You’ve reached the main Draedan Entertainment site on the net. This site is a dedicated developers blog and information hub for all that is our newest project, Ashianae’s Journey. Below you will find a blog documenting the games development while the rest of the site contains valuable information about the project.
Ashianae’s Journey is an online role-playing/strategy game focused primarily on an expansive storyline and questing. Players are immersed in an environment that is alive and available for many types of interaction, and where people are encouraged to become involved in all levels of game society.
As stated about, this main page is a dedicated blog. Please do not hesitate to post comments and respond to my posts.. and don’t be afraid to ask questions!
I know it has been a little while since I’ve been able to update you with anything real good, so I figured I would throw a bone in your general direction. I have been working on some ideas for this AW Expo video presentation I’ll be doing and in the process worked on a little sneak peek of one of the main cities, Dekarne. Take a look at this video and share with me your thoughts. Take your motion sickness pills before hand! This isn’t necessarily a finalized product by any means, but I figured it would serve well to give you all a look into one of our cities.
In an effort to figure out just what exactly draws people into a game I’ve done a lot of reading online about online RPGs, MMOs, etc to hopefully impact Ashianae’s Journey in a positive way. There is an incredible article at Gamesutra.com called “Rethinking the MMO” which can be found at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070326/sorens_01.shtml - the article is good and provides some insight on features and concepts needed in order to successfully pull off an MMO. While the article includes a great deal of information for someone willing to read a bit, the most important aspect mentioned in the article is game play that is fun. That’s to say, one of the biggest game killers can be “boring game play”. This leads to the question of “How do you make your game fun?” It’s a question that plagues me consistently, because while I can envision our game being fun, and including elements that tend to make games fun.. how can you be sure that your concept will lead to “fun” game play, and keep people engaged?
Every so often various Active Worlds community projects get the ability to put their project “out” there for everyone to see and experience in some form or fashion. One of the newer events on the block to provide this service in AW, is the Active Worlds Expo which is a yearly event. Last year we participated for our first game, AWRPG (Active Worlds Role Playing Game), and because that booth was a great success we were more than happy to oblige the invitation we received this year to showcase both AWRPG and Ashianae’s Journey. This year however we will not only have booths for both games, but we will be giving a presentation on Ashianae’s Journey, specifically relating to the steps involved in creating an Indie (independent) RPG.
There are an incredible amount of things that factor into the creation of an RPG, many of which we are discovering along the way and hopefully failing at (quickly) and then correcting (just as quickly). While there are an incredible amount of factors that go into the creation of RPGs, not all of them are interesting or things you want to hear about which brings me to the point of this here post: What would you like to know about, when it comes to the creation of RPGS? Let us know, and we’ll include them in our presentation and do our best to give you a glimpse of how those things have effected Ashianae’s Journey. So… What do you want to hear about? What do you want to see? Are there things you’d like to hear about that don’t exactly pertain to the creation of the game, but relate to the final outcome of the game itself? If so, let us know!
More updates about Ashianae’s Journey to come soon. Thanks for reading!
The past few weeks have been a whirlwind, and on their own do a decent job of explaining my lack of posting. Between finishing up my work and internship in Colorado Springs at RTA Architects, driving back to Kansas, cruising to Cozumel, and making my way back home has not left much room for blogging. Life’s hard, isn’t it?
This does not mean though that the absence from blogging has meant an absence from working on Ashianae’s Journey. On the contrary, progress seams to be flying all around us. Significant strides have been made on the realm programming, and in the last two weeks much has developed on the art front. Realm technology now allows us to limit a players building to a specific area which a month ago was a serious bump in the road. The HUD development continues to move along, evolve and improve. Additionally our artists have churned out an incredible amount of content over the last month.
The past week in game development land has been an interesting one. I always find that when beginning a new project, or in our case refining the scope of an existing one, there are usually a million ideas that all fly in completely different directions. A couple of months ago I read an article on gameproducer.net that talked about setting three goals or targets for your project to easily help you decide “yay” or “nay” when it comes to new features. I’ve kind of taken this idea to heart and modified it to fit the goal of Ashianae’s Journey. I sat down at lunch today and jotted down a few notes about things that would be realistic and valuable goals for our game. We look to provide the following to player:
- A customizable and interactive environment.
- A high level of depth and character immesion.
- An experience that is fun.
In my opinion and from the research I’ve done, this last point is almost painfully, and obviously the most important goal on the list. While the others are important, you could almost include them as sub points. As it stands now, we’re pulling out all the stops in the Active Worlds software to make a game that can compete with other games in the industry, as many games created by individual third parties on the AW engine seem to fail when it comes to modern features. The company that owns the software however seems to very naturally come up with unique approaches that make their projects *feel* like games. This is our goal with Ashianae.
So that brings me to talking a little about two of the very important factors of the game itself - the two cities, and the culture of the Ashianae.. So allow me to elaborate a bit for you here.
Ashianae is a civilization of people that occupy a number of island chains, off the coast of a small neighboring continent, Draeda. Each island within the chain is usually comprised primarily of an entire city, as most of the islands are fairly small. In addition to one large city, some contain villages that branch off towards the coasts. Within each chain of islands is what modern civilizations would consider to be a “Capital” island, a place where the local seat of government power resides. The entire civilization of Ashianae is what one might compare to that of the mythological Atlantis - that is to say, the people there are spiritually and scientifically advanced and have under their control powerful weapons and utilities. It is this advance in scientific and mystical knowledge that has lead to an incredibly hostile environment amongst neighboring islands and island chains. Indeed, the neighboring relationships are tense and often violent even though all within our civilization claim to live under the flag of the Ashianae.
Our story, Ashianae’s Journey, takes place on just one of these capital islands, and is controled by two large cities: Dekarne and Karnaires.
Dekarne is the sprawling city that resides on the surface of the island, while Karnaires is a city that resides below ground within a large magma chamber and cavern. The two island cultures differ incredibly, but ultimately rely on one another for survival. The Karnaires provide the top side culture with the energy source that allows their civilization and island to thrive, while Dekarne provides food, water, and other natural resources. Typically the Dekarne is dominated by cut-throat politics, while Karnaires thrives amongst dangerous and volatile death matches.
At a later time I will have to go into more detail on the cities and their roles in the game itself, but to give you a generic idea: Players will be able to reside in either city, and be able to take part in the politics of each city. It is our goal to allow players to feel as immersed and involved in both city and political life as possible, for those players who are interested in role-playing.
In the mean time, here are some screen shots of the two cities… I’m sure you can guess which is which.
And finally, I thought it might be nice to end this picture with an update on some of our progress as of late. We’ve been working with our graphic artist on the team to do some mock ups of what our HUD will consist of, and what it will look like. Please keep in mind that this is a very basic tool set at this moment, and the icons you see along the top side of the screen will be changed completely to match out environment.
Drop me a line and let me know what you think about all of the above!
Sometimes the hardest thing about being what one may call an “Indie Developer” is the amount of time and tole all of this game development takes on the normal person. It’s been a long time since I’ve approached a project with such a strong desire for it to succeed, at least in terms of Active Worlds project. The last time I pulled this kind of attitude, AWRPG and Draeda popped out. Already this development has taken its tole on my ability to think about other things, other issues: I’m consumed! I suppose that’s a good thing for development, and a bad thing for people who are tired of hearing about the game. This balance between life, work, and extra curricular activities (Ashianae) time is a hard balance. I often find myself jotting down ideas and scheming while working on Revit at work.
I’m partially hoping that at some point the constant gears in my head will cease, but in other ways hoping it doesn’t. I’m constantly scheming up ways (or trying to) to keep players involved and having fun within the game idea we’ve been working on. Lately we have been putting a lot of thought into new stats, spell creation, and the division between the various spells. After some scheming today and some talking with Allen last night, we decided on four different “Trees” of spells, that would help improve diversity among the player ranks. You can read about those here. The idea is to give players a few different routes to go in terms of spells and stat improvement, but at the same time allow players to conquer all of it if they so desire. As of yet, all stats in Ashianae’s Journey are “trainable” - that’s to say, they will all improve with usage. Some people have expressed concern that this would in fact not result in diversity, but I propose this argument: Take two players, each of which spends 100 hours improving their stats. Player A who spends 100 hours on only improving her mana and Fire abilities. Player B spends 100 hours improving his fire, water, arcane and mana abilities. Player A is going to generally have much stronger spells than player B at this point.
At this point we’re still open to the idea of making things a little more exclusive than that though, and I’m curious to hear compelling arguments on why the above is a bad idea. One such alternative might be to limit characters to learning either Water or Fire spells, but let them freely dabble in both Arcane and Divinity, or limit those as well so you end up with players who have various combinations of the four different spell trees. Any input on the above would be greatly appreciated!
One reason we’ve been so interested in not limiting players like this is to let players have as much freedom as possible. Making things like PvP not a necessity in the game, but an optional thing, to me makes our original concept completely do-able and fair. If players aren’t interested in conquering everything, they won’t have to in order to progress along in the game. However if players do spend the time to “master” everything, they would have a leg up in PvP and PvE situations. Is that fair? Most of me says yes, but part of me is a bit hesitant.
Apart from working out a bit more on spell theory, I’ve continued to sculpt some of our natural environments. It is an aim to make this environment as rich and fun to explore as possible. While we have used some automatic placement of trees and such, I am going back in and layering in more detail over those original tree objects to give things a little more oomph. Here is a screenshot of one such area I’ve been working on a bit more with a meandering deer in the shot.
The hand sculpting of these environments is a tiring process but ultimately I think these areas feel more developed and realistic than the areas that have just had a layer of randomized trees entered. As always, comments are welcome on anything I’ve said above - and they’re appreciated!
“Hello World!” (I say in the stereotypical WordPress first post tone). Recently we (and be we I mean I) decided to change this page up a bit. Up until this evening this webpage was not a blog in any aspect, other than the fact that our front page ordered all of my posts (which have now been dispersed and moved to other information appropriate pages) in chronological order. Tonight that has changed. For quite some time I’ve been stuck on pondering how I could get more visitors and readers involved directly in the exciting process of our new development without willy-nilly opening the doors to our software to just any old person. While staring at my admin panel, it dawned on me and smacked me in the head like a fresh brick: BLOG you fool!
And so here I am, blogging till my little hearts content. As of this evening, this page will document much of our development process in the hopes of getting some of you readers involved in watching how our game shapes up to ultimately spark some interest in this new(ish) project of ours. So perhaps I should start at the beginning, as it tends to be an excellent place to begin.. erm.. yes.
Ashianae’s Journey is a project started by myself and a few other brave (insane) citizens on a 3D chat program called Active Worlds. For roughly six years now, a few of us have been developing and supporting a game within that client called “AWRPG - The Land of Draeda”. Over the years we’ve had a blast and learned a ton. Years back we were commissioned by some Dutch folk to create a 3D game using the platform for a website called Games.nl. After a few snaffoos that project washed up, and we were left to our own devices back in AWRPG. Years later, here we are: taking what I consider to be a bold step forward. Three months ago we purchased our own license of the software to develop our own game on. This software is not open source and therefore we do not have the rights to change the programming of the engine itself, but we are free to develop on top of it until we drop… And that is what we’re doing!
In the past couple of months we’ve been working feverishly with various groups to bring this little dream together. Magine, of www.turtleflight.com has graciously provided us with a license to use her RPG II software, which is what one might call a “plugin” to the AW software (without being as cool as a true plugin). This software allows us to operate a “Game Master” which in the most basic language controls all user stats. This Game Master is essentially what we in Active Worlds call a Bot… In generic terms, a bot is the equivalent in AW of Artificial Intelligence. These bots can keep track of player records and accounts, and function as all the NPCs players interact with. We’ve also been working with a couple of citizens, Tim and Joel, to get some cool terrain forms within the world that will make things very nice… So far all of that is set.
At this point in the game we are working heavily on setting up the various Game Master settings, testing out its features, and setting up the infrastructure of the game itself. Setting up the physical environment players interact with is also moving along nicely.
I feel as though I’ve blathered on long enough for one evening. As I make my posts and discuss the progress we make in various areas, I will try to give you, the reader, more background on the topic itself. For example, if tomorrow I post about our NPC development (which I just might!), I will do my best to give you a better understanding of where we are in the process, and where we would like to head. In the mean time, if you’re just discovering this blog feel free to look around at the other pages we’ve provided to get some more information, although some of them lack content for the moment.
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