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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.