January 26, 2008 - Bigger Changes Afoot, Dropped Out of Contest

The core team members are still continuing to make progress towards producing a playable game, however life does often interfere, and so everything is way behind schedule. I think this is pretty typical of most "indie" projects such as ours. To that end we've come to realize that there's no chance of winning the DreamGames contest, so we've officially dropped out. Best of luck to all the other teams involved! It's been a great learning experience.

As for Arcanoria, we still have big plans! But our dates are being pushed back a bit. At this time we don't really want to speculate about when something will happen. However, our near term future plans may or may not include some or all of the following:

• Updating to the new improved TGEA 1.1 which will be released some time "soon" according to garagegames.
• Integrating the new AFX for TGEA in full.
• Possibly integrating Ogre3D as an alternate graphics engine instead of Torque's native DirectX graphics.

As you can see, these are some significant changes to our base technology. I wish it weren't necessary but I do feel that the current state of TGEA is too lacking in many places and desperately needs help. Wish us luck!

December 19, 2007 - Scripts Reverted, Engine Change Ahead?

Unfortunately, it's taking longer than we hoped. Everything is! So we've decided to scrap the original plan and move forward on the older codebase from a few weeks ago. It's mostly stable at this point, so we'll be focused on keeping content development moving while we consider what to do in the "Big Picture". More info to come soon...

December 4, 2007 - AFX Update Prompts Major Script Rewrite!

We have decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the recently released AFX for TGEA Release Candidate 1. It looks really solid so far, we love it! However, over the past several months we've accumulated lots of code in our game that has no purpose, or was incomplete in implementation, or we've simply gone with an alternative code solution. So we're taking a different approach than might be expected. Instead of porting the complex AFX changes into our existing complex codebase, we've scrapped all the code completely and replaced it with an empty folder! We're either incredibly brave and visionary, or incredibly stupid and delusionary... History will be our judge!

All that being said, we've actually begun the process of adding things back in, a line at a time, and in a new file hierarchy that's designed specifically for Arcanoria, instead of a generic demo to show off engine features. It's a painful process but I believe we'll be all the stronger for it in the long run, and hopefully the medium run too. I'm hoping we can get back to implementing new game features in a week or two. Wish us luck!

November 27, 2007 - Sounds Added, Cleanup Continues

We've recently spent a bit of time finding some sounds to start with during combat, and working out the details of how those sounds get triggered. It all seems to be working now, more or less. In order to do this, we wound up doing a significant rewrite of the player/monster object script code. This will be to our benefit in the long run of course.

There's not a lot else to report right now, except that we've been working hard at cleaning up various combat related issues including animations, hit and damage calculations, etc. We're finally getting around to implementing the system we've designed and spending time reviewing how it works, since it's not a simple system.

November 13, 2007 - Model Pack Issues, GODMODE

As we've been adding more and more content to Arcanoria we're running into some limitations of the model packs we've purchased. They've been written by different authors/artists, meaning there is no standardization. The model packs have always been intended to get us to the point where we can attract artists to help us with our own model designs, however at this time we have no actively dedicated modelers on our team so we're having to "work with what we've got". Some of our model packs don't have ANY LODs, which is a huge performance problem! LOD is Level Of Detail, and it's the way the engine deals with objects that are far away from the rendering camera. As an object is further and further away from the camera, the engine renders it smaller and smaller on the screen, and when it reaches a certain number of pixels the engine can render a less complex polygon mesh in its place. But those pixel levels and less complex polygon meshes must be built into the object itself. Unfortunately none of the Arteria models (which we use heavily) seem to have any LODs built in. This is a huge unanticipated performance problem, and every time our player character faces towards our skeleton dungeon (built with the Arteria dungeon construction pack) the frame rate drops immensely. On my reasonably powerful system I'm seeing framerates drop from 30fps to 5fps just by facing in that direction. I can get over 90fps by facing the ocean. Obviously this is a priority for us to fix, but it probably means replacing/revamping all the Arteria models (and some others) and that will mean a lot of time. Yuck!

Our new male character Adam has new clothes, thanks to team member Gustavo. Adam's looking more "medieval" now!

We have begun implementing some "slash commands", including /exp (shows your character's current experience and level in the chat window) and /godmode (a cheat code which gives 10x damage dealt, 10x health and energy, more running speed, etc. for testing purposes).

November 5, 2007 - Quest Progress, New Monsters

We have been adding more AI bot monsters and mobs to the starting zone. Integrated with these are basic combat quests and new npcs. We implemented our first "non-linear" quest concept, something we’re hoping players will really like. We even have our first "dungeon", a small cave system that involved testing the layering of terrain pieces. This layering process has changed the way we approach map building and will inevitably lead to the recreation of the current map, but it offers us many more options than were previously available.

We have a new male character now, as well as our female, which we have been using for testing combat animations. Animations have been a challenge, and on our todo list now is a rework of the animation script (more ripping old stuff and adding new). Seems like the deeper we go, the more things we find to do! In the end the changes are for the best though.

October 27, 2007 - AI & Combat Improvements, Radar HUD, more!

Been busy with improving our AI for monsters this week. Well, not making too many logic changes yet, but working at making the code more readable and useable. We've also implemented a snazzy new Radar HUD, which shows other monsters in your vicinity. The Radar HUD still needs work, as we're planning to add a scrolling map, and we're having problems with some sort of alpha flashing/flickering on the compass overlay, but it's basically working correctly already. Here's a screenshot of the new Radar HUD in action.

We took a big leap last week and got rid of the entire database we had and started from scratch, all in keeping with our "out with the old, in with the new" philosophy. We're really trying to keep things lean and mean going forward, and not add in stuff that doesn't fit our needs. So after we did that of course we had a bunch of issues with player account creation, character creation and login, and on top of that the characters have no stats any more, so we had to add in just a bare minimum of what's needed for our current starter quests and combat system.

On the content side, Chris has been making our world look fantastic, with lots of new stuff laying around including barrels, fish, canoes, tables, etc., plus lighting inside some of the buildings in the main village, some new ruins on the southeast coast hills with a couple of skeletons hanging around for good measure, and they're linked into the quest given by the woman near the docks.

We've been doing quite a bit of general code cleanup across the entire codebase. The fact is that all our script code started off as a demo, and as such there are numerous cases where things are coded for a specific purpose (which of course we don't often share). So our biggest job over time is to rip out the dead stuff and replace all the stuff we can't use with new and improved modular, easy-to-use, no-nonsense, lemon-scented fresh new code. It's a long and difficult task that seems never to end, but of course that's not true, fortunately. The battle continues!

October 22, 2007 - First Quest Running, Simple Inventory

We have a (very) basic quest up and running, and we've implemented a simple inventory system. This involved many things including creating an NPC, setting player object based quest flags during combat, and doing some GUI work to create the popup window in which the NPC interacts with the player.

In other news, we've reset our SVN repository to save space. Would you believe it's impossible to delete old revisions without creating a whole new repository? This was a bit tricky, but saved us quite a bit of room on our limited space SVN hosting account.

October 13, 2007 - Bugfixes Galore, L3DT Mastery

Been working on automation, server side scripting, and database integration. We've added in a lot of new code from GryphonGame, including updates to player stats and inventory handling. I've been finding more and more buggy or incomplete aspects to the TGEA base engine we have, and it's becoming quite frustrating! I would have a hard enough time learning it if it were complete and bugfree, considering its size, but the learning process takes even longer because sometimes I follow code clues to ends that don't make any sense, like for some functionality that was ripped out by Garage Games when they shipped TGEA, or for areas of engine functionality that are only partially implemented.

We've also been working hard at filling out the initial area map, including model and terrain issues. TGEA can be very fussy when compared with its older and more low-tech sibling TGE in terms of accepting models for in-game display. So we're having to go back to the source files for much of the artwork which we thought was going to be "drop-in", and re-create the DTS file format that the engine requires. Just more hoops to jump through, but we're getting there!

As far as the terrain itself, both myself and Chris Dodson have been working at learning more about the really fantastic terrain creation tool L3DT in depth. We're coming up with some much more dramatic landscapes now, and I think this will really pay off for us in the long run, as the terrain can really provide some added interest to an area.

October 3, 2007 - Delays, Updates, Progress!

In the last week we've come quite far! But alas, not quite far enough to have something playable yet. So unfortunately it looks like we're pushing back our demo release for the 2nd time, due to technical difficulties. Ah, the life of the indie developer! Sorry folks, we'll have to get back to you on another date for a release. Hopefully it'll be really soon now!

On the good side there is a lot to say. We've integrated patrolling skeleton monsters, and the Ava female human character. We've made some engine mods to help with dropping players on top of the terrain instead of underneath it (no simple task with TGEA). We've modified the Ava and Adam textures so they look more Medieval. We've done a lot of database tweaking in preparation for quests, combat and class-related persistent data. We have a working melee combat system, although it's Very basic right now. ;) All told, there have been 60 updates to our SVN repository in the last week - like I said, there's a lot happening!

September 25, 2007 - Database Integration Successful!

MySQL has been installed as our server database, and we've been able to successfully connect to it from our script code, including player login and authentication, account creation, and character creation. Once the player is all setup and goes into the game, we're able to successfully load their attributes from the database (including things like their level, experience points, physical location in the world, strength, etc.). No more starting over every login at the initial spawn spot, yay!

We've been hard at work on tweaking our initial terrains, as with the Atlas format all modifications need to be done outside the game engine (the old legacy terrain can be modified from inside the engine, but not the newer Atlas format which we use) using L3DT. We've been able to generate the terrain, complete with hills and valleys, grass and sand, and water as well (the water looks fantastic in TGEA!). We've also been able to customize the terrain by editing the heightmap and texture map in Photoshop. So we've been able to carve roads into the landscape, and give them special textures.

Now that our terrain situation is getting under control, Dave MacLean has been working in the Mission Editor to position some of our new assets in the world. We've uploaded just a few early screenshots of some cool new art assets we've made, but we'll be having lots more screenshots (and probably a video as well) very soon, within the next week. So please stay tuned for more, things are moving very quickly now, and visible progress is just around the corner this week!

September 19, 2007 - AFXA P4 and GRYPHON Merged; Terrain and Model Updates

Okay, it finally looks like we're pretty much done with the major engine merges, with AFXA P4 (including TGEA 1.0.3) completely integrated and behind us now, in addition to the merging of all the Gryphon MMOKit code and scripts! This gives us a huge amount of new functionality and now we have the large task of making it all hang together properly and customizing it for Arcanoria. This is already underway, and we've finally been able to do some actual product branding, inserting our own Arcanoria name and logos into the client software. This has been a long time coming!!!

As far as the game world itself goes, we've got our first "permanent" Atlas terrain in place, thanks to team member Chase Brown. Yahoo!! Things are proceeding on several other fronts concurrently, with team members working on quest content, GUI updates, storyline, models and textures, class and combat implementation, musical themes, and more!

We're also working on a potentially major solution to the problem of creating humanoid animations for all our character models, using truebones.com motion capture animations. Dave MacLean has been working hard at rigging their skeleton to our new Human model (which Dave also has recently created to replace the Frogames pack which we weren't happy with). It'll be boom or bust though, as we've been having a bit of trouble with the rigging effort. If we can get it to work, we would have access to over 1300 different unique animations, giving us tremendous flexibility in creating a fun, creative and interactive environment for players.

September 11, 2007 - AFXA P3 Merged! P4 Underway... and a New Team PM!

AFXA P3 (including TGEA 1.0.2) has been successfully merged with our codebase. Yay! Now AFXA P4 is out (including the newly released TGEA 1.0.3 as well!), which means more work, but a better engine for it. That's already underway and should be completed in the next few days.

Team member Dave MacLean (a.k.a. Beowulf) has been promoted to the position of Project Manager, in addition to his other contributions to our game's Art group. This will be a huge shot in the arm to the team as it will allow us all to work more efficiently. Thanks Dave!!

In other news, Arcanoria Team composer Giacomo Cataldo has been hard at work on our first musical compositions and we expect to have something to show in the next few days. In the meantime please don't hesitate to check out Giacomo's website (http://www.music.cataldomedia.com) for samples of his other work.

September 5, 2007 - AFXA/TGEA 1.0.2 Update Merge Underway

It's taking longer than we thought it would, but our big update really is underway at this point and I'm expecting to have a newly merged engine codebase working this week, including functionality from TGEA 1.0.2, AFXA P3, and the latest Gryphon MMOKIT modifications. There's a lot riding on this update, so it's our highest priority and should be done in the next few days. Wish me luck!

August 27, 2007 - AFXA/TGEA engine updates; Combat System; Backstory completed

Recently TGEA has been updated to 1.0.2 by Garage Games, and we're in the process of putting in place the corresponding AFXA release. Things are looking good so far. To go with that, we've been getting some administrative and technical things worked out so that more of our team can work effectively on the codebase. What this translates to is that we're hoping to have the first installment of our newly designed combat, skill, guild, and levelling system in place for internal testing very soon! What's under the hood is the excellent work that Chris has been doing to flesh out our first couple of combat classes, and how all that orchestration is going to work. While we do already have the existing combat system that's native to the engine, that will all be replaced with our own completely custom system. This will be a huge step forward for Arcanoria.

Also, our game's backstory (for internal use in development of quests, etc.) has been completed by Sean, and it's great! We hope to have something ready for early release soon, so that everyone else out there can have a glimpse of the world we're creating.

August 17, 2007 - Testing Delayed One Month!

Unfortunately, for various reasons, we need to push back our deadlines by 30 days, in order to bring together something testable. This past few weeks has been difficult because of some big issues with some of our most important developers, and we even had to cancel one of our weekly meetings. However, we still feel that TGEA is our best platform, and we're dealing with some "extra issues" there, but it will be to the benefit of the project eventually. Thanks for your patience everyone!

August 10, 2007 - Class System Updates

As promised, we've been making some great progress on our newly created class system. Thus far we have designed the first 10 levels of three classes, including: Warrior, Lifebringer, and Necromancer. The Warrior class will include specialty sub-trees for the Archer specialty, Berserker and Defensive Fighting. The Lifebringer will have Restoration, Consecration, and Purification sub-trees. The Necromancer will have subtrees for Annihilation, Shadow, and Incarnation. We're hoping to have these committed to code very soon so we can start testing them against each other for balance.

Our Team continues to grow, with three new team members being added in the last couple of weeks. However, I have to admit it's been a slow week this week, due to personal issues for me. I look forward to having more updates this coming week!

August 1, 2007 - L3DT Experiments, Skill System Progress

We've been working with L3DT to create Atlas terrain for use with our new TGEA engine. It's fun, but there are some pitfalls we're working through, getting the scale of the world figured out, figuring out what all the buttons do, etc. Also, the process of basic level creation has located some other issues, like the fact that TGEA is missing the vitally important fxShapeReplicator function (allows instancing of objects to use less memory and bandwidth when repeating multiple times). So we've had to do a few engine mods already, but so far so good.

We're also making some fantastic progress on our new skill/class system, and we expect to have some significant news on this very soon - stay tuned!

July 25, 2007 - TGEA Cutover!

We've taken the plunge and are in the process of moving over to the incredible Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA). TGEA will provide us with unlimited terrain sizes (using the new Atlas technology) which are really important for a massive world like Arcanoria. We were able to get Jeff Faust to agree to take us on as beta testers for his upcoming release of AFXA (Arcane FX Advanced for TGEA) and this is helping tremendously with our porting of code from the Gryphon game repository. This is a major leg up for our codebase!

In related news, Arcanoria Art Director Matt Freyman continues to make progress with the new Atlas terrain generation (part of TGEA) using L3DT. We should have a lot to show pretty soon (in the next 2 or 3 weeks) so stay tuned for some serious terrain updates, screenshots and videos upcoming!

On the game's core system development, team member Chris Dodson has been doing a bang-up job working through the details of combat, player levels, skills, classes, etc. We're on schedule to have the combat system being coded starting this coming week!

New team member Sean Mulhall has been brewing up a fantastic backstory for our world, concerning the mysterious ancient race known as (what else???) the Arcanorians. We'll have more on that soon as well, but the super-short version is that the Arcanorians were great at magic, and saved the world once long ago. But then something terrible happened...

July 18, 2007 - Dragons Flying Around! Engine Changes Afoot?

We got our first models in from Gustavo, and the results are looking great! We've got screen shots of our new Dragon, Bunny, and Bear models up in our gallery section for your enjoyment. We've also got the Human main city Morningsun mapped out, and that terrain will be under heavy construction this coming week.

In potentially even bigger news, we're seriously considering switching from Torque Game Engine (TGE) over to Torque Game Engine Advanced (TGEA). TGEA would provide us with unlimited terrain sizes (a big advantage for players who prefer a seamless world!) and a huge graphics upgrade as compared to TGE's relatively older rendering technology. The big hurdle is development time, but we're hoping this won't set us back by much, if at all. More to come soon!

July 10, 2007 - New Team Members, Team Meeting

The Arcanoria team keeps growing larger as more and more talented developers bring their ideas and enthusiasm to our project. This week we are joined by Gustavo Munoz, Dave Maclean (BeoWulf/Beo) and Chris Dodson. Gustavo is an accomplished freelance artist, based in Spain. He's already created many different character models and monsters which we are planning to use in Arcanoria, and Gustavo has graciously agreed to customize these models for us as well. Dave Maclean has taken the initiative and started working on our Gnome character model and it's already looking fantastic! Dave is also heading up his own project, Neoastra, which is a sci-fi based MMO that we're excited to see more about too. Chris Dodson is a well-rounded talent with education and experience in everything from modeling to programming/scripting to game design to content creation. We're hoping to get Chris involved heavily with our guild system this week, as this is at the core of the Arcanoria game system. This should really help us as we transition into doing the code to implement our game system, which we've been excited about (re)starting on. Welcome to the Arcanoria Team gentlemen!

We had our first "Official" team meeting last night, using skype (we've had many informal meetings before of course), and it was a great opportunity for some of the newer team members to chat with the rest of the crew. We also discussed several important Arcanoria topics including character racial models, region maps and terrains, and more. We're planning on holding our meetings weekly from now on, as it will be vitally important for us to stay coordinated in our efforts considering our aggressive release schedule!

July 4, 2007 - Player Races Revealed!

Here is a list of the races available in Arcanoria and a short description of each:

• Humans: A structured society of farmers and merchants who value strength, honor, chivalry, courage and valor. They have a large military to protect their borders from intrusion. They live in the fertile northeastern area of the main continent, protected by the nearby mountains, in a relative paradise of plentiful natural resources and beautiful scenery.
• Norsemen: A loosely organized group of nomadic humans who prefer hunting and outdoor life as compared with the dull drudgery of maintaining cities. They live in small villages and camps on the large northeastern island of Frostgard, where they enjoy all that nature has to offer them, from the snowy mountains to the more temperate southern regions. Norsemen speak loudly and proudly, and love a good hunt above all else. They are a hardy people, accustomed to the cold weather. Norsemen can also sense nearby animals.
• Elves: The Elves are a quiet race of tall and attractive people who live in shining forest cities and in small villages and tree huts. But don't let their relative silence fool you into thinking that they are weak, for they protect their beloved forests and lakes from harm with a vengeance and a very long memory. Elves craft the finest bows in the world, and know how to use them quite well.
• Dark Elves: The Dark Elves are a powerful and seclusive race mostly living in one vast underground city beneath the central mountain range. They are uncomfortable in direct sunlight, can see quite well in the dark, and are masters of stealth, and the magical arts. Dark Elves can be very difficult to spot if they are trying not to be seen. Dark Elves unfortunately have some political problems, however, as there are dozens of factions vying for control of the central city government. Dark Elves are distant relatives of the Elves, who separated long ago because their taller and fairer cousins were too concerned with shepherding the trees and animals rather than making their own destiny in the world through the study and use of the arcane arts, especially the ones having to do with the element of Fire.
• Gnomes: The Gnomes are a smallish race of humanoids, living in the northwestern region of the main continent near the mountains, which is extremely rich in mineable deposits. Gnomes love precious gems and metals such as gold, platinum and diamonds, and they tend to be expert miners. They rarely leave their villages because it would take them farther away from their mines, but occasionally an adventurous Gnome will leave home in search of excitement and personal profit.
• Lizardfolk: A peaceful race of reptilian humanoids who live a nomadic/tribal existence in the harsh southwestern desert and salt flats. They are constantly searching for artifacts of an ancient time, in hopes that they may discover sources of magical power to help make their lives easier. They have already found a few interesting things...

June 28, 2007 - New Team Members; Races and Regions

We've added two new members to the Arcanoria team! James Dunlap brings his storytelling and design inspirations to Arcanoria. We hope to hear a lot from James as he brings new richness to the themes underlying and surrounding our game. Ed Johnson also brings many different skills to the group, including modeling, scripting and design. Welcome guys, great to have you!

Design work is progressing quickly this week. We've been working hard on defining the world's races and their respective regions. So far Rob's done a great job sketching out the Human region, and he's now hard at work on the Elven region. Matt has been working with our model pack for the Humans and has been able to increase the poly counts from about 900 to 2500, and it's looking much nicer now. We've also done quite a bit of discussion lately about how all the races will interact politically, including the Gnomes, Dark Elves, Norsemen, and Lizardfolk. We hope to have some backstory progress very soon!

We have now completed our transition over to webfaction.com and we're very impressed so far. It looks like a fantastic service which provides SVN, trac/wiki, and lots of other services which we may use in the future, plus full SSH account access, and some excellent support forums. Performance and stability also seem excellent.

June 21, 2007 - Matt Freyman Joins; Tech Changes; Necromancer Concept Art

We're very excited to announce that Matt Freyman has agreed to join the Arcanoria team! Matt brings lots of experience with modeling and drawing applications, along with some great game ideas as well as team management experience. By the way, Matt is also the Art Director on the Gryphon Game Development team. We're very proud to bring him on!

In other news, we've been making some infrastructure changes and refinements lately. We've decided to get a new host for our SVN/trac/wiki, which will give us more flexibility as to how we handle our data, which is growing. We've got two new accounts now, including a FREE one with CVSDUDE (thanks to Dave at Dream Games for setting this promotion up!) and a pretty cheap one with Web Faction. We've got some decisions to make and some transfers to do, so it's going to be a good bit of admin work this week.

Arcanoria artist Johan has struck again, twice! Last week he gave us our fantastic new logos and since then he has delivered a concept art piece showing a Necromancer (featured on the right of this article) and he's also working hard on our World Map, which is nearing completion and already looking fantastic. We look forward to showing the new map off very soon, so stay tuned! And we've also done a few website updates to show off some of Johan's excellent work. :) Check our Gallery page for more details.

Besides all that, we're hard at work on developing a new Points System which will help us to compensate our team members for their contributions once the game goes retail. We're still growing our development team and always looking for new team members so if you have any interest in our project please don't hesitate to let us know by sending an email to arcanor@arcanoria.com. We're planning an action packed summer in preparation for our initial public alpha release on August 31. We have an aggressive schedule and there will be a lot going on. Now's a great time to join our team and share all the fun of helping to develop the game system, art assets, music, and more!

June 14, 2007 - New Arcanoria Logo Graphics

We're really excited that Arcanoria team member Johan has done some wonderful new custom logo artwork for the project. Check them out in higher resolution by clicking on them!

June 10, 2007 - Summer is here!

We've been working hard trying to move ahead with administrative and game design issues this week. In particular we're working on the abilities for Necromancers and Druids. We've also been doing our best to create a solid backstory, but we've pushed that back for now as we don't want to limit our development of the game system too much. I also have begun making some inroads towards some musical theme work, which I've been looking forward to for a long time, since I come from a music background and own a commercial recording studio myself! I hope to have a more substantial audio update with the next news release, including a music sample for your listening pleasure.

June 3, 2007 - Gryphons, Orkim, Elves and More!

In some pretty seriously big news, I've been selected to manage the overall project team for Dream Games' flagship product, Gryphon. In addition I will be directly managing the project's website and sound/music efforts. Since Gryphon is a significant part of Arcanoria, this is a great thing for our team! It should mean we'll see some PR benefits and exposure due to my high profile position on this project which is very important to the indie game dev community.

We've recently recruited another new member to the Arcanoria team. Orkim has decided to join up and brings us some excellent skills including experience with C++, scripting, 3D modeling, and plenty of creativity. :) Welcome to the team Orkim!

In yet another stunning acquisition of fine models for our game world, we've just downloaded the brand new Elven Character Pack from Arteria Games. We're quite excited to see what this high quality model pack can do to add new life to Arcanoria. The pack includes two elven males (archer, knight) and two elven females (knight, NPC). They look fantastic, and should give our in-game elves a sophisticated look.

May 27, 2007 - Skeletons; New Team Member; Pod Radio

We've just made our latest asset pack purchase, picking up the highly acclaimed Drew FX Skeleton Pack. We hope this will help us get our first adventures off the ground quickly! This pack is very well documented with tutorial videos showing how to integrate and customize the skeletons into a game world.

After some discussions recently with Rob and a new 3D artist/animator named Juliet, I'm happy to announce that it looks like Juliet will be joining the Arcanoria team. Juliet will be a fantastic asset to Arcanoria as an experienced resource to help with customization of animations and model packs that we've licensed, and also eventually creating new assets unique to our world. Juliet mentioned that she was particularly interested in Arcanoria due to our commitment to non-violent character advancement and questing, citing it as something that many people in the gaming community have been missing, since most other RPGs take a traditional "hack and slash" approach to character advancement. We wholeheartedly agree, and we hope that we can prove to the gaming community that RPGs don't have to be violent to be fun!

DJ Veleck, who heads up Pod Radio (internet radio for the gamer community) has given Arcanoria some rotation in a very nice large banner space at the top of each page of his station's website, in addition to a smaller banner in other places. We hope that Pod Radio continues to thrive and increase their listenership, which will only help the gaming community, and our project as well. Thanks Veleck!

May 22, 2007 - Skype Aids Dev Meeting; Frogames Character Pack

We've had our first successful Skype meeting using voice chat for team communication to help us through a tricky discussion regarding our skill system, guilds, and religions. It went great and communications were much aided - our discussions were very fruitful and saved lots of time and misunderstandings that might have occurred if we had instead opted to use text chatting. Participants in the meeting were me (Arcanor), Rob, and Johan, calling in from 3 different countries (USA, England, Germany).

We've also made another new purchase of a license for the Frogames CS: Warriors and Commoners pack which is a resource designed for TGE (which we use). It allows for thousands of combinations to create unique characters for use in the game. It is going to save us MEGA time in development of NPCs in the game. Props go out to Christophe at Frogames for allowing us to take part in his pre-release Early Adopters program! Thanks Christophe!

Finally, we made a few minor changes to our website. I changed the look of the header on every page, moving things around a bit so that the Arcanoria main logo is in the middle, the small logo is on the left, and a new Site News block is available on the right side. I also added a couple of new pages: one new one for Downloads (also appearing in your menu bar for your convenience), and another private page for our Developers to have access to some useful server resources. It's very important to keep our Dev team happy and able to keep in close communication with each other. Team building is a never ending process. :)

May 20, 2007 - Arcanoria Mentioned in Dave Young Interview; and More...

I just wanted to take this opportunity to express our team's gratitude to Dave Young for mentioning our project (in a positive way) in his interview on Pod-Radio (http://pod-radio.net:8000) this past Friday morning. The interview was regarding Dream Games and their 1 Year Dream Game Contest (Arcanoria is one of the 40+ game projects entered in the contest). In fact, Arcanoria was the first project Dave mentioned! Thanks Dave! Dave is the head honcho over at Dream Games, sponsors of the contest, and also producers of the Gryphon MMOKit, which we use as the base technology for the Arcanoria game engine. Please check our Gallery in the Audio Interviews area for the full content of Dave's interview if you'd like to take a listen!

In other news, we've just started experimenting with Skype for team communication. So far it seems amazingly useful, and is able to provide both text and voice chatting seamlessly for up to 9 users at a time, for free. This may prove to be an invaluable tool, considering that our current team of 5 live in 3 different countries! If/when our team grows to 10+ members Skype allows for larger conference calls for a small fee, or we may also consider using an alternative technology such as TeamSpeak for team meetings. But for now, Skype looks to be all we'll need.

We've also purchased a license for the FPS Environment Pack which gives us a batch of new models to play with! We're excited to add in these new features, including docks/piers, graveyard, windmills, church, several sizes of wooden buildings, trees/foliage, and more.

May 16, 2007 - Team Integration Proceeding; New Video and Screenshots!

Arcanoria finally has something to show! Ryan has created our first village, Flixton, version 1, and it's looking great already! There's a castle, church, windmill, and several other buildings, plus a beautiful sky and terrain, with water and more. We've created some screenshots and a "flyby" video to give a little taste of the scenery thus far. Since we had all these things to show, we also expanded this website to include a photo and video gallery page to hold it all (it's the Gallery link in the site menu above).

We've now got a few cylinders in the engine running, although we're not yet running at full bore. Walt and Rob have been working hard on business issues and are close to putting that all to rest. With the new team members coming on, we're doing a bit of catching up in terms of source code control and pipeline issues.

We've been having discussions about which model packs to purchase which can help us move forward even quicker with development. We've had some great ideas, and there should be some big news about that soon!

Ryan has been working on an updated version 2 of our Flixton village, and we're hoping to have something new to show soon, including updated video and screenshots for the website.

Meanwhile, new team member Jeff has been working on the Arcanoria world backstory, after a long discussion with Rob and Walt a few days ago. This should add some much-needed richness to the themes underlying our world's development.

May 11, 2007 - Online Testing Established Successfully!

Progress has been fast in getting our new server online and functional. We've already got our new SVN populated and we're working on moving our Trac and Wiki information over to the new host. However, more important than that is that we've also got the database working, and have finally run our first successful test of the multi-zone, multi-player, internet-based architecture that's provided by the Gryphon MMOKit. In other words, we started multiple game zone servers, connected to them from multiple remote locations, and were able to interact in game, including chatting, physical movement, shooting/killing each other, etc. This is quite a breakthrough, and we're very pleased with the results!

In other news, we've started work on some of the backstory elements, and we're hoping to have something more substantive available for release in the next few weeks as that continues to progress.

Finally, I just want to say that it's been a pleasure working with Rob and his Urban Games associates. They are making a tremendous difference to this project, and I have no doubt we're much better off due to the creativity and passion that they bring to their efforts. Thanks guys, and keep up the great work!

May 9, 2007 - Server hosting secured

We've secured excellent public hosting for our game server, selecting a Virtual Dedicated Server offered by godaddy.com. The account includes root access, and plenty of disk and bandwidth to get us going throughout development and testing. It also provides expandability for later on when we need to upgrade as our player base increases after our official public release date. We will be able to add more bandwidth, CPU's, disk, RAM, and even whole new servers, both virtual and truly dedicated as needed. It's great to get this important decision behind us!

This will also mean that we should be able to drop our specialized account with wush.net for hosting of SVN/trac/wiki services, since we'll be able to host those things ourselves on our new server. This will require some additional administrative work in the short run, but should be well worth it in the longer run as we will have one consolidated space to do everything we need to do.

May 7, 2007 - New concept art, and more

We've been working on setting the mood for the game world with some concept art, which is currently just an iStockphoto "lightbox" collection which contains stock images that I selected based on our medieval fantasy theme. As always, please let us know if you have any comments about our selections!

We're also continuing development of the game design specifics. Unfortunately, much of this work can't be shared at this time, but we hope to release tidbits as things continue to unfold. However, even though it may not look like much is happening, it certainly is! More to come about this in a future update.

We've done some minor updates to our website, adding our project mini-logo to the header banner, and putting a larger version onto our front page. We've also created a new project slogan (see above in the page header), and updated the game overview on the front page to better describe some of the more unique things about playing Arcanoria.

Work on populating the new SVN repository is proceeding and going well.

May 3, 2007 - Rob Sandbach Joins Arcanoria! ...and other news

I'm very excited to announce that Rob Sandbach of Manchester-based game design studio Urban Games (www.urban-games.net) has agreed to join the Arcanoria development team. We're still working on defining his exact role, but among other things Rob will be lending his Torque scripting, design and team management skills. Rob heads up Urban Games, and has years of experience in Torque game development. This also means that we'll be able to draw on the experience of the other Urban Games associates, who have collectively worked on numerous gaming titles as artists, designers, and programmers. We're looking forward to a great working relationship with Rob and the crew at UG!

On the development front, Rob and I have been hard at work defining the game system's parameters, particularly the skill/spell system. We're excited about how Arcanoria's skill system innovations will affect gameplay. Players will have meaningful choices to make through their actions, instead of choosing a character class at level 1, which is how it's done in most MMORPG's. In Arcanoria, a player's actions will result in changes to their skill levels, which are maintained automatically by the game and adjusted with practice (or disuse). This means that to become a Fighter, you need to do some fighting, or to become a Mage you need to cast some spells! Isn't that the way it should be? We think so.

In other news, the model packs from Arteria Gaming are finally downloaded, after Steve (owner of Arteria) was having some issues with his website's transfer to a new, more reliable hosting service. While he's still not completely setup, Steve was kind enough to get me all the files directly via ftp. Now that's what I call customer service - thanks Steve!

I've also signed us up for an internet-based SVN/Trac/Wiki account at Wush.net, and gotten a development wiki started with a few new documents, along with a shared SVN (source code) repository. This is a huge step for Arcanoria as it now enables us to have our geographically remote development team be able to work together seamlessly.

Finally, I've spent a bunch of time recently fleshing out the Arcanoria Design Document, which will act as a guide as we continue to make our way through the design process. It also serves as a living description of how the game is implemented from the design perspective, and why.

April 27, 2007 - Torque Game Engine (TGE) training going well, plus other developments...

Sorry, still no new screenshots showing the TGE, since there's no artwork in it yet. I'm still quite busy reading manuals and doing tutorials to learn TGE. I also just took delivery of the excellent book The Game Programmer's Guide to Torque, by Edward Maurina. This book is pretty much the bible of Torque programming these days, and it's been a tremendous help so far. I hope to start creating the new world content in the next week or so. Stay tuned.

I'm excited to have acquired a lifetime download license for all graphics and music content available at Arteria Gaming. This means we're now able to ramp up world production much faster, using the fantastic artwork there! Woohoo!

On the recommendation of several other Torque developers we've acquired a license for the stunningly beautiful and super nifty keen Arcane FX spellcasting effects pack, by Faust Logic, Inc. This package is all that and a bag o' chips! Imagine amazing particle effects, explosions, sound FX, animations, light effects, decals, and much more. That's all now part of what Arcanoria is, and we're mightily stoked about it!

In related news, we've entered Arcanoria into the Dream Games 1-year game contest (find out more about the contest at http://www.mydreamrpg.com/community/showthread.php?t=1495). Here's a link to the contest entry thread for Arcanoria: http://www.mydreamrpg.com/community/showthread.php?t=1661

I also started up a game progress highlights blog over on the Garage Games website: http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/90584/12780

April 21, 2007 - Torque Game Engine (TGE) testing

It's been nearly a week so far and my investigations into the feasibility of using TGE instead of building the game engine from component parts (like Ogre, RakNet, FMOD, Newton, etc.) are going quite well! I don't have a screenshot at this time, but here's the new TGE-based roadmap:

• continue reading manuals and tutorials for the TGE basic engine along with the add-ons I'm intending to use. These add-ons include: Gryphon (MMOKIT), AFX (special effects for spells, etc.), and the Modernization Kit (allows TGE to use modern shader technology).
• Over the next few weeks, integrate all these add-ons together as my base engine. AFX is about to release a code update, then the Gryphon folks are going to integrate that with their code, then I'll need to manually integrate the Modernization Kit myself. This should give me one butt-kicking engine to work with!
• After the engine is whipped into shape, start writing TorqueScript to create the game world. Fun! I'm hoping this should be some time in the 2nd week of May, so there may not be a lot of updates between now and then.

Stay tuned, there are likely to be some MAJOR changes on the next update!