Ilkor: Brief Update
We've alot happening right now on all fronts. I'll get straight on with it.
Game Engine: Work started on this about a month ago. Obviously we still have a long way to go, but we already have a bare bones service that processes the turn, advances the turn and phase number, seasons and years. Over the next few weeks we will be integrating into this cycle the introduction of players. The engine persists its data straight to MongoDB.
Registration Process: Development here has slowed down a little due to our move from using SQL to Mongo for our database requirements. So there is little to report, but we'll be re-starting this in a few days time.
New Content: With the website now 95% optimized we are really focusing on pushing new content to the live website on a regular basis. Our aim is to have something new on the website every two weeks. New content will be mostly added to the 'Features' section of the homepage for a little while. This is being achieved by serving up the content in our specially skinned 'scroll popups'!! Go to ilkor.com and see for yourself, we are revealing more and more about the game features and details.
Map: Jon, our fab cartographer is still working hard on completing our world and regional maps. We hope to get the final finished maps very soon now, hopefully before the end of October. You can then expect to see a number of sneak previews of the finished maps!
Avatars: Simon, our amazing Artist will be delivering the first batch of avatar 'facial parts' (head, shoulders, eyes, nose, hair, mouth). He has dealt with a male human for starters. We need this so we can then test our our avatar generating code. If it all works out as planned Simon will then have a few amount of work to do over the next few months coming up with the facial parts for all the other 7 possibilities. Personally I'm really excited about this and will certainly be blogging about the Avatars in far more detail soon.
Database Migration: As mentioned last time, we are busy migrated across from MS-SQL to MongDB. The process is good and we hope to have everything in place by the end of October...hopefully! 
And thats about it for now..
Game Design Revisited
It's been a week since we announced the decision to bring Soccer Supremos back to life. Admittedly it wont be for a couple of years, but non the less we have had an amazing response from ex-managers!
We've welcoming and encouraging all ex-managers to get involved in the re-design of Soccer Supremos. The plan is to button down the game design and engine before the end of 2012. By doing this we'll be able to hit the ground running as soon as develop starts.
Therefore, if you want to be involved, please do so, comment on this blog, contact me (sean@gadgames.com) and most importantly start spreading the word. We need to get as many 'potential managers' onboard now and to partake in ensuring the new Soccer Supremos is exactly what everyone wants.
We have already a number of cool ideas and plans, though none are cast in stone. We have been actively involved this week with a handful of very keen ex-managers discussing early design ideas. It's all very exciting for everyone, so if you want to get involved in the action then please do so.
Much learning from designing and developing Ilkor is being applied to the basic approach to bringing Soccer Supremos online, but more on that another time.
Soccer Supremos: The Return of…
Sounds like a movie title doesn't it!
It seems everything nowadays is making a comeback from the past, bands, movies, tv series, etc. We did the same with Gad Games a couple of years ago and although we are not running a game yet we are busy developing one!!
Since we relaunched Gad Games we've had hundreds of ex-managers of Soccer Supremos contact us about the 'good old days', telling us how much they loved the game and many of you asking us to relaunch it. So that is exactly what we are going to do!
Today we started the ball rolling by purchasing the soccersupremos.com domain. It's not much of a start really, but at least we've got the domain now, infact we were quite surprised to find it was still available. We've pointed the domain to a splash page hosted on our Gad Games website. Nothing special, though we hope to improve on this over time.
So, yes Soccer Supremos is coming back, but due to our current commitment on developing Ilkor this is unlikely to start until the end of 2012.
Hope you guys think this is good news.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: Banners
Sorry guys but I haven't much time to give a huge update this week. Dev is going well and I promise to give some feedback on this real soon.
Recently Simon Lee Tranter has helped us produce a few animated GIF and Flash banners that will be used to advertise and promote Ilkor. The drive here is to spread the word and interest while the game continues through it's development stages.
While we are not aggressively promoting Ilkor yet, we are trying to attract interest and there are a number of forums that have shown interest in allowing us to put up banners. Closer to Beta launch we'll spend much more time and effort on coming up with a real cool marketing campaign.
Orco Banner
Vega Banner
Ilkor: Database Migration has started
You might be aware we had decided to use two different databases to store game related information. Microsoft SQL Server for the majority of the data and MongoDB for all the map data.
Recently we scrapped SQL completely and will be 100% Mongo. Currently we are migrating across. Hopefully we'll be finished with this before the end of October. It certainly is the right choice for Ilkor, there is no doubt about that, but there is quite a learning curve for us, coming from a SQL background.
If anyone is interested in the finer technical detail then by all means drop us a message and we'll be only too happy to discuss the topic in more depth.
One rather large advantage is the fact that MongoDB is free. So that suits us just fine considering the game will be free to play.