Blog for Edward Gardner at GarageGames.com

Dark Horizons- Lore is Yummy!

Edward Gardner — 2006-12-12T15:30:49+00:00

Later this week, even more people will get a chance to play Lore. A few weeks ago, we worked out a deal with Yummy Interactive (http://www.yummy.net/). These folks do digital distribution with ISP's outside the US and offer content in a GameTap like way, where users download games and play them through an ISP provided portal.

This week, we'll be launching in Canada on TELUS and in Greece on OTENet, with additional launches early next year.

The GameTap launch was a great success, infusing our servers with new players who seemed to love the game. We're hopeful that we can continue that success with these additional launches.

What, you haven't bought youself a copy of Lore?

Do I need to put the link in my blog, really?

www.garagegames.com/products/29/

Ok, you forced me, there, are you happy?

Yay, us!

Lore launches on GameTap!

Edward Gardner — 2006-11-12T16:51:19+00:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that Lore (you remember our mechanized combat shooter, right?) has just launched on GameTap.

So if you have a copy, pop in, we've been getting a steady stream of players!

If you don't have a copy, you should. It's cheap, if you buy it here off GarageGames you'll get all the PDF's from our offline Role Playing stuff as a bonus, and you'll be helping us pay the rent. What's not to love about that deal?

Or, if you have a GameTap account, you can get it right now: www.gametap.com/home/gameDetails/000430250

What are you waiting for?

Hack It for the PC Released!

Edward Gardner — 2006-08-22T19:22:22+00:00

We've been busy, in addition to our upcoming puzzlers developed in house, we've been helping our good friend Markus Nuebel get his game out.

We're extrememly proud to announce the release of Hack It, a unique 3D Puzzle Game developed by THE CORE TEAM and brought to you by Max Gaming!

Help Marvin the super hero defuse all the bombs to get back his stuff!

Challenge your mind in a game where you disarm bombs by solving 45 unique mind cracking puzzles against the clock in a veriety of 15 unique environments.

Each bomb consists of highly explosive material and a disordered electronic circuit that must be reorder to get disarmed. If you do not win the race against the clock all your belongings go BOOM!!

Features:
- 4 different game modes.
- Wide range of challenging puzzle layouts ranging from easy 4 solution unit layouts up to high sophisticated layouts with up to 15 solution units.
- 15 unique game environments.
- 45 unique puzzles to solve.

System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows 98/SE/ME/2000/XP (In work: Mac OSX, Linux)
Hardware: Pentium III 800, 128 MB RAM
Graphics card: 3D Graphics Accelerator (32MB recommended)
Sound card: DirectX compatible Soundcard
Drive Space: 40 MB

Download the demo or buy Hack It for $14.95

So say congrats to Markus and buy a copy of his game!

Before/After

Edward Gardner — 2006-08-03T13:07:40+00:00

My life is finally being reassembled after almost 4 months!

Full gallery here:
jkohl.smugmug.com/gallery/1368175/1/65146765

and after

Full gallery here:
jkohl.smugmug.com/gallery/1732516/1/85603913

It could always be worse...

Edward Gardner — 2006-04-15T17:48:08+00:00

So about 3am this morning, someone decided to have too much to drink and park their Nissan in my living room.

jkohl.smugmug.com/gallery/1368175

Me, wife, ferrets are all fine. The Living Room is totalled.

The upshot? If you were expecting anything from me, it will have to wait till I find a new home.

You could buy our book if you wanted to make me feel better though ;)

Dark Horizons Universe

Edward Gardner — 2006-04-13T19:15:30+00:00

It's finally here, for real this time!

As you may remember from mine and Adrian's blogs, we've been working on a paper and pencil based game product set in the Dark Horizons Universe. Well, after alot of stutter-stops, it's done.

Without further ado, I present you with the Dark Horizons Universe Campaign Setting for d20 Future. We'll be making a more formal, press release type annoucement, and cleaning up the RPG website (www.darkhorizons-rpg.com) but we're pretty damn excited.

Buy the Print on Demand version (it will come with a PDF as well, but you might as well get the book in hard copy), we make less money on the hard copy, but it's undeniably cooler.

edge.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=6839

HUGE props to the RPG team!

Thursday Sep 29 18:24

Edward Gardner — 2005-09-29T18:24:19+00:00

No soup, errr, IGC for me :(

I just wanted to post a quick note, as many of my friends have asked, I will NOT be attending IGC this year, which breaks with my tradition of indie solidarity and game development 3 years running.

A very good friend of mine is getting married that Saturday, and he had asked me to be in the wedding. It never occured to me to 1) say no, or 2) check the date for conflicts.

So, alas, you will be without my (frequently inebriated) presence next weekend.

It sounds like Jay and the crew are prepped to put on yet another awsome show though, I am very jealous that I will not be there to experience it first hand.

I will eagerly await reports from the show on how MGT's latest efforts met with the criticism of our peers and friends.

Monday Aug 22 19:34

Edward Gardner — 2005-08-22T19:34:44+00:00

LoreCON

So, I went to LoreCON this weekend.

We had posters and a cool function room:

And prizes:

And people to win the prizes:

And people playing:

And we all generally had a fantastic time.

Our.

Players.

Rock.

Thursday Mar 17 15:03

Edward Gardner — 2005-03-17T15:03:25+00:00

What makes Lore Unique?

What DOES make Lore unique?

At it's heart, it's a shooter. We have some cool mechanics, cool weapons, and some fun variations on traditional shooter gameplay, but at the end of the day, in the actual game, it's got a Tribes meets Mechwarrior vibe. Someone once said that if you have to use other games names to describe your game, you haven't innovated, just copied. That may be true, but in this case, there's more to Lore than just a copy.

We've made an accessible robot shooter. We have throttles, torso twists, aspect seeking weapons, countermeasures, speed/armor tradeoffs, energy management, weapons selection and mutliple classes of MAV's to drive. It's ALOT faster than say, Mechwarrior, the MAV's are nimble, not QUITE human, but nimble and they get places quick. I'd even say it's a bit faster than Mechassault. These are not 40-60 foot tall, 100 ton war machines, and I think we deliver on the scale we intend, 15 foot tall, acrobatic remotely piloted mechanized vehicles. I think, and this seems to bear out, that anyone can pick up Lore and play it and be successful. Your FPS nuts will be right at home with WASD and the mouse, and your sim nuts will find that the control scheme CAN be tweaked with a fair amount of depth.

I think that's one unique point. It sits in the middle of two, sometimes drastically different, genres and manages to be playable and FUN.

Oh yeah, it's fun. I have played alot of shooters. Alot. Lore puts you right into the action, the controls feel right and tight (to me), the physics is there, the machines have mass and stuff starts HAPPENING. Some of this is it's accessibility, see above, but those little game play tweaks, the rate of fire, the pure VOLUME of things happening make it a frantic furball as soon as you spawn. People like fighting. Lore gives you lots of fighting. The levels, again in my opinion, are well designed, you always know where the action is, the levels funnel you along roads with enough visual clues to give you the indication, without putting up a big sign that says "go this way!" That takes some energy to do that right.

I'd say we made a solid class based shooter with fast, fun, accessible gameplay and control options to appeal to both FPS and sim fans. That would be my one sentence statement. I REALLY like playing my own game.

But is that unique? Sometimes even I forget there is more to Lore than blowing stuff up.

Max Gaming started out life doing web and MUD stuff. Alot of imagination driven stuff. When we got into online ladders and leagues, we found that the in game mechanics of the games we liked to play lacked a certain strategic depth. There were GREAT stories to be told, stories of heros, villains and conquests. There was a whole strategic layer to the universe that a simple FP Shooter or FP Simulator just didn't deliver by themselves. So we created maps, resource systems, rules for engagement, planetary conquest, basically a whole real time strategy component that existed outside the "blow things up" part of the game. When we built Lore, we built ComCent.

We have a story we're telling. We're releasing a paper based RPG, and have plans for additional games in the Universe.

ComCent is our way of letting the players help write that story. Tracking the results of the war online and in game, tightly coupled with the gameplay, I think is one of our really unique points. We're telling an original story (that's another) and the outcome is influenced by the players (that's a third). There's a war going on. An invasion. Our players get to influence the outcome of these events. Our fictional timeline has a big blank spot in it around 2160, the setting for Lore. Even we don't know what will happen. Other games with mechanics similar to this don't have the story component. You can't really influence the future history of other games like this, the story is already written, no matter how hard you fight, you can't change the outcome. In Lore, the players are helping write what fanboys call the "canon."

And that's just cool.

So, to recap:

- Fast paced, class-based, accessible, customizeable gameplay for deep tactical play.

- In- and out-of-game tracking of the original game story as it develops, totally influenced and directed by the players themselves, providing a much needed strategic element.

I haven't run this by the marketing guys, but that's my gut reaction. That's what makes it fun for me.

Join the Invasion. Help us tell the story. See you in the Lore Lobby on Friday.

Saturday Feb 5 16:13

Edward Gardner — 2005-02-05T16:13:38+00:00

Fracking cool.

As MGT hurtles towards another milestone for Lore, and other things begin to gel with the company, I took some time to browse the forums I moderate and the projects I have been and am a part of.

I have been managing the Freespace 2 Source Code Project (SCP for short) since Volition released the source 2 years ago. Over that time, I have had the priviledge to work with some very talented young programmers, and seen some very cool work done with the tools the SCP has provided back to the FS community.

Every once in a while, something makes me go "Oooo!"

Here's one of those:

dynamic4.gamespy.com/~freespace/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30301

Close in:

Pull out:

Still further:

Not bad for what used to be a DX5 Windows only engine...