Eikon Games

Well, I haven’t written anything here all year so I suppose I should do a short update.

GarageGames & our engine

A lot has happened with the Torque Game Engine Advanced since I last posted here. Back in November when I last wrote something, we were using TGEA 1.0.3 which, whilst it had the makings of a great engine (and, visualy at least, was a huge improvement on the somewhat dated TGE 1.5.2) it still had the feel of something that wasn’t quite finished. There were a lot of bugs, the engine was not the most stable thing in the world and framerates were pretty low on anything but pretty quick machines, giving the impression that it wasn’t optimized that well.

That all changed on March 19th, 2008 when the open beta of TGEA 1.7 was announced. I know there was a huge improvement, but to this day I still don’t understand the jump from 1.0.3 to 1.7 :o)

A massive number of new features were added, such as yet another new terrain engine (we’ve already had legacy, atlas and atlas2). This one was based on the legacy terrain which allows you to edit in real-time in the engine but allowed for much bigger terrains. Sadly, ‘much bigger’ turned out to still be nowhere near the expanse we need for Epoch so we’re left with Atlas2 which, technologically speaking, is far superior but it also has its drawbacks - most notably, no in-game editor.

Polysoup collision was finally introduced as standard, meaning that we no longer need to produce collision meshes on objects - the collision is based on the object mesh itself (which removes a pretty big art headache).

As it was an open beta, the bugs starting flooding in and just 10 days later, on March 29th, 2008 Open Beta 2 was released which didn’t add any new stuff, but contained a huge amount of bug fixes from beta 1.

Just 7 days later, on April 5th, the final release of TGEA 1.7.0 was released with yet more bug fixes, a completely abstracted graphics layer (I’m no longer constrained to directx8 - yaaaaaaaay!!) and the start of an abstracted sound effects layer too (sound in TGE(A) has historically not been great).

That became the codebase which Epoch: Battlescape was to be developed on.

On June 13th, yet another massive update came our way in the shape of TGEA 1.7.1 - yet more bug fixes and yet more new features, which I’m not going to list here but are available on the GarageGames blog here - they didn’t fix my freelook bug, but I’ll forgive them… As long as the fix it soon :o)

Version Control

With a feature-packed and stable engine, and development now ‘properly’ underway it became clear to me (and to Mike) that I’m rubbish at organising my time and thoughts. A change of web host (to dreamhost) brought with it the ability to use much richer web applications and also version control in the shape of SVN.

Being a windows user, I have set up TortoiseSVN and now have the ability to make changes to the code as much as I like, safe in the knowledge that if I break something (as I regularly do) I can always roll back to a previous version. To compliment this, we are also using Trac as a web front end to the SVN repository which gives us a nice ticketing and milestone system. From day one, trac has made me 100% more productive and I now see it as an abolute must for any software project.

In other news, sadly Alex the Younger is no longer with us and is off pursuing other projects. However, the droid model is well underway - more on that soon…

The timer we’ve been running for the last month or so expires in a couple of days so, before that happens (and in a break from the usual format), I’m very pleased to be able to introduce one of the central ideas in the Epoch backstory and show off some of the concept art relating to that idea… so without further ado:

A Glimpse into the Future
The World of Epoch: Battlescape

Imagine a world 100 years from now: governments, and the public they serve, have grown weary of unceasing peacekeeping duties and guerrilla warfare; their intolerance arising from the inevitable human cost of any military action.

A program started in the late twentieth century, with the birth of unmanned aerial vehicles and simplistic battlefield drones, has now entered a new epoch with the development of the Infantry Combat Chassis.

This sophisticated robotic infantryman is linked to the mind of a human soldier via a non-invasive neural interface and dedicated hi-band satellite network, allowing the operative to remotely experience the war zone or hazardous environment via a form of immersive telepresence.

Operating under the auspices of the United Nations, this new breed of battlefield combatant is tireless, efficient and utterly fearless.

For a further glimpse into the world of Epoch try digging at the Epoch: Battlescape website when the timer runs out…

…Something is coming.

Happy New Year first and foremost, and may the great development pixie smile on us all.

This Story caught my eye recently as it’s (kind of) something that had been on my mind for a while. The bottom line being that UT3 and Crysis, two very high profile titles on the PC, had less than spectacular sales figures in their initial launch window given their positioning in the marketplace.
There’s potentially any number of things that could cause this and my personal feeling is that it’s not one thing but rather the combined effect of a number of factors (the PC has a smaller fps market than it used to have I think, CoD4 and TF2 in particular are serving that market well at the moment, they launched right before Christmas when the market was flooded with everyone else launching right before Christmas) but the one that stands out for me (in relation to Crysis in particular) is the system requirements issue.

It can’t be a coincidence that a game like Counter-Strike, that enjoyed such ludicrous popularity, was able to run on 3-4 year old systems at its height. Similarly the MMO 800 pound gorilla, World of Warcraft, has relatively low system requirements and achieves its gorgeous graphics with some nice artwork rather than millions of polys.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a place for that kind of system taxing game but I guess the question is how “good” do you really want your graphics to be? and how much money and hardware are you prepared to throw at it to those graphics?
I’m still regularly playing games from 4-5 years ago on my PC (Swat 3, Joint Operations and a bit of Freespace here and there to name but a few) and never do I think the graphics in those titles adversely affect the enjoyment.

The reason that this issue in particular plays on my mind is that we’re using the Torque Game Engine Advanced from Garage Games (an engine that started life in the excellent “Tribes” back in 1998). TGEA doesn’t produce an ugly game, far from it, and do see it as a definite advantage that our game should run on most half decent PCs.

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Anyway….

We’re on the very cusp of a momentous day here at Eikon Towers.

We’re about to have our first ever proper playable build of Epoch: Battlescape.

Well…. I say playable build. It’s a million miles from being Epoch truth be told. At most its going to be a relatively simple technology demonstrator with players running around a custom landscape able to shoot each other. The important thing however is that everything in the demo is custom built and whilst its far from final it is all ours, and we’re pleased about that.

This is an important landmark for us… this is the point when we have something in code that we can tweak and change to start to try and craft the right feel with… actual bonafide gameplay, goes without saying I’m rather excited.

As a side note… I’m looking at getting our website back in working order, whilst I can’t yet promise loads of details and screenshots etc. there will at least be a web presence for us.

My thanks to Andy the Magical Code Monkey for taking the time to sort this blog out after our intentions to resurrect it were discussed this weekend.

This development blog was originally started by another of our number a little over a year and a half ago. Sadly we weren’t quite ready to blog what we were doing because, being brutally frank, we didn’t know what we were doing and the enormity of the task ahead hadn’t really sunk in. We’re still still learning stuff and a long road lies ahead of us but… now seems the right time to pick up the baton again.

First off then …why blog?

There are number of reasons why we’ve started to blog this experience, not least of which is the fact that what we’re going through is such a unique experience in itself and therefore worthy of sharing. Indie game development is not terribly rare these days but it’s definitely something that most (normal) people never try or even consider trying. Amongst the innumerate reasons why normal people don’t all become indie game developers is the fact that it’s rather difficult. If something is difficult then I’m personally of the opinion that there’s some small value in sharing that experience with others in the hope that it may encourage them in the long dark hours that lay ahead of them. Of course eventually it will serve as a nice marketing tool for us and also its kind of fun.

So a little about where all this came from I think….

I’m Mike, the designer and creative director of “Epoch: Battlescape”, the game we’re all now working to bring to the world. Epoch started life as a loose collection of ideas I had well over 15 years ago now and, whilst it’s evolved somewhat since then, the basic core principles of the gameplay I envisioned back then are still very much intact.

This is the third attempt I’ve had now to get this game off the ground. The first attempt was a rather half-baked suggestion in an email responding to a old boss (hello Adrian if you ever read this) who asked for suggestions on how our struggling dotcom might make some headway in the online gaming market that we were attempting to forge at the time. He didn’t take me seriously… and to be honest I wouldn’t have either. Worst. Pitch. Ever.

The second attempt was sometime after the original dotcom had folded and was slightly less half-baked. I got a real development company interested in the idea in principle and pitched it to a few grown ups. But we didn’t really know what we were doing (still) and it showed …we needed money, and I wouldn’t have given it to us either if I’d been them.

So …fast forward a few years. No-one else has yet made this game I so desperately want to play, and to be honest the obsession with designing and building it hasn’t dulled any so I started again and begin recruiting like minded, but infinitely more talented, souls…

I think that will do for now… next time I’ll try to talk about the learning process, why it’s taken so long to get to this point, what you need to do to get your project off the ground and bacon sarnies and how they will one day rule the universe!

Team EiKON is….

Mike – Designer and Creative Director

Mark – Artistic Design Lead

Andy - Technical Design Lead (I believe you’ve already met?)

Alex the Younger – Concepts, 3D Modelling and Animation

Alex the Elder – Written Content Provision and Story Crafting

James – In Game Audio Design

Nell – In Game Audio Design and Musical Composition

Dan – In Game Audio Design and Musical Composition

So. Here we are in full flow after what has been a fairly inconsistent 12 months of darting from one project to another and then back again.

But now it’s full steam ahead for Epoch:Battlescape and it feels great to be back in the thick of it. We had the 2nd of our now monthly meetings on Sunday at Mike’s house where vast quantities of bacon sandwiches, kettle chips and pepsi max were consumed.

Much of the talk was based around the ‘January Demo’ - the codebase that will probably make up the first numbered release (v0.1) and one that wont involve an awful lot more than our main protagonist, the droid, fighting other droids on a bespoke landscape level.

Speaking of droids, Alex the Younger (hereby known as ATY) has been working his socks off doing a huge amount of concept sketches to run by Mike. For those of you who have watched the dvd extras on The Phantom Menace, it plays out pretty much like the scene in that where the guys at ILM stick up all their art on a wall and George Lucas walks quietly past them all, rubber-stamping one or two and consigning the rest to the depths of hell (or rather, the big book of unused concepts).

Thanks to ATY, we now have our droid chassis pretty much nailed and work is underway as I write this making him a 3d reality, but if he is so inclined, ATY will talk about that himself.

Anyway, being a codemonkey I suppose I should say something about the state of development at the moment… So, where are we?

Well, the terrain for the Jan Demo is pretty much done and is in the engine and I currently have some placeholder art running around the level, not doing much. For testing purposes, we’ve just bought a bunch of nice real-world weapons to use until we have our own but getting them into the engine, displaying them and firing them isn’t as straight forward as it perhaps could be… My head’s swimming in onFire functions, datablocks and explosion emmiters at the moment but all that should pass fairly swiftly.

On another note, Mike keeps saying scary words to me like “squad management” and “cover system” and stupidly I keep replying “that shouldn’t be too much of a problem”… Ask me again in a couple of months time.

That’s all for now since this is already waaaaay too long.