Ilkor: A Long Overdue Development Update
Sorry guys, it’s been a long time since I last blogged. It's not due to the lack of progress and news about Ilkor. Far from it. We've been very busy. However, I do feel rather tired, it’s been a busy year and I think my mind and body has already gone into 'holiday mode'. 
OK, so here's a quick status report on where we are with the project:
Content: The website (http://ilkor.com) has had continuous updates over the past month. The website has had numerous subtle changes made to the 'Features' area. If you haven't gone over and visited for a while then now might be a good time. Besides new content, we have also fixed up a few reported bugs specifically around cross-browser layout issues. In the next day or two the site is due for another update, this time we'll be supplying detailed information on each 'base class': fighter, wizard, rogue, priest.
Wiki: Our newest GM, Senyors (a.k.a Scott) has been working hard on populating the Arcadia Gazetteer wiki (http://gazetteer.ilkor.com). It is taking shape, but it is still far from being ready for public viewing really. However we don't mind sharing this info here, we know you'll understand that it is very much 'work in progress'. So by all means check the wiki out and let’s hear your comments.
Sign-up: The sign-up process has been developed and complete. This isn't available to the public yet. Don't get confused with the 'beta sign-up' that is currently on the website. The actual sign-up process will require you to sign-up and submit 4 pieces of information (email address, class, race & gender).
Character Creation: This follows the sign-up process. The sign-up flows straight into the character creation. Here the player will be able to make last minute changes to his original sign-up options and deal with additional options such as character name, stat allocation, starting town, and so on. The early stages of development has started and we'll be working on this going into 2012.
Security: The login and logout process has been developed and complete. This handles 'role management' which basically grants or restricts access to various areas of the website.
Metadata: The last metadata screen has now been completed. It has been a huge job that has taken several months. We have 48 different metadata screens, some of them rather complex, others fairly basic. The metadata screens are used to create the world of Arcadia. The screens will never be seen nor used by players. They are for GameMaster eyes only. The Metadata screens form a small part of the GM section. Early into 2012 we will start to use these Metadata screens to design, populate and configure the world of Arcadia
Map: We've had a bit of an unfortunate setback with the Arcadia world map. Jon Roberts, our cartographer has had his laptop stolen and with it alot of his cartography work. The Arcadia maps are part of this 'lost' work. Jon has had resort to backups so he can finish the maps. I will keep you informed with the progress, hopefully Jon doesn't have to perform too much rework.
Artwork: Simon is due to deliver a fairly large amount of illustrations which will be used specifically within the 'character creation' stage of sign-up. No doubt you'll also come across pieces of this new artwork stash throughout the website and wiki - keep your eyes peeled.
Game Engine: We now have a 'Game Engine Service' in its early stages of development. This accompanies the website and is used to process turns and phases. It has been written in a modular fashion so that as Ilkor becomes richer in functionality we have a mechanism to plug in new features.
And thats all for now folks. I'll do my best to post more frequently from now on.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: Welcome GameMaster Scott Huelsman
Welcome aboard Scott Huelsman: Ilkor's first Community GameMaster
We were approached by Scott just over a week ago, offering his services to get involved in the Ilkor project. Scott brings with him many talents such as vast knowledge and experience in role-playing, a gamemaster, webmaster and programmer. Scott has even developed his own 'Role-Playing Novel' which is a very interesting concept. You should really check out his work at: http://www.thehway.com/WizardReborn/RolePlayingNovel/PlaytheRPN/tabid/2924/Default.aspx.
So Scott is to be our first Community GameMaster. Early in the New Year he will aid myself (Sean) in populating the game with all the various metadata tokens such as; weapons, armour, shields, monsters, spells, settlements, magical items, etc. This is no small feat and will take many months to get the bulk done.
In the meantime Scott has wasted no time at all and has taken on board a very important job of constructing 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'. You can read more about this in the next section.
The Arcadia Gazetteer
The latest development from the Ilkor / HeroQuest project is the release of 'The Arcadia Gazetteer'.
For those of you, who might be a little unsure what a 'Gazetteer' is I've included a small extract from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer) below:
A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names, used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup of a country, region, or continent as well as the social statistics and physical features.
We have plans to release quite soon (sometime during the month of November) a wiki that will serve as a Gazetteer for 'The World of Arcadia' which is the setting for Ilkor: Dark Rising (http://ilkor.com).
To begin with it will be rather thin on content, but our first community GameMaster (Scott Huelsman) will be driving this over the coming months to bring it to life. This should prove to be an important area of the game for players to read, discover and learn about Arcadia.
So look out for this. It should be available within a couple of weeks with any luck. I'll keep you posted.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: Donations
We've just pushed a new update to our website (ilkor.com). The update includes quite a large number of content improvements. Go and hunt around the homepage / features section and see what you can discover. More will be coming online over the next couple of weeks aswell.
What I really want to chat about is donations. Although we aren't going to be charging for playing the game, nor will we be surfing up adverts to ruin your gaming experience, we do need to find ways of re-coping our development and running costs (at the very least).
We have a few ideas up our sleeve on how we might be able to charge for some value added services and products, but that is some way down the line once the game goes live. Luckily we aren't doing this to get rich fast and we are developing it ourselves in our free time, thus keeping the current expenses down to a minimum. However there are ongoing and regular costs that need paying. The biggest is our monthly hosting cost of $70. We also have some ad hoc artwork costs from time to time.
I know times are getting tougher with the so called 'global recession' re-emerging but if anyone can and wants to support us by making a donation we would be over the moon. Any amount no matter how small will really help us in the long run. Donations can be made through PayPal who accept payment from all major credit cards. You can either click on the link below or go to ilkor.com and on the features section scroll down to the bottom left and click on the link which will present you with more information on making a donation.
Do the right thing and make a kind donation
We are looking at rewarding those that have faith in what we are doing in a number of ways. For starters we have created a new link in the footer on the homepage called Heroes. This link throws up a scroll popup that lists everyone that has and is aiding us in developing and running Ilkor. I know it isn't much, but it is a small 'thankyou' to show our appreciation.
Kind regards,
Sean.
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.