Blog for Christian S at GarageGames.com

IoM in a nutshell! - GG::IoM(Blog 9);

Christian S — 2007-12-30T20:41:06+00:00

The dream
We still work on bringing a Viking Themed Persistent World to life. The game mechanics will react to actual game play and compliment and encourage Role Playing.

Looking back!
Having a core group skilled in many areas of IT but the core coding in languages like C++, Java, etc. is plain foolish. As the engine code is what ties everything together a core team can be good, even stunning, but get as good as nowhere even over a long period of time. So starting this up with our skill pool back then was not that wise, and then again...

Our idea back then, to first define exactly what it was we wanted to create and then document it was a clever move, that allowed for the team to grow into unknown areas of game defining, documentation and development as we progressed. It made the progress slow, but steady none the less.
-And even that is a win for Indies taking on a project as big as this.
Making the documentation (See blog 6) is something that have given us a lot of afterthoughts, and no matter what we have learned a lot that we can fill in the backpack of experience to bring along, should we one day end elsewhere than in living in the world of Game Development.

Our step from TGE to TGEA in the hope for whole worlds in one map/zone was not a clever move. All the resources that existed for TGE which could aid a core team of non engine coders could not be used in TGEA. And all the OpenGL aid was totally nonexistent, so this move was not wise if you look at bringing a product out fast. But it gave us the opportunity to redo our work one more time learning even more in the process.

And with AFXA coming around we finally skipped the MmoKit/Titas and started on a fresh engine and tweaked in only those resources that fitted our ideas. Maybe this wasn't a clever move either but at least we have more control with, and insight into what it is we are doing. And if we manage to overcome some of the engine issues and troubles, it might in the long run end up being a wise move after all.

Our participation in the Dream Games 1 year 'contest' has been a real learning basket. Not only from our own endless stream of blogs, but also from the way our competitors chose to do it, and to the way DG have handled it. It gave us a good insight in how the indie community works, what the future customers want to see and what they couldn't care less about.

Getting actual evolving talk to occur amongst competitors is really hard, and even though some stuff is shared willingly, other things are explosive to touch upon. Especially if there's a big cash price, it will make team leaders a bit touchy -but that's the charm of competition isn't it ;)

The fans seemingly gives a rat's tail about blogs, philosophical thoughts and dialogue -until you show them screenshots and game play demos. Display stunning graphics, complex meshes, big bowls of poly soup and crunchy textures and then they will start to give feedback. Don't deviate with this and that 'non game' stuff like our miniatures thing, cartoons, t-shirts and more -but move along with code, modeling and texturing and get to the finish line instead!

Getting there is one of the reasons, combined with a bit of 'slack handling' of the teams, to why I have been non present at IRQ and forums other than our own for some time. I've focused on improving my Java, C++, UML skills, as well as implementing game mechanics -so that we can be ready with a demo for the DG staff when time is due ;)

Looking ahead
Indie core team and affiliates is a dream that's sweet but not working. It's the personal experience as well as what I've seen in team after teams blogs and forum postings. If you need anything done that's outside your core teams skill set, figure out what you want to pay for it and make it a paid job. And don't pay before you have the thing you asked for. So in our future everything outside our skills will be contract work. Because the idea of shared profit doesn't work well in projects with 2-4 years span for a global team and team members dropping without even a mail stating so seems more the rule than the exception.

Our coming product will be a PW, with everything in it as high quality as possible from us and our purse. It will mean smaller amount of elements, but we do believe that the high quality will make up for the small range. And the future will either bring IoM as a TGEAAFXA thing that we iteratively develop on. Or the game combined with the documentation will open a door at some studio/publisher allowing for another engine and a full scale WoW buster ;)

The DG 1 year contest, whether we win or not, will be a thing we will keep in mind and boast with. It's been a fun and learning thing, and we are certain it will be so for the last quarter as well. From the initial crazy style blogs to the recent small ones, it's been fun to share thoughts, problems, progress, and opinions in cozy style and hot tempered threads. All our conclusions from this contest participation have further given us insight in how we are to approach with IoM.

-All there's left to say is have a good new year folks, and we look forward to sometime in 2008 finally show you the inside of IoM

Slowed down, no wAy! - GG::IoM(Blog 8);

Christian S — 2007-12-03T20:31:13+00:00

Time sure fly!

Sometimes it feels like standing on a highway with a nifty can and no fuel at all in the tank. But what can you expect with only a handful of folks working part time on a MMORPG.
Anyways, the coding is going almost as planned -a bit too slow, due to some things teasing us more than they should. But we are having progress with those areas we planned to work in.
Persistency, Character building, NPC's, skills and the Technical Document (mostly being developed alongside the application) and heavy debate whether 'new' ideas can be tweaked in and work as part of the wholeness.

-We still have no plans to scope the game idea down, and are still going for that closed beta around the time the Dream Contest ought to require it. And maybe (if everything goes as planned) we will also do open beta a tad later next year. But more about that later, I sure don't want to once again jump into some of the pits 'developers' easily can plunge into.

So what have we been doing the last month?
Coded on the above things, and tweaked the whole of it into the latest TGEAAFXA and fought with adding in Yack Pack and the Horse Pack -but that's been really messy and we still have some minor issues to solve. In the process we did find some errors and are fixing those, when we are completely done with that we might pop the fixed bugs back to the pack owners.
We have also started to toy around with the latest generation of our custom models -and that is a real pest, cause the animations are teasing us like crazy!

And, the amount of UML I am learning sure aids us in the improvement of the Technical Document. It's actually quite cool to use, and a nifty way to clarify algorithms, etc.

-well, that's all folks!

Determined work & full sail - GG::IoM(Blog 7);

Christian S — 2007-11-02T22:53:15+00:00

So, another month passed all ready!

Time sure does fly fast when there are tons of things going on, and we sure are heating a lot of irons here in the IoM camp: As there's a tally going on today, I'm going to be brief in this news boost and only shortly describe some various elements of the project progress!

With Ben Garneys Forest Pack code out in the open, and no news (even though we asked) about the SickHead SpeedTreeRT clone, and Jean-Claude's in the trenches of secret dev. We have begun working with the code, to produce the much awaited forest areas -after all, a Viking game needs trees -loads of trees.

Also the really nice YackPack have hit the shopping basket, and we have been waiting for this one to look it over and either go for a tweaked version of the old RpgDialogue by Gonsalves, Ari, and others or the YackPack -it seems that it will end up with a tweaked version of the YackPack!

We have also tested our new and improved IoM custom characters with the old Horse Pack from Robert Brower. As the horse was made for the Ork it around 2.6 meters (26 hands) and our characters and buildings are scaled to resemble male average height of 1.76 meters -and the Viking horse was rather small -we are reworking meshes.
And as the original code was made for TGE, there is quite a large of tweaking needed for making it work proper with TGEAAFXA -this is currently being done!

We are also working with the characters, and a couple of engines of ours. So that NPC and player character crafting animations will resemble the way real Vikings used these engines and tools. It's giving our lead artist/animator Peter grey hairs, but it's going forward for sure.

And lastly, here just before the DGI tally I would like to mention that our team is small, but those in it now are working very well together. So being small and determined, is so much more cozy and rewarding than being a large bunch that it can be hard to whip info or results out of -That being said, we sure could use a couple of extra hands in areas such as sound, icons, etc.

- - - Well back to RL, and the meeting in DGI and I will be back here with a in depth re-post tomorrow.

Communities & IoM - GG::IoM(Blog6);

Christian S — 2007-10-01T22:49:53+00:00

Hello there folks!

So much is going on right now, project wise and in the real world for as good as all in our team -yet we are still hard at work and focused on the task!

Outward thoughts!
Yes, we are still in deep waters working on our game project. As we have learned there is as hard work managing an indie team working on a MMORPG as in the coding, modeling, texturing, etc. But, as we have had a constant process of rethinking what it is 'we' do, we have reached a conclusion.

We think of the core team, helpers and the rest of the world as a turning wheel with the core team at center and loosely connected fans at the rim of the wheels. If you think over this figure for a second 2 things comes to mind -Interest (Weight) and placement (time).

The core team with the original idea have a huge interest and thus weigh a ton, and as they also pour the most time into the project they sit heavily in the center where the turning of things add only the slightest of outer pulling.

At the rim of our project are those, that occasionally visit our site and gives a rare comment in the forum, or send a suggestion on Msn or the like. These people float between the wheels of all there is out there and as such are very hard to attract to a project.

In between these two is a layer of persons that if caught will dive into the project and seek more information. If proper information is delivered they will become more interested, and could even throw their precious time and knowledge into the project. For this to happen though, two things need to be present in the information at hand.

First it must be very clear what the project is all about. The world setting and the game mechanics must be clear and well defined. And the person must also get a feeling that if they dived in, their time and work would matter, and that what they could bring would shine through in the final project outcome.

With this in mind we have started to redo the website, and set up a strategy for the communication channels -as to deliver what we think could attract more people to the project instead of wasting time on border fluff.

Inward thoughts!
Even though we know there is slight chance for Indie teams to complete a MMORPG, we have no plans to scale down on the project bounds. Instead the core team has opted to throw in more focus on what we do regarding IoM. Thus is Peter now focusing entirely on racial/animal/beast modeling/animation and I'm focusing completely on Torque-script/C++ and have as I said earlier even begun a 2.5 year coding education. We have lately focused more on direct contact with the affiliates and volunteers and it have been a good process giving a lot of feedback and innovative spinoff, but also some turmoil as to the organization of things and content of information streams and development -but all in all, a very good development.

Documentation:
To document our project we have chosen to develop the following set of separate documents!

Business Plan
Describe the business model, development budget/environment, milestone list, and alternatives

Design Document
Describe the world setting, areas, aspects, and mechanisms we plan to implement in the game

Technical Document
Describe the structure of and communication between problem domains, object classes and define how interaction and behavior occur.

Technical Appendixes
Describe in detail how each game mechanism and its subtypes interact and behave.

Game Manual
Describe installation, setup and usage of the application in detail.

Trailer Manuscript
Describe the game world, races, architecture, animals, engines, etc. spiced with a cool storyline.

Project Management
To manage our project we have chosen to use SVN and a software tool named ToDoList!

Team Communication
To handle communication between the core and affiliates/volunteers we now as good as daily chat on Msn, or send mails or use SMS. And bi-weekly we send developer news out to the close circle.

Dream Games Contest!
Well it will be interesting to see where we end this time as we have no clue whatsoever as to where we should have improved compared to the other contestants. So instead we tried to improve in all areas as well as moving along. Website, concept art, blog content, participant thoughts, technology development and documentation being some of the areas we focused on. And innovative technology combined with well planned GUI visibility and usability as deliverer of a stunning world and brilliant content is still our main concern.

And with access to a wealth of technology in the Dream Game community and some really good and kind fellow developers, that have no problems sharing knowledge, even though we are in fact rivals, clearly show that most know that 'tech ripping' without an innovative touch is pointless, as the advantage of the misplaced tech elements will result in a less innovative product -and tail-biting, well let the Midgaard Wyrm do that while we innovate ;)

Sadly our musicians lost inspiration and dropped as they could not find the right sound for our preferred instrument range and their visions:

Loosing Dennis is a hard blow as some of the tunes he brewed up had such a good feel, but sadly not the right twist of instrumental sounding for this carved wood and rusty blades theme. So a door is open for anyone feeling interested in making sounds.

Now, despite some really interesting contests out there and good talks with some industry majors we still are around here doing our weekly spam, and try to give our best shot at GG each month. Because this contest really is giving us a god reason for doing a lot of stuff that improve our skill set, and (I can for sure say, aids me a lot in staying focused in class). But besides paying our dues here and there, we have this time 'only' managed to get links to us at 2 more sites out there -Cory & Adams!

These guys bring so much quality to our concept art that it's hurting the eyes, well maybe not but its sure stunning work as you can see below, and at our website.

(We do though feel that it's kind of a thin 'cuppa' this time, so we consider posting quite a lot in our DG blog in the coming weeks.)

Mechanics of a PW - GG::IoM(Blog 5);

Christian S — 2007-09-01T16:53:19+00:00

As expected we are still working on our game project, and it being a PW (MMORPG) there is tons of things to work with so it never gets boring... but often frustrating due to the huge amount that have to be completed to get the feeling its moving ahead. Peter and I actually did calculate the amount of work we so far have thrown into this project, and if we counted 8 hour workdays it's similar to 3 work years as we sat drinking coffee after visiting a huge Nordic Viking smith fair.

Research to make the games environment, culture, buildings, clothing, items, etc as realistic as possible and writing it all down have been a huge part of the work, and actually still is. Doing environments and enemies like in Battle of Asgard is cool if you don't care whether or not the game actually have a wholeness. But it's not at all what we feel is needed to make players flock in joy, and stick around with pleasure month after month in a PW. Technology versus buildings and humans versus enemies and so on needs to be justified. Just as well as the placing of cultures, their interaction, and their grudges and bonds have to fit to make sense.

If things don't make sense we believe that people will soon notice the game settings and mechanics as elements that stick out and not as seamless layers and tools that makes the players integration into the world, and the players placement of the character(s) in the world hierarchy. And these 2 key elements is what makes players stick around, and is what drives them to use the mechanics of any game as I discuss with Phil C. here.

Regarding the research and the fun factor we are also aware that is wouldn't be fun to have a world of mud and turf huts, with a few timber forts and some skin dressed enemies. So our game DO have elements that are fictional and weird, but as Karl so nicely put it "Every monster, realm and weirdness needs to have its existence justified to be proper part of the setting".

A taste of our environment done by the new member of our team Adam Hunter Peck which's colors fit what we had in mind so much that when he approached us to join up -a single look and a short phone talk was all Peter and I needed to agree that this member was a huge gain. And at the moment Adam is painting all the racial pictures for the website so it soon will feel complete as visitors browse it.

We have also considered our strategy regarding our various elements of information stream (websites, forum, external blogs, etc.) so the site is undergoing some changes. And blogs are now only found in 2 places, a weekly Dream Games contest one here and a more philosophical and broader monthly one here at GG. We did take down our chat as it didn't have the community that justified its existence, and we will begin to use our forum a bit more to try build sort of communication with those interested in the project.

The project is by the way, coming along nice despite the fact that we are few throwing work hours at it. I do hope that there at some point are others that would like to hook up to the IoM team. If not to leave their mark on the game, then to be in a team that tries to evolve in the process and share their knowledge extensively internally in daily communication as well as in the bi-weekly Developer Newsletter.
At the moment I am coding away on inventories, character selection, skills grouping and usage. The focus is at the moment on the skill grouping and usage.

Peter is modeling and animating our human range consisting of 3 different models for each gender.
Dennis & Andreas are recomposing the music. As they received our alpha client they thought the music they had done didn't fit the various screens (main menu, character build, in game environments) so we are all exited to hear what they come up with.
Adam is currently making racial arts for the website due to the conceptual lines.

PS: I do know that I previously promised to describe the magic system in depth but the lack of coder aid have forced me to code and I have thus been unable to dive further into that area of documentation and I apologize for this.

Securing work our PW - GG::IoM(Blog4);

Christian S — 2007-08-01T07:46:03+00:00

This month there's 4 things I happily will share with you guys.

1st I have been accepted into a 2.5 years code based education. What the, aren't I 43 and what the does it mean. Well as it has been extremely hard to find coders willing to step in and work on a project as large as a mmo, I had to jump seats to do the game code. Doing this coding on the fly, reading tutorials showed that I needed to improve, and taking actual classes would be the best for me to get along in a steady pace. And it allows me a minimal monthly income to support bread on the table (A lot of other income projects are laying extremely low as I work on IoM) so that I can focus.

And this will time fine with the duration of the game development. And who knows, I might even find some additional teamsters in the classroom ;)

2nd We have talked a lot about our models and their skins (No. of Textures) and the planned meshes to be attached (gloves, greaves, etc.) in our team. And as we have understood TG(E/EA) both renders each texture on a model once and the meshes to be attached would be a animation pest. So we brainstormed for quite some time.
Result is that we will have 3 different types of player model meshes to resemble light dress, medium armor and heavy armored players. This makes the mesh animations more controllable we think and as the light player is dressed in 6 textures, the heavy is only dressed in 4 textures as this picture tells:

That does in fact mean that 10 light dressed players fighting a boss mob equals 15 heavily dressed players for the graphic card. As it is not the Pc power nor bandwidth that is the main problem for most players I think this is a good turnout for us.

3rd Code wise more and more things are falling into place for me. And something that is really simple struck me the other day. Player to environment interaction is in fact object-object-object and nothing else. Whether it's a sword planted in the skull of a goblin, an axe slashed at a tree or a shovel stamped into a bog.
-it's all Object::Player - Object::Weapon - Object::Monster or Object::Player - Object::Tool - Object::Resource or any other combination. And as if that was not brightening up the bulb enough the game mechanics that makes the above effort worth it are all the same.
No matter if its Primary::Default::Combat::Blades or Secondary::Learned::Survival::PickLocks skills they all work the same (I think the below example should explain it too)

%action.result = %skill.result ? %skill.gainUp : %Object.detoriate;

And then move on to either the increase skill math function or the item detoriate function.

I have also a working broadcasting timer values for our Day/Night GUI are working but I have an idea for improving it further. Races beside human that the player can interact with are planned and structure is in with dummy models as place holder for the time. And I am currently also looking at making inventories so that I can have attached values to items stacked. (Type::Name::Purity). This is needed as the purity of resources is vital to our game.

4th As I would have loved to throw in a load of fluff. This quarter's blogs aren't going to be like the old ones. This is the time of hard and gritty work. So the loose hand spreading all those concept arts and smart words are steady at the keyboard. But as we did cross the first quarter line in the DG game contest leading the field we at least have proved that we understood that contest fully, and tried real hard to adhere to its boundaries alongside the hard work on the game itself. Not at all times the most wanted job, because you have to work real hard and be on the needles all the time, to actually have anything to blog about weekly. I do though think it would have been a good evaluating tool for us all in that contest, had we the option to see the actual point list so that we could evaluate our effort in said contests various areas.

But, shady placing or not we will keep up the hard work and try yet again to be crossing that line covered in yellow. How, quite simple by spending this quarter getting a load of game mechanics in place and at quarter's end show you some in game graphical and game mechanic descriptions and Flowcharting away.

Progress of a PW - GG::IoM(Blog3);

Christian S — 2007-07-01T16:14:33+00:00

Howdy folks!

We still do a little bit of drawing, mostly are now focused around actual work drawings for the models though -heres 2 little sneak peaks of some of the planned races that the players can interact with.

But besides drawing those we are now more focused on actual modeling and making textures on the art side. And on the code side we are still working on vendors/trainers/bankers/questgivers (We call the lot Merchantes ) as per the initial name in the mmokits enhanced Rpg-Dialogue system.

We are thought working on a 'slight' change so that each Merchant takes the player characters faction and various skills into consideration when content are presented and interaction occur. Not at all a easy one for my little bulp, but progress is being made -and progress is what this is all about, aint it ;)

Oh, and speaking of progress with the various elements. we have worked a bit more on the MainMenuGui Looks, and on MainMenuGui Music, and on the Content Managment System, Demo Video Script, etc...

But surely not as much as we liked (we never do it seems) since we once again are back to few at the keyboards -but this time trying to focus. Because focus is what is needed to bring up all the way past that fininshing line thats named -Going live!

And to stay focused, on the Merchant thing atm, and melee next. We have also decided that all the fancy stuff and hype attempts had to be dumped. Ye, I know -It's much more fun to fool around and do all the non game things, as they are easily completed in no time and the mmo... PW, arent going to hit anyone with awe for at least the next months of 4.

Anyways!
Ill pop back to work on the time chewer and leave ya all to roaming wherever the gentle winds may take you -Laters!

MMORPG or simply PW - GG::IoM(Blog2);

Christian S — 2007-05-31T23:10:33+00:00

Ok folks, it's blogtime again and not only because it fits some contest deadline but because a lot of things are going on right now for our team, and I have a lot inside I have to pour. If nothing else, then at least to see it in writing and reflect on the comments that 'could' pass this way!

Afterthoughts!
As it is not up to the developer(s) nor publisher, distributor or posters at the rail station to define if a game succeeds in becoming a MMORPG. One can only as a humble indie developer hope to complete a Persistent World (PW) and let the audience decide what it ends at. I was not aware of this simple fact years ago, so when I first presented the thought of me, and non coder, non modeler indie making a mmorpg on the GG Irc channel, I was stunned by the comments the dinosaurs there made. Looking back on the problems, the progress and what I've learned I am much more realistic in what we face today, and I can understand every word, skeptics and slapping I received back then -and along the way!

There is no make my game button software out there!
Yet it is easy for us indies to ass-pat, and back-rub ourselves into some sort of lullaby and blindness due to our lack of insight. While ignoring the fact that turning our dreams into something deliverable to others is extreme hard work and takes immeasurable efforts, and PW's being on the closed cell candidate level for indies, not realizing that producing costs is the major risk of getting stuck and not going anywhere.

Realizing this and trying to get things done on share points and future royalties really takes a master of persuasion, as well as a project that in itself is on the brink of human understandable terms in its innovative level, to get teams built that can put up the hands where the mouth write checks and create kickass content and stunning stuff. And lastly, offering payment in advance in the form of software licenses, hardware tools, shares and small fees for snippets, functions, routines, etc. can't compete with hiring people for real cash and tying them to the desk 7 hours a day. The latter a cost we simply cannot afford.

So doing a PW like we are is the road to some evenings spent in the couch staring blindly into the dim lights outside with totally blank mind. A strong urge to waste all the cash in the bank in the lottery to get the huge wins to pay a team. And the feeling that it's all in vain and dissolving the crew and pulling down the banner is the best solution. But no way, simply said, no way am I going to quit or give in -I believe in my game concept and mechanics!

Even to such extent that I did quit my well paid day job to work on it full time, and now also applied for a 2.5 year code based education so that I can DO what's needed to get this baby moving along at a speedier pace stepping in doing the much urgent code. For no matter if one uses TGE/TGEA, Gryphon/Titas, MoMTech or whatever the biggest task of them all is actually to tweak the engine to fit the game idea.So its going to take a long time, and a extremely huge effort to get there!

-With the above in mind -It's no wonder mmo's are for the big'uns!

Our game!
It seems that I haven't been quite clear, or done a proper job describing a main factor about our game. I apologize about this and will here try to elaborate on the issue.

Our game is classless, there simply are no professions and all skills are learnable, changeable, and doable to every character in game. We have parted the skills into 2 major realms, and those are skills known to any character and those skills characters have to find a trainers to learn them off. Trainers of skills can be both NPC's and players, and what skills are presented to you in a trainers portfolio depend whether the NPC's like you current faction standing or not, or if players like your performance and tradeoff suggestion enough to open up for the goodies. The skills in our game can thus all be learned and used by anyone and all it takes is play style presented, and seeking up trainers to learn from.

Developing the skills learned happens via actual game play. Both through the abilities of the character and through time spent doing them. Thus are all the skills placed in 3 groups due to the characters current stats. All these 3 groups do is determine what algorithms are used for calculating action failure, success and gain. Making a primary placed skill easier to use and less actions to improve in than a tertiary placed skill which are harder to succeed with, takes more actions to raise and needs usage more often than a primarily skill to keep it's level up. The changing of stats during gameplay affects how the skills are placed so keeping an eye on things and focusing on certain areas can be very beneficial and speed up the process. So should anyone suddenly want to, or have a need for totally different game style -then simply change it!

Game Mechanics!
Another thing about our game that's still in the description mist but is planned out is the Magic and Fylgia systems. I will try describe them a bit here;

Magic function by unleashing various planned effects in Mana threads. These threads will force Mana to flow from the surrounding Mana Sea through the caster. This flow will gradually build up the casters abilities as Mana portal and allow for increased unleashing of Mana amounts. These increased abilities as portal and container will allow the character to gradually increase the abilities as manipulator of the Mana Sea by using Futhark the old magic language.

The threads that define what an unleashed spell actually does are user built by carefully pathing the thread through a world realms elements thus forming the exact threads effects. Any thread can be built all the way to mastery at 9th level and can be torn apart again to twist it towards other elements at any level thus giving the thread a totally new direction (effect). (I will describe this fully in the next GG blog)

Fylgia is the spirit follower system. Do not confuse this with the pet system as it's nothing alike a pet. These spirits notice what players do and align themselves slowly to a player due to playing style. The system is built upon the ideas of one self and the surroundings, and the physical and psychological aspects of the universe. So there is an outer and inner sphere parted into Air and Sea areas simulating the psychological aspect of the universe we live in. And there is Earth divided into above and below simulating the public and private parts of the physical Human inhabiting the universe.

The different animal spirits are placed by the shamans in a wheel representing outer and inner spheres -divided into sky, water, above, below. These animals, 24 accounted for by the shamans all in all are furthermore aligned to each other and the universe due to their nature as shown in the wheel below: (Some might be changed out, and sorry for the real lousy graphics)

So as mentioned does the animal spirits tend to align themselves with the player over time allowing for some neat features, and even shape changing can be done if possessed and the spirit is willing enough. It will take quite some effort to please the animal spirits and even the slightest mistreatment of similar aligned species can make the spirit unhappy to such an extent that they leave -plain and simple!

We cant wait!
With stuff like the Forest Kit, Flower Power, Yack Pack and of course AFX being thrown at us at GG I actually DO believe that there is hope for a kickass game. And we cant wait to get our hands on what these guys have told us would soon be hitting a download near our neighbour. Making a viking themed PW there have to be mountains, valleys and rolling hills covered in trees and foilage. There have to be cool interactions between the player character and the NPC's and there have to be stunning effects.

Team work!
We are currently working on the vendor, trainer, banker, and guild master interactions. Tweaking with the horse, boat and vehicle functionality trying to get it all working. We are also working on enignes of construction. Operating tools and engines in our game will be essential to turn ressources (purity) into other ressources (purity), ingredients (purity) and objects. -here's an early version of our lathe;

We are also doing more concept art so that the last races will get pictures, work drawings of those missing races so that the modelers have a definite build line, textures for said models, models of whats planned for the intro demo and to fill in at the alpha server, animations for races, animals and engines, music and sounds, documentation, etc.

Team!
I know, if you look at our site it seems like we area ton of folks busting our asses. wEll we are, but as most in the team have real lives, other interests and are into other projects as well we could for sure need aid. What we need most, is code aid in the form of a lead coder grabbing the pole and running alongside Peter and I. I think Ill start posting some 'positions available' on our site but as written above, it's going to be a pest getting those seats filled for sure.

Technical depth!
I know that that these IoM .blogs are real tech and code light, and I will try and change that in the future. But as a non coder trying to have all aspects rolling along it can be hard to dig into unknown areas. It will start to creep in here thoug, of that I am pretty certain.

Hype!
Besides from the write a viking story contest on our site. Where we have just found May months winner: Congrats to the Fish for his short but well written entry. And added him to the pool of coming closed beta testers. We are now launching yet another hype'o'meter event!

A 2 month long Fan Site Art competition, where the goal is to create a web template for guild/fan sites havinf stunning Viking themed art. Wether it is Jelling style or other is not important. As long as it's less celtic/cristian influenced than a pure or mixed artline of viking styles.

All art must be in either .jpg or .gif.

And the winner price will be 250$ - umpire staff will be announced in our forum thread regarding this topic as they are found.

/pheww
That's all for today folks, have a nice month!

Been a while - GG::IoM(Blog1);

Christian S — 2007-04-30T22:38:33+00:00

Howdy again folks, It's sure been a while!

So what on earth have been happening at this end since my last .blog, well I have been busy, really busy trying to accomplish what is truly insane, I'm still working at our MMORPG.

Right after my last .blog I headed into the directions of all the areas I mentioned, learning things very slowly and not at all at an optimized pace. But at least I never got bored, when something became too complex or I was stuck on something -I merely dived into one of the other areas. Thus did I actually improve my skill set and the project moved ahead slowly.

At some point I realized though that all was in vain if the code was not there, so I did try and focus a bit more on C++/Torque script. But changing TGE 1.3 to my needs was simply to troublesome. And then I suddenly saw that a set of tutorials was to be completed that dived into an explanation of the various resources needed for a mmo base. Soon this tutorial project changed into a promise of a code base being released.........

So I did turn away from code again, as I was having a real hard time understanding it (Taking the proper time to do it) and awaiting the code base that would come. Time passed and I was focusing more on the npc's, quests, graphics and ... Doing too little!

Ok, where am I getting at! Well, first of making a game, any game that is, is really hard work and needs proper attention. So 1st April last year I quit my nicely paying job to pay full attention to my game project. It all was cool, except for the fact that I still tried to cover all areas of the project and I kept awaiting the 'final edition of the code base that would make my dream'. But this year something really good happened..........

In the process of re-writing the design document once again, to make it more readable and only have the essence of the project I saw that Dream Games Inc announced that they would make a 1 year game contest. I saw this as an opportunity to brace myself and actually get some focus lined out. So I completed the Design Document in a couple of days and submitted our project to their contest. I would like to mention that they use a slightly modified version of a NDA that I have developed and which are free for DL/Use at my site.

Having no working code base at all for our project I decided that the Download of the TGEA based Titas would continue until our team had set up a server with MySql/ODBC, Php, SVN, etc... This was completed shortly after our submission to the contest and Titas Ver. 117 are the core base of our now running Alpha Game Server (AGS).

- o -

So, what is it we have running at that server? Well it's our planned mmorpg Isles of Midgard (IoM). IoM have no professions/classes in which the player is locked and any character can do anything all the others can, all it takes is changed play style.
Our skills are divided into 2 types, Default that comes free to any character, and Learned that are gained from doing quests and/or seeking up Npc's. Furthermore the skills are classified as either Primary, secondary or tertiary skills. And based on the characters STATS the skills are placed in the various classifications. The only thing that classification of skills do, are using different mathematics to calculate skill up possibility and decreasing of unused ones.

Our game is also heavily based on Faction. Faction(s) are a direct result of game play and it impact/inflict on how gods, other races, monsters, animals, spirits and human Npc's react towards the character. So all it takes to travel from Odins favorite to Lokis is actual game play.

I could rant on but I should give you folks some 'Draft tasters instead'......

Every Wendesday 3+ of our team meets and after the meeting I spend a day thinking everything over. Next day I create and mail DevNews to our team. This is really good for the teamspirit.

This is the planned Background for the MainMenuGui in which one agrees to the Eula, enters username/password and selects the character planned for use

Should anyone need 2D maps for orientation, we will have these as well. They are being made in Campaign Cartographer 3

We have a couple of musicians that are doing stuff like This for our game.

A Small GUI Element that show the passing of game time.

As we have some content managers lined up around the Globe I am currently working on a Content Management System (CMS) that layers the users and keep the content organized in numerous ways

There are so many more things I'd like to throw in but I fear it would be too boring to read. You could on the other hand pop by our game site over at www.islesofmidgard.com

Or pass by my Weekly blog over at Dream Games Inc.

That was 'all' I had to spill for now, hope it was not to light for your taste, if it was it's just too bad -you have to wait to get more ;)

Thursday Sep 8 16:14

Christian S — 2005-09-08T16:14:28+00:00

My Path from developer noob to guru ^^ Theres a long way to travel yet, but I am trotting along steadily and trying to cope the various issues involved with it all. Casue being a logistics/sales/project definition guy - I had too little knowledge of actual game development.

Being a old RPG player, miniature painter, terrain creator, figure converter/sculptor and LARP fencing super dude I fell over a online game. Rune was the name, Norsca vikings was the theme and I fell in love with gaming, and especially the community players attitude was awesome.

Finally one day, as a friend asked me to play in a MUD, which I scorned and said, "Id rather make a MMORPG, than play a MUD".
Spoken, theese words slapped my face real hard. What had I spawned, I knew not -but I have never involved myself in such a huge task!

I knew how to paint in Photoshop, I knew how to skin models that allready had been unwrapped, and I knew .asp and HTML and some SQL. So holy crap there was soo much that was coming down from that point off.

My first action was to brew the community down into a world of fiction. This was fast done merging it with a old RPG background I have been working on since 1991. Then Find a engine, and some fellow Runer pointed me towards Torque (thx AmranX). Then I had to buy it, and try figuring that mess of threads out. And at the same time I had to learn to model in Milkshape (later exchanged for 3DMax). Then i had to cope all the stuff about modelling properly, unwrapping in clever manner, optimize colour templates, rig and animate models. Export and import them. Make buildings and go from hammer to Cartography Shop. Figure out Treemagic and Plantlife, and using Campain cArtographer 2 to make some layouts of world.

All spiced up with no knowledge whatsoever of Java or C++, so head on into the world of Visual Studio .net, Torsion/TorqueDev to cope all that are so cleverly scattered in countless ressources and hints for improving and working with the engine and its scripts.

In the meantime, writing up characters, towns, plots, treasures, tools, items and so on by reading numerous books, seeing viking movies, googeling hints and ideas. Collecting and building ressource libraries, and spending quite some 's on stuff and services over time -phewwww!

Had I known back then where I was heading, I would still do so. Working with game desing is trully awesome. And I have been learning since day 1. Hopefully I can one pay back -and serve our PW.

Now we are working on building the actual game. Its taken only 1+ year to define what we wanted, and I am so pleased.

Laters!