Arcanoria MMORPG - playable demo scheduled for December 2008

Some folks in the community have approached me recently, saying that they had learned about my MMORPG project Arcanoria here in my previous GG blogs, or from the MyDreamRPG contest we entered last year. Arcanoria has come a long way since my last blog here, so please accept my apologies for not providing an update sooner! We've been quite busy...

Well the first thing to say is that, unfortunately, we had to drop out of the DreamGames contest back in January of this year for various reasons, including the fact that we'd decided to switch engines again, back to our original engine, which was based on Ogre. I felt it was a better fit for our project, which will include server-based network play in a persistent world, and a fully custom game system, among other things.

Since January 2008, we decided to move over to using the still-in-development Zen Engine (www.indiezen.org), rather than develop our own framework and toolset. This has proven to be a great benefit to us, and the future is looking very bright, with much of the basic engine functionality already stable and working, and new features just on the horizon, including a powerful world editor that's scheduled for initial (internal) release in about a month from now.

That notwithstanding, we're already able to construct scenes and gameplay rules using Lua script, and the process has begun of porting our creative work over from our old TGEA-based demo from last year, plus implementing all the other stuff like game rules, back story, etc. which we designed last year and is sitting in our wiki waiting to get into the game world.

The big news is that we're planning to release a playable (alpha) demo of Arcanoria at long last, and it's scheduled to release before the end of this year! If you take a look at our project blogs on our main website (www.arcanoria.com) you'll see that things are coming together VERY quickly, now that much of the engine work is behind us. Our screenshots (www.arcanoria.com/photos) tell the tale of very rapid and tangible progress, just in the last couple of weeks.

If you are interested in more detail, please feel free to browse our blog history page for the whole story (www.arcanoria.com/history.php), including everything we've done since the project's beginning back in January 2007.

I'd love to hear what you think of our recent progress! We're really excited about the future of Arcanoria.

Thanks for reading along!