Ilkor development is progressing at a good pace, but not as quickly as we had expected or hoped for. The character creation process is now complete, though is missing some artwork. We'll be allowing everyone to have a sneak preview next week when you'll be able to create your own character. You won't be able to save the character, but it should give you a good insight of what is to come.  This will also be your chance to submit your comments and feedback, both good and bad

Chris is now working on the Map Engine and we're seriously entertaining the idea of changing the current 2D grid layout to a hex map format. It is potentially more complex to develop, but will assist us in providing an accurate and balanced movement formula and enable us to handle the terrain transitions more elegantly between locations.

Simon is now freed up from other non-releated Ilkor work and is working hard to finish off the missing class/race portraits and avatar facial parts. We are expecting the male dwarf avatar images any day now, which we're all excited to see.

Jon Roberts, the offical cartographer for the Game of Thrones book will be back on Ilkor next month to help Chris on the mapping engine. We'll need a bunch of sprites in keeping with the hand-drawn illustrated maps.

GameMasters Scott and Mike are continuously updating the wiki with new content and helping populate the gaming engine with the vast amounts of metadata that is required.

So, slowly, but surely things are coming together.

Well its been a while since our last post.  It's really tough holding down a job and family with kids while trying to develop a game on the side  The last couple of months hasn't been easy, personally I've been a little low on energy and not having much time to getting down to any real Ilkor development.

However I'm now back in the thick of things again and I feel we are making traction again.

Chris on the other hand has been working furiously on the character creation process and it is now basically finished, bar the saving of the actual character and artwork from Simon.  The artwork doesn't prevent the game from functioning, but cosmetically it would be awesome to have all the portraits and avatar facial parts that would complete a wonderful player experience.  However, understandably the artwork is a very time consuming task and if it means we have a wait a little longer than so be it, it will certainly be worth it.

Having said that, we might well release an alpha version of the character creation page in the next week or two.  As soon as we do, you'll be hear about it here.

Next we'll be tackling the mapping engine and character homepage.

The core of the mapping engine has already been designed and developed.  It was however put on hold late last year to focus on the character creation process amongst other higher priority tasks.  We are really hoping you'll like the approach we've taken with the maps.  You've most likely seen the amazing (illustrated) maps that Jon Roberts created for us which we'll be using to drill into.  The mapping engine will use tilesets created by Jon to hopefully recreate these illustrated maps in a 2D tiled structure, zooming in to a much more detailed scale.  Each tileset will roughly represent 1km or 2km.  That is the type of scale we feel will work nicely.

The character homepage is really the area of the site that you'll arrive at each time you log-in.  Here you'll be presented with a summary of your character (character sheet) along with summaries of the state of play, turn & phase numbers, deadline date, weather, season, etc.

As for our growing team of GMs.  They have been working hard at populating the Gazetteer of Arcadia which is the game's wiki.  Although the game isn't live yet, the wiki is up and running and growing in size almost daily.

Will thats it for the moment.

Character Creation Screenshot

Here's the first screenshot of the Character Creation page.  It is still far from finished in terms of the information, content and detail that you see, however you can get a pretty good idea of what we are trying to achieve.

This screen is reached from completing the signup information on the homepage (email, race, class, gender).

The panel on the left is used to change various aspects of your character.  The changes are immediately reflected on the underlying canvas below.  There is still alot of information that still needs to be added to the canvas, but the actual panel functionality is almost fully developed now.

The 3 text boxes at the bottom of the panel is used to enter your password, password repeat and gatekey.  The gatekey gets emailed to you upon reaching this page.

The avatar to the top right of the canvas is dynamically created based on a combination of email, race and gender.  Later on in the game you'll be able to customize your avatar.

You can see from the menu on the panel that you are able to configure your character in areas such as gender, race, class, name [family | House | Clan | Folkname], Starting Settlement, Class Feat and Minor and Major Racial Feats.  Each of these animated sub panels that slide out to the right give you additional information where you can make the change.

In a few weeks, we hope to release an alpha version of this character creation process so you will be able to play around and experience it for yourself.

We released a new version of the website early this week.

We are finding the performance has improved which is kinda strange since we didn't focus on such enhancements.  There isn't too many obvious player facing improvements with this release.  However the back-end (the Gamemaster section) really has come together nicely now and is pretty much in a full working state.

The GMs are now starting to use the Gamemaster tools to populate the game and world of Arcadia with all its rich information, and the many many tokens that the game depends on.

The game engine currently contains mostly 'stubs' for all of its entities and tokens, such as weapons, shields, armour, settlements, etc.  There are close to 40 different types of tokens.  For example, a weapon is a token type.  There are about 50 different types of weapons available in the game.  Currently they are simply naed 'weapon 1' through to 'weapon 50'.  The GMs now have to go through each and every weapon, assign it a proper name (i.e. Short Sword), along with icons and images, stats and descriptions.  There is ALOT of work.

We announced a short while ago that Mike Collins joined the Gamemaster team.

This increases the team's head count to three which is wonderful news.  Between the 3 GMs we are now busy populating the Arcadia world with all the various information, tokens, monsters, settlements, etc in preparation for the opening up of the first region; Caledon for game-play.

There is much work to be done, but we appear to be well organised and this is going a long way to ensuring the work gets done.

Each GM creates their own avatar which will be their 'game and player-facing' alter-ego.  Myself (Sean) has Lord Vega [vega@ilkor.com] and Scott has Senyors [senyors@ilkor.com].

Now I would like to introduce Mike's avatar Mausosium Anul [mausosium@ilkor.com]:

Mausosium Anul (GM) - Male Human Rogue

Mausosium Anul, Male Human Rogue

Many of you may have heard of me in the lore. If not, then you most certainly heard of my alibi, “The Thousand King Thief”. The first thing I’ll tell you is that my escapades are rather exaggerated. I did not have the time to rob one thousand kings! And just like I ran out of time then, I’m running out now. Old age has found itself creeping ever closer, I can feel it in my fingers. I am losing the touch that I possessed in my younger days, a youthfulness that eludes me each morning I wake.

Luckily, I have been able to find many who are willing to un-lock the finer arts of the criminal element. Anyone can pick a pocket, but only a true artist can do it in style. I have trained close to a dozen expert thieves and assassins now, and surely they will branch out their teachings to their own apprentices.

You may see my work as immoral, but I see it as an art form. It takes skill to actively break into a kingdom’s castle, pilfer their treasury, and woo the maiden before anyone with a sharp sword and a mind catches up to you. It takes skill, and years of practice. Practice that usually involves life or death situations and at least a dozen judicial systems that want your hide.

Now that my roguish charm has begun to deteriorate in my later years, I’ve also taken to cataloguing the world. This may seem strange for a dashing rogue like me, but combing the tomes allows me access to a kingdom’s library. This is usually in the same building as the treasury vault…

This is just a very quick news update from the developments taking place at Ilkor: Dark Rising.

I'm very pleased to introduce our new Gamemaster; Mike Collins.  Mike has just joined the Gamemaster team, swelling its ranks to three!  Not a huge number I agree, but we're extremely grateful for the help that each of every Gamemaster brings to the game.  The three of us will be working closely over the next 6 months as we start to pull the game together.

There is much work to be done, but together I think we're really going to be producing a solid game, rich is background & history.  Scott has already made a good start, the quality of the wiki is test to this.  If you haven't yet visited the Gazetteer of Arcadia, then I really think you should!

Mike is busy devising his 'Avatar'.  Once this has been done we'll get Simon to draw a portrait and reveal everything on the wiki.

Anyway, welcome aboard Mike.  We are extremely pleased to have you on the team.

Cheers,

Sean.

We've had a very busy week.  There is much to report.  So here goes:

Website Update:  ilkor.com has just had an update.  Please go and check it out.  There have been numerous bug fixes, enhancements and new content.  The most visually and obvious enhancement must be the browser requirement indicator that appears in the bottom right of the page.  It will detect whether your browser is going to be able to run the game successfully.  Ilkor requires browsers that support HTML5.  Most of the new browsers that have been out in the past 6 months or so should be fine.  To check, go to ilkor.com and look at the indicator.

Browser Requirement Indicator

If the globe is green then your browser will have no trouble running the game.  An orange globe indicates that you may have some trouble and it is advisable to update your browser to the latest version.  A red globe will require that you upgrade your browser before you'll be able to play.  You will still be able to signup however.

The Gazetteer of Arcadia:  For those of you who don't know.  The Gazetteer is a wiki that we're in the process of populating with the rich world setting information and background.  GM Senyors and Lord Vega are both busy at work here.  Please spend some time here, it'll help you get a better understanding of the game's setting and prepare you for when the game starts.  If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us.

We've recently added some of the game maps and very soon we'll be including a number of new hand-drawn portraits of races and classes, supplied by Simon Lee Tranter.

Maps: Jon Roberts is very close now to completing our various versions of the world and regional maps.  They have been some time in the making for a number of reasons, but the wait is proving to be well worth it.  I've already shared some of these maps with you via Twitter, Facebook, this blog and the Gazetteer wiki.  The big one we are now waiting for is of course the detailed map of Caledon.  So watch this space, it will be appearing here soon.

The Blue Region: Caledon

Character Creation:  This is really the most exciting area of development.  This is because, beside the GameMaster sections of the website, this is the first real functional areas that we are starting to see and it really is looking amazing!!  Unfortunately we can't share this with you yet, not even screenshots, but soon we will do just that followed by an alpha version of the website where you'll be able to experience the character creation process for yourself and supply us with feedback.  This will be our first real playtest request.  Please consider joining in!

Thats it for the moment.  Hopefully I'll have more news in the coming week.

We're about to up the level of  our communication.  This is already happening (hopefully) to our existing player-base, but equally important we are now looking for new channels and websites where we feel Ilkor news will be of some interest.

As you might know we are gaining some nice momentum on the game development side and while we are still some way away from launching into beta, the game is really starting to take shape now.  Hopefully by the end of March we'll have the signup and character creation up and running and will be only too pleased to give those that are on the playtest waiting list a sneak preview and brief 'alpha test'.

So, in preparation for this we are seeking new and exciting channels where we might be able to prompt Ilkor: Dark Rising.

If you have any suggestions or can help in any shape or form regarding such advertising / promoting then we'd love to hear from you.  Such channels that are of great interest to us are:

• Beta Sign-up:  If you haven't yet signed up, then please do so.  There is nothing to be scared about (honest) and it won't cost you a penny.
• Tell a Friend:  If you could at least try and get 1 friend to visit the Ilkor website and sign-up then that would be amazing.
• Facebook and Twitter:  While signing up for the beta playtest, why not get yourself and your friend to follow us on Facebook and on Twiiter?
• Forum Mention:  If you are a member or a suitable gaming forum, then why not start-up a thread about Ilkor.
• Forum List:  We are always on the lookout for new forums that we could get involved in.  If you know of any, please drop us a line or two about it and we'll be only too pleased to check them out.
• Blog Mention:  Maybe you run your own blog or know of one that could be interested in writing an article about Ilkor?  If so let us in!!!
• Advert Banners:  We have a couple of Ilkor advert banners.  If you know of a website that might be willing to display them, then let me know.

I'm sure there are other channels, so if you can think of anything at all then I'd love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Sean.

We finished the new homepage for Ilkor: Dark Rising late last year that we'll be using when we go into Beta and allowing players to sign-up for free to join and play the game in beta mode.

We thought you'd be interested in checking out the screenshots and hopefully soon even get a chance to experience it in alpha mode.  Yes thats right we'll be launching an alpha version of Ilkor in the next week or so.  We'll be updating the website on a fairly regular basis so you can experience the latest advancement in our development.  At the moment you'll only be able to have a peek at the sign-up process and an incomplete Character Creation process, but I imagine it is better than nothing.

In the meantime, here are a couple of screenshots.  Click on the thumbnails and check out the detailed screenshots:

Sign-up Screenshot

Sign-up with Class dropdown

We would love to hear what you have to say, any feedback, good or bad would be greatly appreciated.  If you looking closely at the full detailed screenshot of the Sign-up page you'll see there is a Log In button in the top right-hand corner.  The homepage will have two modes and you'll be able to toggle between both of them.  It can either be in Sign-up mode or Login mode.

As I have already said we've completed the signup process completely now aswell as the login process.

Anyway, thats all for now folks.

Enjoy,

Sean.