EiKON Games

Shame on me for not posting this stuff sooner to be honest… but better late etc.

For anyone that hasn’t seen it already, this is the kinda thing our engine of choice is now capable of.

Watch and salivate:

GDC 2009 – Torque 3D “South Pacific” Part I – GarageGames on Vimeo.

Worth checking out parts 2 and 3 also.

The last few weeks I’ve been teaching myself to use Adobe Premier whilst testing out some trailer concepts and ideas at the same time.

Showing the results to the rest of the Eikon team provides useful feedback and also my wife has been a great help with some constructive criticism and ideas on what direction to take it in, but by far the best feedback I’ve had so far has come from Dave, a guy I work with.

He’s very much a creature of the visual medium, he loves movies (has *the* biggest DVD collection on the planet) and even dabbles in directing his own stuff on occasions. The fact that he’s an avid gamer doesn’t hurt any either.

It’s not so much about what he says but his reactions as he’s watching as Dave very much wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to trailer appreciation (or not).
From one watch through I can tell what visual cues had the desired effect, what visual / music combos worked and what parts didn’t work so well and where perhaps I may need to tighten up the pacing somewhat.

His only verbal reactions are “whoops” and cries of “awesome” but its where he “whoops” and “awesomes” (and just as importantly where he doesn’t) that is able to tell me so much.

Fortunately he doesn’t read this blog, I suspect that if he knew what close attention I paid to his reactions in particular it would spoil the results of my regular screen testing.

For Epoch, web content was always planned to be part of both the finished game and the development process.

As far as the latter is concerned we have two blogs to serve that purpose (primarily). One at Garage Games and this one at Eikon.
I’ll be honest, I struggle to post anything on either – as is painfully apparent.

I think my main problem is that I often think “would anyone actually be interested in x,y,z on our game if it doesn’t contain amazing screenshots or detailed information on an in-game feature” …but of course the development process isn’t all about “hey look at what we built; this week with at least 50% more awesome” – in fact I’m learning that that is in fact quite a small part of it …especially at the stage we’re at now.

So I figured I’d pull myself up by the boot straps and just damn well write something… so here goes (sorry for the lack of awesome).

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It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me…

The newest member of the Eikon permanent team is our “suit” (for want of a better expression) …he brings our growing number to four.
A developer, an artist and a designer / producer (yours truly).

We have a sound / music guy hovering in the wings as well but that’s more complicated …so it’s we three plus suit for the moment.

Our suit has a very broad directive at this stage; he’s been tasked with (eventually) looking into exterior funding options and (right now) generally making sure that Eikon itself is being dealt with in a (frankly) more professional manner than I’m capable of doing.

We (him and I)  had a loooong conversation last week about both the road ahead and the road behind us. It was useful, productive and encouraging and I’m really pleased he’s on board with us.
He’s able to go to places and talk to people that I’m simply not able to and that makes me feel so much more confident about this whole venture.

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EiKON Design HQ (Europe)

Eikons European HQ (as I’ve taken to calling it) is the second bedroom in my house.
Most of our meetings happen here and pretty much everything Epoch comes through here at some point.

I decided last week that it was feeling too much like a  second bedroom and not enough like a game-design-den so I thought to redress the balance and create a somewhat more creative atmosphere in here.
To that end I printed up some of the more relevant and awesome concept work onto high quality paper and started papering the walls with it. My long suffering and hugely tolerant wife commented that it “felt like being at work” (she works in the industry) but I have to say I’m glad I did it… and the process is going to continue (she really is very very tolerant).

I also (finally) invested in a whiteboard for the wall this week.

I figured initially that it would serve 3 purposes:

1.) Help me track what needs thinking about / doing.
2.) Help me track whose thinking about and doing things
3.) Help me explain ideas better when we have our regular meetings

All that whitespace? ...gone

Its been on the wall for 2 days and its full of 1 and 2 and there’s no room for 3.
In fact I twittered earlier that there was only room to write “get another whiteboard” on it.

Pretty much all my design work is done on google docs as  a.) it works for me and b.) I can share it with the guys really easily.

Any keyboard / document combination can only take you so far and sometime you just gotta write on the damned wall to get the ideas across properly.

So… it’s proving its worth so far …I am seriously thinking about another one though (she’ll laugh I’m sure).

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Good to see that Garage Games have blown the doors open on the Torque 3D private forums [EDIT: They haven't on all of them it seems ...just some of them].

Realtime sunset

It made no sense to me to keep that stuff hidden.  Pirates will be pirates but customers need to see the goods they’re buying and they need to see other customers buying, using and enjoying those products to reinforce thier buying decisions.

On that note… T3D is yielding significant and encouraging results for us. All told we’ve been at this for 4 years (mostly learning stuff through TGE and TGEA experimentation) and since the launch of T3D we’ve seen the most significant progress in the actual game itself.

Expect at least 50% more awesome soon.

‘Tis dead exciting.

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Just a quick point before I go… we had to close comments on the blog for the moment as the sheer volume of auto-spam became unmanagable. It’ll get addressed at some point in the future …just not now – sorry about that.

Long time no blog… my bad.

After a lot of concept work and discussion internally I decided to draft in some outside assistance to help get our initial and most important player character off the drawing board and into the game.

After talking to a few individuals and companies I finally settled on Silhouette Studios to both model and animate the droid chassis and create the armour he uses. Silhouette are based in Adelaide, Australia and we’re in the UK ….it’s impossible for us to be further apart unless one or the other moves planet so communication can be challenging, however, I’m pleased to report that we’re seeing some very impressive work come out of Silhouette and their building of what we’ve asked for has been pretty much bang on.

We’re currently working with them on some initial animations and when we have those I’m looking forward to sharing our progress to date with you all a little bit more.

In the meantime enjoy this small look at the droid chassis in his armour.

If you haven’t already don’t forget to take a look at the Epoch-Battlescape website where you can learn more about the games backstory and sign up for future updates.

If you’re interested in joining EiKON Games we’re still recruiting and are always interested in talking to anyone whose interested in us. Contact details can be found here.

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 )

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 )

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?)