Plan for Adrian Wright

It's been a little over a year since MGT decided to shelve our first major project and develop Dark Horizons: LORE with TGE, and looking back on the last year I have to say I am very satisfied at what we have accomplished.

We took a step back about a year ago and really reviewed what it meant to be an Indie and set some expectations on what we could accomplish for a first title. We had been designing a much more aggressive first project which used a different engine license, had gotten it to a tech demo state and started making the rounds with a few publishers. Our concept for this project was very well received by those we spoke to, had an excellent design overview, good tech demo and we were pumped up.

Then reality hit, despite the backgrounds of the main team members, which included project management, software development, systems design, and commercial art production the recurring comment after a couple rounds with each publisher was "but you haven't done anything as a team". So as this reality set in we started to reevaluate what we were going to do as a dev team.

MGT members had been part of the GarageGames community since the beginning of the movement, and we all had played with the engine in a project we had called Mecha Lore. We went to IGC in 2002 and I was lucky enough to get to talk with Jeff Tunnell and Jay Moore in person for the first time. We talked about what types of game MGT wanted to make, and where GarageGames was headed. It was a fantastic experience for us and helped shape where we would go from there.

In December of 2002 we decided to shelf (not permanently) our big first project and design a game which was achievable to complete within a year and at a low budget. Thus was born Dark Horizons: LORE. This first TGE project we decided we wanted to do a mecha game based on our Sci-fi Universe Dark Horizons, something not to complex, was simply for all users to play and not locked into a traditional mech sim format. Fourteen months later we are ready to release the Early Adopters version of the game, and already have plans to complete the Gold edition and future projects building on LORE.

The concept of how we have designed and will continue to design aspects of LORE is heavily based on players, and their experiences and feedback in the game. We call the first release the Early Adopters release, because those coming into the game at this level really are coming in at the very beginning of the Factions Wars of this time period in Dark Horizons. Over the next couple of months, those who participate as a early adopter will see the grow of this part of the universe, the expansion of game play areas as the war spreads, the addition of new technology into the game space, and of course the ability for them to not only influence but contribute to the game will be un paralleled.

To be continued...