Ilkor: Tavern Talk
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.
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: Updated website
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.
Ilkor: Introducing Mausosium
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…
Ilkor: Mike Collins the new Ilkor GameMaster
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.
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: 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