Plan for L Foster

As I write this blog Adrian is in the process of packaging up our current Realm Wars 2 code and content and is preparing it for the LoreCon 2005 show that is taking place this weekend in Philedephia. Its quite an achievement to come this far in such little time, even stepping it up about ten notches to ensure that we get a build done for LoreCon that we feel comfortable and confident in showing off to the general public. To say the least I am very proud of the team, they have done some excellent work during this time and never once complained about this march. With that said though now that the march is done and there is time to reflect, I have to sometimes seriously question my own sanity when I do these things.

The past three weeks have been pretty tough for me as I was pulling full time (8+ hours) every night for this release on top of my normal day job making games. At this point if I have to look at 3DS Max or Photoshop at all during the next couple of days I will think about shooting myself. The long hours have made my brain go into a quasi-sleep mode where it seems to be functioning half right due to a lack of sleep, I haven't been eating regularly (since I got so caught up in my work) and my back is pretty pissed off at me for sitting down so much and not being able to stretch or exercise. So the question I have to ask myself is "was this sacrifice worth it?" and after looking at the build and playing it a bit with a few people the answer is a whole hearted "YES".

Back when we started work on Realm Wars 2 about six months ago we all knew that we were in for a pretty long haul. The work done for the Realm Wars Community Project (RWCP) was a complete and utter mess and that is the honest truth of the matter. It was unfortunately one of those projects where you had way too many chiefs and not enough Indians and as such it just spun its wheels and didn't get anywhere. Hence why CVS was bloated full of garbage of stuff that was never used and didn't even load right, there was a lot of code that either didn't work at all or only worked half the time (hence the buggy builds) and overall the game lacked a lot of playability and fun factor that it really needed. Now let me make it clear that RWCP was a great experiment and there was a lot of work done, so I don't want to make it sound like I am ungrateful for all the people that sent in contributions back in the day, but it just wasn't the level that we wanted to aim for with Realm Wars 2.

So what exactly is Realm Wars 2 and why is it different? Well at the core of things it is still a fantasy themed shooter game, but how the new version differs from the old one, without giving away too much about our plans for what we want to eventually do, is a heavy emphasis on providing an underlying social gaming experience. When I say social gaming I mean the elements such as communication, cooperation to achieve a goal and sharing experiences with others (and not the misconception of a MMO). In order to facilitate this how ever we decided to two things. The first being that we will start again pretty much from scratch on the project, primarily because we needed to start from a clean slate but also so that we can properly leverage our experience and abilities properly to do the tasks that need to be done. The second thing that we decided to do was to break our development up into small baby steps or milestones as we eventually called them.

Milestones were very crucial to us from the very get go because they not only defined our teams progress but they also helped give us an indication of the fun factor in the game. At the end of each milestone the game needed to be fun and complete enough that it could be released as it was as a product, this way we could properly gauge how things were going. By doing this we were better able to adapt on the fly to do what was needed to make the game better and try out things, if there was a problem some where we could fix it, if we felt that we had to allow some feature creep in to make the experience as a whole more enjoyable well that was allowed. In the end it really helped to define a grand experiment, which has worked out quite well, that we call an "iterative design process". This simply means that we try to build everything up at the same time from a rough & crude state to something that is feature complete.

The first milestone that we officially planned out for ourselves was to get a basic yet solid foundation laid out that we can then build from in future milestones. We knew that if we could achieve this (and we have in other Torque based projects) that we would be well along our way on the road to success. What this meant in plain English was get a good, working, playable and entertaining FPS game going. It needed to have polish and be a hell of a lot of fun, but it didn't need any unnecessary features either because we can easily just add these in after we have ensured that we have crafted a great FPS experience.

New splash screen and UI throughout the game helps define RW2

Some of you at this point are probably thinking "Ya so what, RWCP was already a FPS game, so what took you so long?" and although it is true that RWCP was a FPS title it really wasn't a complete title, but more like a sickly Frankenstein monster. Realm Wars 2 was a huge undertaking (which was developed after hours too) and I seriously doubt that we left many stones unturned from what was there in RWCP. When you play Realm Wars 2 you see this by all the polish and great things that have been done to make the experience very enjoyable.

Showing off the orcs, their new team textures, weapons and animations

Although this LoreCon build is not Milestone 1 feature complete, there are a number of enhancements and features that I am quick proud of that are worth highlighting for their important and significance to the game.

LoreCon Build Features:
Team textures, which allow you to visually separate friends from foes.
New CTF flags and team textures for the flags.
New hand to hand weapons. These weapons are larger than before thus allowing for some slightly more interesting melee combat.
Longbow weapon added to the game.
Update Paul Dana's melee code. You can now rotate as you swing your weapon (at a slower speed though of course) and add in some additional collision detection to spawn blood particles where you hit the player.
Shields. Players can now pickup shields that use their entire collision surface to block any incoming melee or ranged attack (ie. projectiles). If you hit a shield, the engine detects where that collision was made and spawns sparks as well as rewinds the melee attack animation.
New melee combat animations.
Upper body twist & rotation. Small changes to the look angle (left/right) will now adjust the upper body only as opposed to current TGE code where it moves the entire player body on a dime. In addition, rotations to the player if they are standing still will cause the player to move himself in place versus the current TGE implementation of just rotating on a dime wo/ movement.
Revamped UIs. Almost all of the game menus and HUDs have been revamped and changed. There is still plenty more to do here before we are complete.
Integrated IRC Lobby. This feature allows players to log onto the IRC server hosted by MGT and find other players to compete with.
New CTF mission with complete new interiors (DIF) objects and items. There is a lot of spit and polish here on this mission that even makes the stuff that we did for Lore look like a drop in the bucket in comparison.
Player is now damaged both underwater (drowning) and landing after a large fall.
The in-game message system is now fixed so that message text cannot exceed the chat display window.
New spawning code that allows players to be spawned inside or on top of interiors (DIFs) as well as anywhere on the terrain.
Staging area. Similar to what we did with Lore Invasion, the staging area lets the player choose their team and avatar that they are using without having to reconnect to the server like they do with RWCP.
ESC = suicide. To counter-act a bit of cheating that goes on in FPS games with players pressing ESC before they die to rob someone of a kill. Any time a player uses ESC to exit back to the staging area they are awarded a Suicide. In order to return to the staging area players must now use the Temple Dias, which automatically takes them back into the Staging Area.
Ridable horses (thanks the Robert Brower's Horse Pack).
New music from Joel Steudler.
John Kabus' Lighting Pack has been added to the game.

Aside from looking cooler and animating, the new CTF flags are now easier to distinguish apart too.

So what's next for Realm War 2? After a few days of well deserved rest for everyone we will be returning to normal work schedules to finish adding in the last of our Milestone1 features that we need to complete as well as any tweaks or fixes that are reported back from the LoreCon attendees. All in all it should be a few more weeks at least, so not too terrible to say the least.

Showing off our iterative design and development process, this town has slowly been developed and reiterated slowly during our development. There is still more work to do here but it gives you a pretty good idea of the flow and layout we are trying to accomplish here for this mission.

When these last few fixes and items are completed for Milestone 1, we will begin a private beta test which will be limited to special invites at first, the list will then expand and slowly grow with each major release. Note: We had talked about doing a public beta test off the start but felt that it would be too much of a distraction and take us away from being able to continue our milestone development as well as tweak the game as necessary. I apologize to anyone who is offended by this but unfortunately it is a necessity at this point in time to operate our beta period like this.

That's all the news from the Realm Wars 2 front right now. I just want to close by saying thanks to Markus, Doug, Adrian and Tim for all their hard work that they have given to this project thus far and congratulate them for all the great work that we have accomplished together thus far.

The new Orc Sword and Axe help to define the Orcs. Crudge, large and going to lay out a shit kicking if you don't watch yourself.