Ilkor: Argyll the Yellow Region
The Yellow Region: Argyll
Here's the third regional map from Jon Roberts. It is Argyll, the Yellow Region, situated to the west. Now remember, this is just a thumbnail map. For each regional Jon has also designed a highlydetailed map which will only be revealed to players once their character arrives on its shores.
So thats 3 down, 2 more two go. Then we're going to reveal the highly detailed map of Caledon. We've decided to do this ahead of the game going into beta. Players will be able to start 'exploring' the region in preparation of game launch. Remember you can also go over to the Gazetteer of Arcadia where a whole wealth of knowledge is slowly but surely starting to
More maps to follow very soon.
Ilkor: A Website update, the Gazetteer, Maps & Character Creation
We've had a very busy week. There is much to report. So here goes:
Website Update: ilkor.com has just had an update. Please go and check it out. There have been numerous bug fixes, enhancements and new content. The most visually and obvious enhancement must be the browser requirement indicator that appears in the bottom right of the page. It will detect whether your browser is going to be able to run the game successfully. Ilkor requires browsers that support HTML5. Most of the new browsers that have been out in the past 6 months or so should be fine. To check, go to ilkor.com and look at the indicator.
Browser Requirement Indicator
If the globe is green then your browser will have no trouble running the game. An orange globe indicates that you may have some trouble and it is advisable to update your browser to the latest version. A red globe will require that you upgrade your browser before you'll be able to play. You will still be able to signup however.
The Gazetteer of Arcadia: For those of you who don't know. The Gazetteer is a wiki that we're in the process of populating with the rich world setting information and background. GM Senyors and Lord Vega are both busy at work here. Please spend some time here, it'll help you get a better understanding of the game's setting and prepare you for when the game starts. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us.
We've recently added some of the game maps and very soon we'll be including a number of new hand-drawn portraits of races and classes, supplied by Simon Lee Tranter.
Maps: Jon Roberts is very close now to completing our various versions of the world and regional maps. They have been some time in the making for a number of reasons, but the wait is proving to be well worth it. I've already shared some of these maps with you via Twitter, Facebook, this blog and the Gazetteer wiki. The big one we are now waiting for is of course the detailed map of Caledon. So watch this space, it will be appearing here soon.
The Blue Region: Caledon
Character Creation: This is really the most exciting area of development. This is because, beside the GameMaster sections of the website, this is the first real functional areas that we are starting to see and it really is looking amazing!! Unfortunately we can't share this with you yet, not even screenshots, but soon we will do just that followed by an alpha version of the website where you'll be able to experience the character creation process for yourself and supply us with feedback. This will be our first real playtest request. Please consider joining in!
Thats it for the moment. Hopefully I'll have more news in the coming week.
World Map: Sneak Preview
Hey guys,
I've decided to share with you a quick sneak preview of our world map. Jon is still working on it however. It's not complete by any means. He still needs to include marshes, which is the last terrain type to add. He also needs to draw each settlement and then label everything such as villages, rivers, mountain ranges, regions, seas, oceans etc. Finally he will then need to plot the trading routes between the settlements. Oh, and currently Jon has only drawn the major terrain blocks, he still has to finish off by including scattered clumps of different terrain types all over the place.
I've uploaded a very low res version of the world map. It is only at 8.33% of the actual size.
The World of Arcadia
I hope you like the style of the cartography. I've always loved the Tolkien style of mapping and we believe this type of map will work very nicely in the type of game we're developing. The lack of colour in the tilesets will enable us to overlay the various moving pieces, tokens and mapping of character movement.
I've also uploaded a tiny snippet of a small area, though this is shown in full res. If you look carefully on the world map you'll see to the west two land masses close together. The southern isle is the smallest and Jon has already started to label it. The snippet has been taken from the bottom south-east coast. That should give you some idea of the shear vastness and scale.
Snippet of Detailed Regional Map
Now these maps are only the illustrated maps. The game won't be played at this scale but at an even lower level. The game will be played on a tiled area which will drill down even further. I can't show you an example of this level yet, the engine and editor is just about complete but we still need to get Jon to supply us with a tileset that will be of the same style as the illustrated. Hopefully by the end of May or early June 
.
When the game starts we'll just be opening up with one region. If you look at the world map again you should be able to make out 5 main regions or continents. The game will start with the centre region with the others opening up as and when they are required.
There is plenty more I could talk about, but for the moment I believe this should give you guys enough to think about and hopefully look forward to.
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.