Ilkor: Character Creation now complete!
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.
Ilkor: Latest Development News
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.
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: Design Session
Well another week has gone by in the blink of an eye. I can't believe we are almost 1 third of the way through the year!!
The Cape Town based development team (wow all 3 of us! - myself, Chris and Mark) had a very productive design session last Wednesday evening. You guys might not know our setup, but all three of us are developing Ilkor in our spare-time, trying to find the odd hour here and therefore during the day and spending what time our families allow during the evenings and weekends on Ilkor development. It is tough going but extremely rewarding.
Mark and myself work together in the same office for our 'day job' while Chris is about 10kms down the road. Mark and I therefore manage to talk 'Ilkor' on and off throughout the day, at lunchtime and at any spare moment we find in the day when out 'day job' is a little slow. We tend to work long hours at the office so we are able to do both.
I mentioned last week we have our own VPN which all of us can access from anywhere so it doesn't matter, day or night, we can all get access to documentation, source code, etc.
We run Ilkor using a development methodology called Scrum. I'm not going to get into the details of this as it'll most likely bore you to death. However we have been working like this for many years. It basically involves splitting sizeable chunks of work up into small pieces that can be completed in a short period of time. We work on a 2 week cycle. Each cycle is called a sprint.
Our sprints start every 2nd Wednesday. Infact we start a new sprint this coming Wednesday. Part of Scrum involves having a short meeting every day to track process etc. We do this at 7am over Skype. It works very well indeed and sets us all up for the rest of the day.
Anyway...as for the design session. The agenda was to really go over a number of topics. We reviewed the database model, which as I mentioned the other week, and is really taking shape. It's not complete but a large section (specifically the metadata) is now fully designed.
We also reviewed the map engine and editor. Chris demo'ed what he has achieved to date and it is going to be completely amazing. I really want to share this with you guys but not until we have the finished tilesets, world and regional illustrated maps from Jon. To show this off before then will not do the engine justice. Anyway we thrashed out some of Chris' concerns, mostly technical around terrain transitions and the approach to both roads and rivers. We settled on a great solution which Chris is well into implementing already.
Finally I gave a presentation around the player interfaces, the pages that will be served up to the player while he plays the game. Between Simon and myself we have come up with a great navigational structure that we feel will be very intuitive, something I believe more than 90% of the text-based browser games fail to achieve. The session went well and I was happy to see that both Chris and Mark managed to understand the structure. With some feedback I'm now revising some areas before Simon will then take the brief to work on the design drafts further until we are happy. This includes the 'look and feel' or the theme of the site, which in many ways is equally as important.
All in all we've had a hugely productive week. The artists are making alot of progress, especially Jon who has taken our comments regarding the initial map snippet that was given to us. The final finished world map is expected to arrive sometime this week, we are all very excited, maybe next week we can share a small snippet of the map to you! :-)
We've now got just over 2 months to go before we intend on launching the ilkor.com website that will really just be a holding page with some info on the game and the ability to join the playtest. However this is going to be a huge milestone for us. If we can make it, it'll mean we are finally live, will have a real web presence and then have only 6 months to complete what is needed to launch the playtest at the end of 2011.
I'm really hoping that early into May we'll start to have some nice illustrations, maps and screenshots that we'll be able to give you a sneak preview of.
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.
Metadata, Map Making & a Logo
Sorry, its been a while since our last update on Ilkor, however you'll be pleased to hear work is going full-steam ahead. Development is going very well indeed and we've made quite a bit of progress. We've still a mountain of work to climb, but the roadmap has been drawn and the journey has certainly begun.
This article is going to be reasonable technical and therefore it won't really reveal too much about the game features (sorry guys, you'll have to wait a while longer for that).
Right now the development team is 5 strong; 3 programmers and 2 artists.
Logo & Motif: Simon has completed numerous concept designs and we've settled on a style that we really like and believe it sets a great tone and theme for the game.
We've a number of different variations (mono, colour, light on dark, dark on light and so on). Simon has also put together a nice motif that will be used throughout the game. He is now busy working on a large collection of character portraits (race and class combinations).
We'll report more on these as and when they become available. For the moment however, check out the logo and motif below:
 Ilkor: Dark Rising Logo |
 Ilkor Motif |
World Map: I (Sean) spent the better part of Jan & Feb actually coming up with the design for the world map. This proved to be an interesting task which took far longer than I expected. The world map is going to be huge, massive!!!!
It consists of five regions (continents). Each continent is plenty large and interesting enough to keep any fearless adventurer content for many years. I designed each continent down to low level detail, setting out the various terrain types, places of interest, roads, rivers, settlements and then labelling everything. When I say labelling everything I mean everything!!!
Anyway, now with the draft map completed, this has been handed over to Jon who is busy re-drawing the maps to an extremely high quality. The maps will be drawn in a typical 'Tolkien' style. Jon has indicated that the map (maps) will be ready around the end of March. I really can't wait.
The finished maps will be used by the mapping engine. The world map will just be used for reference purposes only. The game will start with just one of the continents 'open' for play. The detailed illustrated map of the continent will be fully available for the player to study and explore. The map size will be somewhere in the region of A3 to A2. Remember that is just one continent, there will be another 4 to explore eventually!
Players will move their characters around the map using a grid map. The scale will be even greater on the grid map. The grid map will reveal much more detail about the continent and will only display the areas that you have previously explored. The rest will be 'clouded out'.
What is really exciting about this approach is that we hope to have the grid map 'look and feel' much like the detailed illustrated map. The tilesets will be created by Jon and we're using some rather smart ways to handle the transitions between terrain types thus it will not look like a grid map, each terrain type will seamlessly blend into one another.
One of the reasons for choosing a 'Tolkien' style map is the lack of colour and it's simplicity in terrain types. Not only does it look cool (well we think so), but it won't detract from the various tokens and symbols we plan on programmatically displaying on locations.
While Jon and I have been working hard on the illustrated maps, Chris has been slaving away at the Map Engine and Editor. This is using a number of different technologies, mostly C#, MVC, Javascript, HTML5 (mostly Canvas) and Mongo DB (database). The engine is used to handle all the tile and sprite rendering, the fetching of data from the DB and keeping the illustrated map and the grid map in sync. The very rough demo I've seen of it is extremely promising, it lightning first and very lightweight.
Chris is now starting work on the Editor itself. The editor is a GameMaster toolkit that will enable use to build the grid map up from the illustrated map. We'll have tools available to change terrain types, to create roads, rivers, settlements etc. Anyway, more on the map editor at a later date. I'll try and get Chris to write up an article.
Metadata: This article is proving to be lengthy already so I won't talk too much about metadata. Basically metadata refers to all the 'playing pieces' of the game. I've gone through an exercise of putting together very rough screenshots of all the various metadata pages where the GM will use to pre-populate the game at the beginning with data. The type of data is:
- Classes (Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Priest, etc)
- Races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, etc)
- Religions
- Guilds,
- Weapons
- Armour
- Shields
- Spells
- Maagic Items
- and so on
It isn't simply a list but a whole host of properties for each specific metadata type. For example, each class will require to have a ClassId, a Name, Brief Description, Detailed Description, Icon, Image, and other game related stat values. These are all configurable so that the start of the game the GM can customise the game to his liking.
We've gone with this 'generic' approach so that the game engine could one day be re-used for another type of game. Also it makes it alot easier to manage the game and correct and tweet it here and there. As I mentioned, Ilkor will start with just one continent open. The other 4 will open when they are required. The majority of a continent's data and 'playing pieces' can be configured through these screens prior to opening it up to players.
Hope you find this type of article interesting, I'll try and write more often.
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.