Rob Sandbach Joins Arcanoria! ...and other news

Arcanoria is a medieval fantasy SMORPG and our main website is www.arcanoria.com.

I'm very excited to announce that Rob Sandbach of Manchester-based game design studio Urban Games (www.urban-games.net) has agreed to join the Arcanoria development team. We're still working on defining his exact role, but among other things Rob will be lending his Torque scripting, design and team management skills. Rob heads up Urban Games, and has years of experience in Torque game development. This also means that we'll be able to draw on the experience of the other Urban Games associates, who have collectively worked on numerous gaming titles as artists, designers, and programmers. We're looking forward to a great working relationship with Rob and the crew at UG!

On the development front, Rob and I have been hard at work defining the game system's parameters, particularly the skill/spell system. We're excited about how Arcanoria's skill system innovations will affect gameplay. Players will have meaningful choices to make through their actions, instead of choosing a character class at level 1, which is how it's done in most MMORPG's. In Arcanoria, a player's actions will result in changes to their skill levels, which are maintained automatically by the game and adjusted with practice (or disuse). This means that to become a Fighter, you need to do some fighting, or to become a Mage you need to cast some spells! Isn't that the way it should be? We think so.

In other news, the model packs from Arteria Gaming are finally downloaded, after Steve (owner of Arteria) was having some issues with his website's transfer to a new, more reliable hosting service. While he's still not completely setup, Steve was kind enough to get me all the files directly via ftp. Now that's what I call customer service - thanks Steve!

I've also signed us up for an internet-based SVN/Trac/Wiki account at Wush.net, and gotten a development wiki started with a few new documents, along with a shared SVN (source code) repository. This is a huge step for Arcanoria as it now enables us to have our geographically remote development team be able to work together seamlessly.

Finally, I've spent a bunch of time recently fleshing out the Arcanoria Design Document, which will act as a guide as we continue to make our way through the design process. It also serves as a living description of how the game is implemented from the design perspective, and why.