We've got a new logo for our gazetteer.ilkor.com wiki website.  Our artist Simon produced it the other day and we now have to upload it to the website.

Ilkor Gazetteer Logo

If you haven't visited the wiki in a while then now might be a good time to do so.  It now contains a fair amount of content but is some way from being complete.  I guess it will never be complete as it needs to grow and expand with the game.

By the way from a dev perspective things are really starting to hot up now and we're getting back into the Map development in a big way, hopefully we'll have something nice to show in a couple of months time.

I thought you might be interested to hear about Tavern Talk which is our messaging system for Ilkor: Dark Rising.  We've been working hard on this part of the game and it is now basically finished.

You might wonder what a messaging system is.  Well it's the way players, gamemasters and characters will be able to communicate amongst one another.  We won't be revealing anyone's email address, but rather you'll be able to send private message to individual characters and even groups of characters or you are able to post messages in the rooms that you have permission to enter.

Technically, we've used PhpBB3 which is a forum application (open source) and have skinned it to blend in with the game and spent the last few months modifying and customizing it's functionality.  We've named the forum Tavern Talk and it will be hosted as a sub-website of Ilkor.  Tavern Talk isn't available yet, but it will be eventually available on http://tavern.ilkor.com.

Tavern Talk will be a private forum.  It won't be available to the public.  You will gain access to Tavern Talk when you signup and create your character to play Ilkor: Dark Rising.

We've fully integrated Tavern Talk with the game, so you'll be able to gain access to Tavern Talk directly from Ilkor after logging in.  The same password will be used.

Tavern Talk has been designed and configured so that your only have access to the rooms that you are allowed to.  For example, if you are a Fighter, you'll have access to the Fighter's Guild.  Only fighters will have access to this room and you'll be able to post messages amongst guild members.

Below I'll included a handful of screenshots.  Hopefully they are pretty self describing and you like what you see.

This lists the rooms your character has access to. The two rooms in the 'Arcandia Chronicles' are available to all characters and considered rooms for general chat.

This sections lists all the characters in the game (player and gamemaster characters). As you can see from the list, there are just 3 characters in this demo game, a GM and two adventurers. Note how their broad location is also revealed.

This character profile is available to all characters. Everyone can see one another. We feel it doesn't give too much away. From this view you can see that Durfur is a 1st level Dwarf Male Priest along with this avatar. This location tells you that he is in the region of Caledon and currently in the Beren kingdom.

Here you are able to manage your character, write posts and messages to groups, rooms, adventurers and gamemasters. You are also able to manage other aspects of your communication.

And that really it for the moment.  There is much more to Tavern Talk, but hopefully this gives you some idea of what you can expect.

Cheers for now.

Well its been a while since we blogged. It's been a hectic last few weeks both in home, work and here at Gad Games developing Ilkor: Dark Rising.

At the moment we are not getting nearly as much time on the project as we would like. All the members of the dev team have their own personal reasons but non-the-less there has been significant progress.

Alpha Feedback: Thanks for the feedback from everyone who checked out our alpha site that allowed you to experience the sign-up and character creation process (alpha.ilkor.com).
It was very reassuring to hear that we have got things pretty much right. This doesn't mean we didn't get some very good constructive feedback and suggestions for improvements. These improvements (and a few detected bugs) have been worked on over the past few weeks and will be making its way to the alpha and live websites very soon.
If you haven't yet checked out alpha.ilkor.com then please do so, we are sure you are going to love what you see and really want to hear what you think about it.

Tavern Talk: Much work has been done on Ilkor's messaging system that is being dubbed 'Tavern Talk'. We're very close to launching it so you can all experience it and see try it out. The messaging system is going to be a forum that will allow players, or rather 'Player Characters' and 'GameMasters' to communicate via forums and a private messaging system. Emails are not revealed and the system will be integrated with ilkor.com. The messaging system will be located at tavern.ilkor.com (note: this is not available yet). When you signup and go through the character creation process you will be granted access and rights to 'Tavern Talk'. Each PC will be granted rights to various forums related to your character. More on this in our next blog, hopefully with some screenshots.

Character Creation: We have finished integrated the improvements and bug fixes that came out of the alpha and now handling the integration of Tavern Talk and then we should be finished with this very important aspect of the game. We're still waiting on Simon for a number of art pieces (avatar and character portraits) but they can and will be slotted in as we receive them.

Mapping Engine: Process is being made, though it is slow, but what is coming out of this area is very interesting and we are sure it is going to blow you away.

Game Engine: This is working nicely. This is really the heart of the game, it is the engine that controls the turnaround, seasons, phases, weather, movement, and so on.

Hopefully you'll get an update very soon.

For now, keep well.

We're sad to inform you that we have had to delay the beta launch. Hopefully you won't be too disappointed and that you understand that most indie games are done in spare time and therefore delays are inevitable.

This itself is by no means justification, and while we had every intention of making the original deadline of the 2nd June, it has been obvious for a little while now that we are not going to be ready. The team had a meeting with regards to where we are with the game and have decided that we are not willing to compromise the quality nor integrity of the gaming experience just to meet a particular deadline.

As Scott (one of the GMs) said, "you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Heck, look how long it took Blizzard to just release Diablo 3!".

The design and development is simply very time-consuming and we have slipped up on a number of fronts which I won't go into detail right now. I think over the coming weeks we'll try to communicate our development roadmap a little clearer and give you guys some feedback on how we are tracking.

The newly revised launch date is now 9th Feb 2013!! Seems like a long way off, but we feel this is now much more achievable. We might even be early Our forecast shows that we should be ready towards the latter part of this year (4 to 5 months time), but felt the launch immediately before or after Christmas would have less of an impact.

...And now some good news

If you want a sneak preview of the Character Creation (the official signup process) you can do so by going to: http://alpha.ilkor.com

Although the Character Creation process is now developed, there are a few known aspects that are still not complete:

1. Character Portraits (hand drawn illustrations by Simon that appear in the centre of the dail)
2. Character Avatars (again, we are waiting on Simon. Currently we only have 'some' of the facial parts for male and female humans & male dwarves)
3. Content / Copy for items like Settlements & Feats.

Please go and check it out and give it a good test, supplying us with plenty of feedback. Undoubtedly there are small snags and fine tuning to be addressed. Performance might be a little slow as we are hosting alpha on a 'development' server.

You are welcome to go through the 'Character Creation' process as many times as you want. You character won't be saved, remember this is just for testing purposes only.

And Finally...A Knowledge Quest

In the coming days we'll also be announcing the first 'Knowledge Quest' that you will be invited to take part in. You'll learn more about this in a separate announcement to this.

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…