Looking back...

Time flies when you're making games...

It's been an interesting year. I started and ended it unemployed, but I also started and ended it on the hustle. Last January, I was just settling into the new-found time I had and digging into Epic Frontiers full-force. I knocked down features and the world was designed in much greater detail while, at the same time, I ran the conference circuit (GDC, AGDC, Comic Con, VGXPO, GameX, IMGDC, KOTRA in LA, and VGXPO and a funding conference in December of 2008). I'm still burned out and exhausted from all of those conferences...

So what was the end results for 2009's efforts?

1) The demo for Epic Frontiers is running on my "server" box (the quotation marks are intentional). It's not up to the standards that I had set, due to deadlines (that should have been set a lot more fuzzy than what they were), but it's up.


2) "Demo 2" is being worked on for a new round of possibly-interested publishers in Asia.


Aside from learning from the mistakes of "Demo 1", we're aiming to have large swaths of content completed quickly (you can too- keep reading), as well as zoning and more features, as well as more eye-candy, because of the things I learned- to my dismay, was that those ugly overhead numbers really are needed to make the game look like it's doing something, animations or no. Who knew... Oh yeah, the guys who've done MMOs before, that's who ;)

3) Tunnel Breaker was created in TGB.


I have another game or two on the drawing board for TGB, and though the portals didn't respond to my queries to sell it, I chalk it up to either the economy, or maybe the game sucks. I'm too close to be able to tell, but I thought it was hopeful when my sister play-tested it and went 20 minutes before asking me where certain parts of the GUI were. Usually, that's a good sign, and it probably still is :)

4) Going to all those conferences has let me know which ones are worth the money, and which aren't. In my opinion, the worthy ones are: GDC and AGDC (the networking there is unbelieveable, if you're willing to run yourself ragged for a week- and I highly recommend that), GameX (in Philly, shaping up to be a really good East Coast conference), IMGDC (if you're into MMOs, do it, or you're screwing yourself). VGXPO is not worth it for networking or development talks, as many of it's former speakers have migrated to GameX. The funding conferences were worth it for contacts that are allowing me to call my demos "Demos", but unless you are able to whip out a laptop and demonstrate something, don't go.

In the present, I'm recovering from the holidays (my family functions, her family functions, trying and failing to avoid family functions, shopping, eating, etc) and looking forward to staying on the grind for the new year. Apparently, I was nominated for Thread of the Year here. I have to thank Scott for that, though personally I feel that while the thread is helpful, it's probably not top-three. Still, having been nominated and lost, I had to do something funny. Having already done the Kanye bit during my demo announcement, I had to get all Wu Tang on them, instead (and we all know ODB did it way before Kanye) ;) Of course, those who won did so for a reason, and they weren't looking for kudos in doing what they did, but kudos anyway! And now, moving into this year, some of the things I have cooking on the stove o' work include:

1) I needed a tool that would allow us to create sets of hundreds or thousands of items for Epic Frontiers. Art-wise, we're covered with using generalized icons for objects (since in an MMO, 80% of your in-game items are just icons), and while that does take considerable time, so would plugging all that data into the database. Almost done is a tool that allows you to specify the database fields and then generate combinations of objects as you see fit. If you have a Ray Gun, say, and need that Ray Gun to exist in your MMO as "Rusty Ray Gun", "Clean Ray Gun", "Exalted (tee hee) Ray Gun", etc, then you can use this tool to generate those permutations of the gun, along with any modifications to the database fields you need, after a few minutes of set up. If you use special generation functions to fill in a field, that would be supported as well. I know this has worth in the MMO space because of articles I've read on games such as Anarchy Online creating a tool like that to enable them to quickly generate items for the game on the fly as the game progressed. With SQL and CSV import/export (which I'm working on today), I'm looking at a $25 per seat license, which is pretty cheap considering the longevity of the product (SQL and CSV aren't going anywhere, and neither is your MMO's need for content).

2) Added to the above, I'm going to trim down the database-based Interrogative dialog system and offer that up as well. Since it's script-based right now, I'll need to move it to code and compile it as a dll for inclusion into the engine (it'll run faster, and I'm not going to release the source code because I have too much planned for it, sorry). I'm not sure what the price will be, but it will probably cost a little bit more than a T3D binary-only license.

3) "Demo 2" is moving ahead, with lessons learned from the first demo. Alongside this, I'm working on a good number of things that will make it to the community as free resources, such as fixing mouselook (which I should submit as an engine fix- it really should be in there, and it shouldn't interfere with anything else).

4) Hopefully, an MMO launch at the end of the year. We're Plan-B'ing it as a default to self-launch the game with a partial world, hoping that it will bring in enough people to play a "pre-history" version of it that takes place a few years before the "main" launch to help fund the rest of the development.

Interesting things. I'm also wondering how people feel about the products like the item generation tool ($25), or the Interrogative dialog system, or merchandising MMO products pre-release to help fund an MMO?