Ilkor: Brief Update
We've alot happening right now on all fronts. I'll get straight on with it.
Game Engine: Work started on this about a month ago. Obviously we still have a long way to go, but we already have a bare bones service that processes the turn, advances the turn and phase number, seasons and years. Over the next few weeks we will be integrating into this cycle the introduction of players. The engine persists its data straight to MongoDB.
Registration Process: Development here has slowed down a little due to our move from using SQL to Mongo for our database requirements. So there is little to report, but we'll be re-starting this in a few days time.
New Content: With the website now 95% optimized we are really focusing on pushing new content to the live website on a regular basis. Our aim is to have something new on the website every two weeks. New content will be mostly added to the 'Features' section of the homepage for a little while. This is being achieved by serving up the content in our specially skinned 'scroll popups'!! Go to ilkor.com and see for yourself, we are revealing more and more about the game features and details.
Map: Jon, our fab cartographer is still working hard on completing our world and regional maps. We hope to get the final finished maps very soon now, hopefully before the end of October. You can then expect to see a number of sneak previews of the finished maps!
Avatars: Simon, our amazing Artist will be delivering the first batch of avatar 'facial parts' (head, shoulders, eyes, nose, hair, mouth). He has dealt with a male human for starters. We need this so we can then test our our avatar generating code. If it all works out as planned Simon will then have a few amount of work to do over the next few months coming up with the facial parts for all the other 7 possibilities. Personally I'm really excited about this and will certainly be blogging about the Avatars in far more detail soon.
Database Migration: As mentioned last time, we are busy migrated across from MS-SQL to MongDB. The process is good and we hope to have everything in place by the end of October...hopefully! 
And thats about it for now..
Ilkor: Database Migration has started
You might be aware we had decided to use two different databases to store game related information. Microsoft SQL Server for the majority of the data and MongoDB for all the map data.
Recently we scrapped SQL completely and will be 100% Mongo. Currently we are migrating across. Hopefully we'll be finished with this before the end of October. It certainly is the right choice for Ilkor, there is no doubt about that, but there is quite a learning curve for us, coming from a SQL background.
If anyone is interested in the finer technical detail then by all means drop us a message and we'll be only too happy to discuss the topic in more depth.
One rather large advantage is the fact that MongoDB is free. So that suits us just fine considering the game will be free to play.
Ilkor: Latest Development News
Hey there!
Many apologises. It's been a little while since our last blog entry. I can't believe just how quickly the time goes when you are busy
And we sure have been busy!!! It's now been a month since we went live with ilkor.com. The site seems to be holding up nicely.
In that time we've had a surprising amount of people signup to be part of the playtest, especially considering it isn't due to commence until June 2012. Having said that we do expect to get the playtesters involved much sooner than that.
We've also refined the website during the month of July, it has already gone through a number of updates mostly centred around performance and optimization improvements. I think we've managed to reduce the image sizes by about 3/4. The site now runs alot quick and we've had some very positive feedback.
On the development front we're working on the character creation process and will be involving our playtesters over the next few months to ensure what we're doing is right. I can't say much more about this here other than the setup will be a two step process. Players will be able to join and get playing very quickly.
We've also made a fairly big technology architecture change. We're now using MongoDB for our database needs. Originally we were going to be using SQL Server and Mongo just for the map components but now the entire game engine will be run off MongoDB.
The only exception might be our messaging and forum system. We've been exploring the idea of integrating phpBB into the game system. This uses php and either mySQL or MS-SQL. Our investigation has concluded it could be the best choice for Ilkor and although the integration won't be that straightforward it is possible. With some luck we should have this in place and ready for exclusive use by our playtesters by the end of the year.
Other than that we've been getting a fair amount of coverage on the various PBM and Gaming Forums and will soon be putting together a small low key marketing campaign to help spread the word of Ilkor further afield.
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.