BrokeAssGames - Ruin Online - 2007 Year in review

Happy New Year! (somewhat late)

Let me first say "Thanks!" from all of us at BAG to those members of the community that have stuck with the project in 2007. I'd also like to send a 'shout-out' to those of you who took the red pill and chose work with us on development and community support. Too numerous to mention you all here, that's what Credits are for!

It was a big year for us. If we can keep the momentum up, 2008 could be the year we release. (Would probably take all year, but it could happen.) We've had our ups and downs, but managed some forward progress. Here's a recap:

Early 2007, we had just finalized the format of our new character set with an in -house workflow for easily creating Torque characters. We didn't realize it was so easy at first, but now we're proficient at character work, especially for Torque. We released our characters as a dev kit for Torque, still in 'Early Adopter' phase. (Look for the official release of our characters soon.)

At the end of BETA3 in Jan. 2007 we had a tough decision to make. "Do we keep the BETA3 behemoth version of Ruin alive", or do we "scrap it and start fresh with the latest version of Torque and our new character base?" We decided to scrap it... load times were terrible and some bugs/issues went back to when Ari was first learning Torque. What'd we learn? "If something works, delete it and start over. Build it better..." Best decision we ever made.

By April, we had enough of the bugs worked out of the new build and went live again with BETA4. One zone, new characters, new melee combat system but not much else. Many of the little features from BETA3 were missing, but we all managed to enjoy the new clothing items, dual wielding, mad kung-fu, etc and got a bit of development done during that time.

We acquired a new dev, Rex, who among other things is a character artist. He has a solid Torque background and wasn't doing much of anything else, developmentally speaking. This was great, our team of three turned to four. Unfortunately, Moe had to go to Denmark for about six months... Additionally we drafted a writer from within the community, who for the first time ever, managed to get some quest/story content in game. It's only a fraction of what's expected from a decent mmo, but it's more than we had before. Project Oasis (nub hunting zone) is littered with NPCs, some of which will give you quests/rewards.

With BETA4 we also started using a file repository system, Subversion (SVN). This kept all our developers updated with the Lead Dev's build. We as under-devs could also add our new work to the dev build, with a few clicks of the mouse. This was great, but we still had a big issue: publishing patches for the client version was a nightmare. This could only be done by the lead dev, and for him it was like pullin' teeth. The more files that had to be patched the harder it became to publish, and patch days became fewer and farther between. Finally, the idea of using this SVN system to manage the client build too dawned on us. This was just a theory at first, a pie in the sky idea. There were many issues to 'figure out' for keeping a dev build and client build together, but separate.

By the fall of '07 we launched BETA5. SVN functionality for the client build was the goal for launch, and we nailed it! Ari modified our launcher to do it all automatically and made it (pretty much) nub-proof. A new user downloads only the launcher now and it builds an updated version of the client in a fairly short time. Once that client is running on a system, it is easy to update and stay caught up with the community on the latest version of Ruin. The best part is now more of us devs can patch the client. And it's not as hard as when Ari used to have to 'publish' a patch as a separate program. Additionally, we converted the way the game talks to the database to a system called 'event driven', in which the database calls queue up and wait for a quiet moment to contact the DB. We're talking milliseconds but the difference is incredible. This eliminated the incessant lag players would suffer from prior to this change (lag when other players die or log in, mainly). Thanks to Dave at Dream Games for the hands-on help with event driven.

More good news: Our never-ending work on frameworks will be ending soon! Over the course of 2007, we looked hard at our Framework list, reviewed the scope of our Game Spec document and removed allot of frameworks that were redundant or 'not required for launch'. We whittled the list down to about 12 major frameworks we were still missing and started pounding on the remainder.

As it stands now, we have 3 frameworks to wrench into Ruin before we begin the second to last phase of development!

AFX integration - Done at time of this post.

Web browser integration

CSK integration

Added: We need an AI revamp

Once the above frameworks are in game we have 3-6 months of Feature Development where we will define the major frameworks into many usable features (many of which are still completely missing or borked). That will be a long feature list, but at some point in 2008 we will 'cut the cord' and do a final phase of strictly Bug Testing/Fixing in prep for Gold Release.

As always, we are on the lookout for community members with some development skills to participate behind the scenes building this beast. If you are interested, PM or email me.

If you read this far, its safe to say you are at least morbidly interested...

Jondo