Ilkor: Latest Development News
Hey there!
Many apologises. It’s been a little while since our last blog entry. I can’t believe just how quickly the time goes when you are busy 
And we sure have been busy!!! It’s now been a month since we went live with ilkor.com. The site seems to be holding up nicely.
In that time we’ve had a surprising amount of people signup to be part of the playtest, especially considering it isn’t due to commence until June 2012. Having said that we do expect to get the playtesters involved much sooner than that.
We’ve also refined the website during the month of July, it has already gone through a number of updates mostly centred around performance and optimization improvements. I think we’ve managed to reduce the image sizes by about 3/4. The site now runs alot quick and we’ve had some very positive feedback.
On the development front we’re working on the character creation process and will be involving our playtesters over the next few months to ensure what we’re doing is right. I can’t say much more about this here other than the setup will be a two step process. Players will be able to join and get playing very quickly.
We’ve also made a fairly big technology architecture change. We’re now using MongoDB for our database needs. Originally we were going to be using SQL Server and Mongo just for the map components but now the entire game engine will be run off MongoDB.
The only exception might be our messaging and forum system. We’ve been exploring the idea of integrating phpBB into the game system. This uses php and either mySQL or MS-SQL. Our investigation has concluded it could be the best choice for Ilkor and although the integration won’t be that straightforward it is possible. With some luck we should have this in place and ready for exclusive use by our playtesters by the end of the year.
Other than that we’ve been getting a fair amount of coverage on the various PBM and Gaming Forums and will soon be putting together a small low key marketing campaign to help spread the word of Ilkor further afield.