Ilkor: Spreading the word
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.
Ilkor: Sign-up Screen shots
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.
Ilkor: GameMaster Section
Development is moving on at quite a nice pace. Currently it is split into three areas; player section, gamemaster section and the game engine itself.
Player Section: We're in the depths of designing and coding the registration process, character creation and login process. All three are closely inter-linked. We haven't any screenshots that are at an advanced stage where we can give a sneak preview. Not yet anyway. We are also thinking that we might not, until the launch, though people that have signed up for playtesting will be invited to not only have a sneak preview but also test it out for us and provide feedback. This should be made available towards the latter part of this year (hopefully).
Game Engine: Nothing visual here to show. This is the heart of the game which can be thought of as a complex clock that continuously ticks and keeps account of the game year, date, season, weather, turn number etc. The engine decides when a phase starts, ends, when a turn number advances, a season ends and so on. The basics are in place and we're now moving onto more interesting jobs like leveling up, distribution of experience points, processing of actions, movement, and combat.
GameMaster Section: This is an area of the game that we've been working on for quite some time and therefore we have the most amount of screens completed and ready to show off! 
The screens are now reasonably polished, though we haven't fully setting on the style nor some of the content. These screens are for the GMs to run and control the game. Initially the GM tasks and tools will be used by us to create the game tokens (weapons, armour, shields, spells), the maps, settlements, NPCs, monsters and so on. However, our vision is that Ilkor: Dark Rising won't be just for players.
Ilkor is being developed for the gaming community and also by the gaming community. Already we've got a small team of helpers from around the world that have input into the game's development. Together we design and code the game. We already have a large list of playtesters waiting to get involved and sometime in the New Year we'll be looking for a few GMs who will want to play Ilkor but rather as a GameMaster instead of a Player. Both are equally important to us and the success of the game.
GameMasters will log into the GM section. Depending on your GM Level (there will be various levels) you will be given access to different functionality. The top GMs will be allowed to map out the continents, design the settlements, poplate with monsters, etc. Lower level GMs will report to their 'Chief GM' and will be assigned tasks.
The entire GM section, just like the player section is designed to be 'in character'. The screenshot below shows what can be best described as the GM Homepage. From this page the GM will be presented with the tasks and tools that are appropriate for his access rights and GM level. The screenshot isn't completely polished yet, the setting and content might change somewhat, but the idea here is that the GM section will be an actual location in the game. At the moment we have a vision of it being a dungeon where each level will deal with a different function. Rather than talk about it here, check out the screenshot, it should hopefully describe what we are trying to achieve.
We'll blog more about the GM section and supply yet more screenshots which are far more interesting. We've got the bulk of the metadata screens complete. These are the screens that are used to create and design all the items and tokens of the game (races, classes, monsters, spells, skills, weapons, etc). More on that another day.
GameMaster Homepage
ilkor.com goes live
This is going to be a short entry. I'm very tired and need to get to bed. It's been a long week as we've been preparing to launch ilkor.com.
Well, we announced we'd be ready and launch on the 1st July and we did just that! It's a major achievement for us, so much hard work has been put by the entire dev team.
The site is far from perfect however. We know that and we are expecting feedback pointing out errors and silly mistakes that we'll fix up during the month of July. Hopefully by August the site will be polished enough for us to feel confident enough to promote the website and game further afield. For the moment we are sharing it with a small select audience.
If you visit the site you'll see that we're accepting beta playtest signups. It'll be free to play, so you really have nothing to lose. Please explore the site, register for the playtest, spread the word amongst your friends and let us know what you think of the game. There isn't alot of game material on the website...yet, though this is going to change over the coming months.
Everyone that registers for the will receive regular updates from us. The playtest is only scheduled to start in 11 months time!! It is some way off, but it'll fly by all too quickly.
Anyways, hope you like what you see and it is enough to look forward to what is coming down the line.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: The Good, Bad and Ugly…
At the time of writing this we have just 10 days before we launch ilkor.com. We're all very excited but nervous!!
We are determined to launch our website on the 1st July. Remember, the game won't be available to play yet, you'll have to wait a while longer (read below for more info). However come the 1st July you'll be able to find out information on the game, learn when the Ilkor will be available to play, sign-up for the beta playtest including some hidden surprises coming your way over the next few months.
The Ugly: Nervous because there is just so much to do still. We had hoped to be in a much better position than we are right now but for a stack of reasons we are running behind in putting together the content. I can see alot of late evenings and spending most of the coming weekend working on the outstanding tasks. We want to launch with at least a 'half decent' website. I'm sure we'll be updating the website on a continuous basis post launch date, but non-the-less we want our first web-presence to be a good one. The finishing touches just seem to take so much longer than we at first thought for numerous reasons, still making silly mistakes despite all our experience in web development!!
The Bad: We had hoped to launch the game on the 7th Jan 2012 as a beta playtest. However we have had to review that date. It appears that date is a little too optimistic. We don't feel comfortable with that date any longer. Unfortunately we are going to have to push that date out by at least a few months. You'll learn about the revised date on the 1st July. This is something we have thought about long and hard over the past few weeks. We felt it was too high risk to keep to such a tight deadline date and for what reason? Why do we want to put such pressure upon ourselves? Sure we want to get the game finished and open it for everyone to signup, play and enjoy, but we are doing this in our spare time. It is therefore difficult to forecast just how much development we can achieve in a specific timeframe. I really hope you are not too disappointed. I can assure you it will be worth the wait.
The Good: Keeping the best for last. We're busy setting up our web and database server. This task is happening this week while the final touches to the website are getting developed. The website is looking really great and should be available in all browsers including mobile. We've chosen a solid and reliable hosting company called ElasticHosts. They have a wonderful model and will allow us to scale when required. I'll blog about our technology stack sometime in the future when I have more time on my hands. The content is also coming together which includes alot of juicy game material, artwork and general information regarding the great features of Ilkor.
OK, well thats about it for the moment. I best get back to the grind to ensure we meet our launch date.
Cheers,
Sean.
Homepage Design & Avatars
I've just got time for a quick post before I get stuck into finishing off coding the registration section. We're about 5 weeks away from launching the ilkor.com splashpage. Scarily stuff as we've still so much to do! However the dev team really is putting in alot of effort and we're producing some top quality work, on all fronts, design, development and artwork.
Up until now I haven't really spoken too much about the homepage and specifically around the great artwork coming from Simon Lee Tranter. Simon has been extremely help in coming up with much of our website design, logos, artwork, site navigation and layout.
We started designing the homepage about a month ago. We had some ideas of what we wanted and gave this to Simon. He's come up with a number of concepts and have eventually settled on a specific style that we all feel works the best for how we such to present Ilkor. Simon has just concluded a number of concept iterations of the main illustration that will appear on the homepage. I have actually been giving him such a hard time over this and he just keeps on delivering quality revisions. Today we finally settled on a concept and now Simon is getting to work on drawing the finished piece. We've decided that he is to draw a much larger illustration than we intend on placing on the homepage. Instead we've already identified a portion of this drawing that we wish to zoom in on, crop and present. We have plans for the full-size illustrations further down the line.
Since we are only 5 weeks away from launch I'd rather not give too much away other than to explain the theme of the game has been depicted in the illustration. It is centred around Ilkor, the Goddess of Darkness rather than to 'show off' the rich feature set the game will be offering.
Besides this amazing illustration the homepage will allow eager players to sign-up now ahead of the beta playtest. We'll place them onto the waiting list and keep them up to date with game news and progress. The homepage will allow players to also learn the usual basic boring stuff like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, About Us, Contact Us and of course info about the various parties that is helping to make this project possible (HeroQuest, Simon, Jon and of course us!).
Further than this we're going to be giving a whole host of information on the cool game features. We'll talk a little about the different races, the classes, the level system, fame points, leveling up, the turn system, etc. We'll also show and explain a little about the maps and something that we hope will be extra special. It is your character's avatar. We have devised a way to produce a 'head and shoulders' avatar that depicts your character. It is completely automated and will be unique to you as a player. The avatar won't be like the normal avatars out there that look like clipart or popart, the portrait will be designed by Simon in such a way that through the use of code we'll produce a unique portrait based on three things, your email address, character race and gender. To start off, you won't be able to alter your avatar, so you are kinda stuck with it, but they will be a really cool drawing and they will be unique. Later on we will be supplying a way for players to then go ahead and customise their avatar. They won't be allowed to upload their own pictures, but instead will go through a wizard to pick various facial features all drawn and supplied by Simon. We're actually very excited about this.
So that will be it really. So this is what we are going live with. It's not much and therefore we are calling it a splashpage. Once we are ready to launch the beta playtest we'll modify the homepage to allow players to register proper and also login and get stuck into the game.
OK, enough rambling, I best get down to some coding.
Ilkor: Splash Page Update
Well its been a couple of weeks since my last update. There has been so much progress in the last few weeks on all fronts. However we haven't really completed a single piece of development that has a visual aspect to show off here. Much of the progress has been rather technical aswell.
At the moment the entire team are working towards the 1st July which we hope will be our launch date for ilkor.com. Now don't get too excited, the game won't be ready, but we think it is important to get a web presence as soon as possible, so we can supply information to potential players and give them the option to sign-up for the beta playtest which will start early into the New Year (we are aiming for the 7th Jan 2012).
Here's the current development progress:
Illustration Map: Jon Roberts really has done an amazing job. The world map is close to completion now. Our previous blog entry went into some detail around the outstanding work that has gone into making this what it is. Between myself and Jon we've gone through a handful of correction iterations and I believe within a week or so Jon will have completed the job. Finally we'll be adding a border, title, compass, etc to the map and then it will be complete. Jon has recently blogged about Ilkor amongst his various other projects.
Map Engine: This is also close to completion, at least the core functionality. Very soon Chris will be working on the engine once more using an actual tileset drawn by Jon Roberts to ensure the game map style matches the illustrated world map. You might not be aware, but when we launch Ilkor we will only be opening up 1 of the 5 regions. Each region will have roughly 170,000 locations for the players to explore. While this is great for the players it means ALOT of work for the GameMasters. We are going to have to not only create and render the region based on the illustrated map but also populate it with various information, items, creatures, etc. So there is alot of work coming up very soon and I am going to be the main one running with this!! 
Splash Page: This is what most of us have been focused on now for the past 2 weeks and will keep us pretty much busy right up until the end of June. Seems like alot of work for a single page doesn't it? However there is far more involved in getting this right than you imagine. In this process we are also buttoning down the website's theme, look and feel and navigational structure. Simon has been heavily involved in coming up with a number of different concepts for both the layout as well as navigation. He is now working on the main illustration that we will be displaying on the homepage. It's still in the early stages of concept but by the end of the week I think we'll really be on the right tracks. The page is being developed with progressive enhancement in mind. If this term is new to you then I suggest you go and read up on it. Basically we intend our website to be user friendly and should work with any browser and any connection type. At least the homepage will be coded like this. The internals of the website will rely on HTML5 and Javascript. The splash page will also allow you to sign-up to take part in the beta testing. The rest of the splash page will give a host of information on the game, it's main features along with various other game and company related information. Besides the development work involved in this we also need to publish this out to the Internet. This means picking a hosting company and setting up our environment and servers. We thought the splash page would be an ideal opportunity to test out our hosting company and environment with a minimal level of stress, pressure and risk. Hopefully it should make future releases much smoother.
Well thats the update this time around. Hopefully a little more can be revealed soon.
Cheers,
Sean.
Ilkor: Dev Update
I thought it was time to give a quick and brief update the Ilkor: Dark Rising development progress.
We're still on target to having the beta version ready for the end of the year. Time is running by very quickly, but we are making good progress in most of the areas of development.
Ilkor Website Launch 1st July:
We have pencilled in the date of the 1st July to launch the ilkor.com website. Now don't get too excited as it won't contain very much The idea is to get the website out there to have come visibility so we can start advertising and promoting the game. Equally important, we want to establish and process prove our development, build and development cycle. Behind the scenes we will not be dropping new code into production but rather have a strict build and deployment process.
The website will really consist of a single page that will contain a countdown to the beta launch, high level info on the game and the ability to signup for the beta playtest.
Build Process:
Our build process makes use of a number of components. The majority of it is automated. This process is not yet completely up and running. During the course of April we plan of getting the majority of it inplace and working. This is something the team all has experience in doing in past projects. We have already setup a VPN over the Internet so all three developers are able to connect to our development environment. Our dev environment consists of a server and a NAS. The NAS is used solely for back-up reasons. Our server is currently being doubled up as a Build Server and a Dev Wiki. We are using SVN as our code repository, MSBuild / Nant to build and deploy and CruiseControl to manage our build process.
Map Making:
Jon has been making excellent progress with the illustrated world map. Once it is completed it will have a total of 5 continents (regions) which will be A2 in size!!! The game will start with just one of the regions open, with others opening up sometime in the future. I managed to get a sneak preview of Jon's progress last week and it is looking amazing. I was really hoping to share it with you but we are now going through a number of refactoring iterations to get it 100% right. At this point we'll reveal to everyone a snippet of a region and talk through our choice for the style of the map and how it is going to be used within the game.
Map Engine:
Chris is almost completed with the highlevel requirements for the map engine and editor. We are going to be taking the illustrated maps from Jon and then using the map editor to drill down and produce a tiled map that will be used to move around and reveal information to the player. The engine and editor both rely heavily on the HTML5 technologies and persists to MongoDB. I'll get Chris blog about the technologies and his approach to this in more detail a little later on in the year. Chris will be obtaining a tileset from Jon to ensure the tiled map will have the same style as the illustrated versions. Currently Chris is completing the code that will deal with the rivers and roads.
Meta Data: Mark has made excellent progress with creating a SQL DB Scheme of all the tables, columns and relationships between the various metadata the game is going to require. At a quick count there is over 40 tables that have been required to complete this piece of work. Mark has just about finished. The next step will be to code up some rather rough screens for the GameMaster to use so that he can populate the game with the data that he requires. This will cater for information such as the names of the seasons, duration of seasons, race and class names and stats, weapons, spells, etc etc. Just about everything in the game.
Player Screens:
I have been working on alot of admin tasks such as creating the company, bank account and other legal stuff and setting up the dev environment. When I've had the time I've been focused on creating mockups for the player facing screens. This has been a rather tough exercise, but I'm making good progress and have a good idea of how this is now going to work and the style of it. We are not going for a typical heavy and dark look and feel to the site. Instead it is going to be clean, simple and light. When I say light, I am referring to the 'feel'. Often RPG games are 'heavy' with tons of images, adverts and options. This not only slows down the website and spoils the player's experience but also detracts from the core reason for the specific screen. We are now at a stage where we have a pretty clear direction of how the screens will look and will now get Simon (other other artist) involved to come up with a number of concept designs.
Cheers.
Sean.
Development Starts
We've been itching to start developing Ilkor: Dark Rising all throughout 2010 and it has finally begun!!
That doesn't mean we've been dragging our heels, far from it. The design phase has taken a little longer than we had expected. It had to be right before we could start cutting code. The design still isn't 100% bedded down, however the core mechanics 'feel right' which gives us enough to start getting our hands dirty.
The development team currently consists of 4 brave people ; two programmers and two artists. Without a doubt this team will grow a little over the year. All team members are 'part-time' so it's going to be a real challenge.
- Programmers: Myself (Sean Cleworth) and Chris Kriel. We're friends and we work together as computer programmers at our day job. Together we've decided to take on this project and make it a great success. We've access to a number of other friends at work that could assist on Ilkor should we need it.
- Artists: Both have been commissioned to produce artwork. We think their work is out of this world. Simon Lee Tranter is responsible for coming up with the game's overall style and theme and the various pieces of artwork that we'll require. Check his portfolio, amazing stuff. Johnathan Roberts has been commissioned to produce the world map. His cartography skills will be a huge asset, the map needs to be stunning...and it will be. Please go and look at his work.
This is very exciting times (especially for me - it's been many years since I was involved in game development and it's great to be back) but the sheer volume of work that lies ahead means we're going to be very busy.
I'll post more information as and when I have it, though there will be aspects of the development that we'll be keeping close to our chests...we want to hold back some surprises for the Beta Testing phase which will be towards the end of this year.
Cheers,
Sean.
A Busy and Exciting Year…
2010 was all about resurrecting Gad Games from the ashes of the late 90's when the Play-By-Mail industry was badly hit by the raise of Email and Web usage. I had been toying with starting Gad Games up for a while but was a little nervous about making such a huge commitment. Life at the age of 42 is quite different to when I was single and in my 20's.
Much of 2010 was spend getting back into the 'gaming scene', especially the PBM community which is still out there but appears to be very small nowadays and quiet. We managed to throw together this rather simple website and this blog section is the newest addition. We also have a facebook fan page and I was amazed to see 40+ people have stumbled upon us during 2010. We've just setup a twitter account (#gadgames) which you can follow and learn about the latest developments both with Gad Games and our Ilkor game which we have finally started developing.
2011 will see us look more towards the future as we finally get down to coding our latest project; Ilkor: Dark Rising. Our aim is to have the game ready for beta testing by the end of the year. I really hope we haven't bitten off more than we can chew, after all we are running this in our spare time!!
I hope to blog on a regular basis regarding our game development process, Gad Games news and snippets of interesting pieces in general. So if you are keen on keeping up with the progress of the development of Ilkor and want find out some of the design aspects and features we will be introducing then stay tuned.
Cheers,
Sean.