets done more (and if I get permission to do so).