Ilkor: New Logo for the Wiki
We've got a new logo for our gazetteer.ilkor.com wiki website. Our artist Simon produced it the other day and we now have to upload it to the website.
Ilkor Gazetteer Logo
If you haven't visited the wiki in a while then now might be a good time to do so. It now contains a fair amount of content but is some way from being complete. I guess it will never be complete as it needs to grow and expand with the game. 
By the way from a dev perspective things are really starting to hot up now and we're getting back into the Map development in a big way, hopefully we'll have something nice to show in a couple of months time.
Beta Launch date pushed back
We're sad to inform you that we have had to delay the beta launch. Hopefully you won't be too disappointed and that you understand that most indie games are done in spare time and therefore delays are inevitable.
This itself is by no means justification, and while we had every intention of making the original deadline of the 2nd June, it has been obvious for a little while now that we are not going to be ready. The team had a meeting with regards to where we are with the game and have decided that we are not willing to compromise the quality nor integrity of the gaming experience just to meet a particular deadline.
As Scott (one of the GMs) said, "you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. Heck, look how long it took Blizzard to just release Diablo 3!".
The design and development is simply very time-consuming and we have slipped up on a number of fronts which I won't go into detail right now. I think over the coming weeks we'll try to communicate our development roadmap a little clearer and give you guys some feedback on how we are tracking.
The newly revised launch date is now 9th Feb 2013!! Seems like a long way off, but we feel this is now much more achievable. We might even be early Our forecast shows that we should be ready towards the latter part of this year (4 to 5 months time), but felt the launch immediately before or after Christmas would have less of an impact.
...And now some good news
If you want a sneak preview of the Character Creation (the official signup process) you can do so by going to: http://alpha.ilkor.com
Although the Character Creation process is now developed, there are a few known aspects that are still not complete:
- Character Portraits (hand drawn illustrations by Simon that appear in the centre of the dail)
- Character Avatars (again, we are waiting on Simon. Currently we only have 'some' of the facial parts for male and female humans & male dwarves)
- Content / Copy for items like Settlements & Feats.
Please go and check it out and give it a good test, supplying us with plenty of feedback. Undoubtedly there are small snags and fine tuning to be addressed. Performance might be a little slow as we are hosting alpha on a 'development' server.
You are welcome to go through the 'Character Creation' process as many times as you want. You character won't be saved, remember this is just for testing purposes only.
And Finally...A Knowledge Quest
In the coming days we'll also be announcing the first 'Knowledge Quest' that you will be invited to take part in. You'll learn more about this in a separate announcement to this.
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: 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.
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: 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: Banners
Sorry guys but I haven't much time to give a huge update this week. Dev is going well and I promise to give some feedback on this real soon.
Recently Simon Lee Tranter has helped us produce a few animated GIF and Flash banners that will be used to advertise and promote Ilkor. The drive here is to spread the word and interest while the game continues through it's development stages.
While we are not aggressively promoting Ilkor yet, we are trying to attract interest and there are a number of forums that have shown interest in allowing us to put up banners. Closer to Beta launch we'll spend much more time and effort on coming up with a real cool marketing campaign.
Orco Banner
Vega Banner
Ilkor: Metadata Screens
I mentioned a few days ago about revealing some of the GameMaster screens we have recently completed.
Of late alot of dev time has been spent producing the screens which will be used to populate Arcadia (game world) with data. We've produced about 50% of these to date and architecturally have a solid pattern that we are now following. You can get some idea from the screens below.
Within the next few months we should be ready to start to capture 'real' game data such as weapons, shields, armour, spells, magical items, monsters etc.
You might notice from the screenshots that each item has an associated icon and image. Simon, our artist, is busy producing these. Currently we are just using placeholders.
GameMaster - Base Race List
GameMaster - Base Class Detail