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.
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!
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