EiKON Games

We have some significant process…

See our blog on TorquePowered.com for the full details.

In summary, this test was done in less than idea conditions with only 2 (of the 4 available) cameras (hence the glitching) …but it’s definitely progress.

We’ve been investigating a motion capture solution recently and started testing a candidate product today.
Our experiences thus far with it are blogged at TorquePowered.com.

Rollercoaster of a day …and the ride continues.

Here’s the first proper look at what we’ve been squirrelling away on for such a long time, this screengrab was released onto our TorquePowered.com Blog late last week.

Epoch: Incursion - Gameplay

All very Work in Progress, take nothing as final …but it’s ours, we did that

We’ve had a number of discussions internally over the years about weaponry in Epoch: Incursion and what direction we take with it.

The most frequently asked question on the subject that I get from outside the team (usually as soon as the word “Scifi” escapes my lips) is something along the lines of “Will there be lasers and stuff?”.
There’s a simple answer to that …and a caveat.

The simple answer is “No, we’re going with ballistics and projectiles”
The Caveat is “…unless it suits gameplay and / or the fun factor to add energy weapons”
The next question that usual arrives shortly after that is “are they real world guns or stuff you’ve made up?”

The answer to that question is a little more complex  and still in a state of flux (and been on my mind this week somewhat) ~  The state of flux is solidifying though …let me explain.

One of the big driving “rules” of Epoch: Incursions design has always been to minimise barriers to entry.
A game shouldn’t be hard to get into and play. It can be complex to master and complex to get the most from, I’m fine with that, but in my humble opinion it shouldn’t bite you on the arse in the first 10 minutes and it shouldn’t be immediately confusing and overwhelming.

I’m sure people much cleverer and with more experience than me have written books and papers on such things but from my personal experience (as a gamer) I reckon you’ve got about 10 minutes at the most from the moment someone starts playing your game to get them to come back for more.

I play a lot of first person shooters. Some I play because I want to, some I play because I want to learn from them… learn what they did right and learn what they did wrong.
Designing my own game has made me look at games and game design in a way that I never had before throughout my 30 plus years of gaming. This week I’ve played 3 new shooters (new to me anyway).

Two Indie titles (stunned by the excellent quality, they’re getting better and better) and one mainstream, big studio title. All three titles used guns of the “made up” variety. All three titles used familiar archetypes (snipers, rocket launchers, assault rifles, sub-machine guns etc.)
Crucially all three titles were (Steampowered) digital downloads and, whilst they may have planted a manual of some sort somewhere on my hard-drive, I have no idea where it is and I’m not inclined to go looking for it (hey, I’m a gamer).

3 Games I’ve not played before, 3 lots of fictional weaponry, one game would’ve been enough to teach me the lesson however.

I’m in the thick of my first gunfight …I look at a HUD that I’m unfamiliar with, I look at the virtual weapon in my virtual hands and I’m none the wiser as to whether its an assault rifle, a sniper rifle or an SMG or some sort of heavy GPMG and I’ve no paper manual to refer to (like I would anyway!) so we’re into guessing territory.

Firing unleashes a flurry of rounds… experience would seem to indicate that the sniper rifle is now an increasingly unlikely option (plus the zoom on it doesn’t seem to zoom much at all) so I discount it ….leaving the other 3 options. Graphically it doesn’t give much more of a clue as to its designed purpose so… I’m stuck …firing a weapon in a gunfight …the specific purpose of which I’m unsure of.
That’s in the first 10 minutes and it’s an irritation, a barrier …albeit a small one.

With Epoch: Incursion we’re fortunate in that we’re not constrained by the technology of the day and age that we’re setting our game in ….we are in the future but we’re not 300 years in the future – so we’ve got options.
For me the equation is simple. If I pick up an M16 assault rifle in a game, years of experience have taught me what it does, how it fires and what situation its best suited for. That’s something I, as a player, don’t need to be taught and that’s a barrier out of the way. With an arsenal of recognisable weapons I can be in the thick of my first gunfight and not even think about weapon choices …I’ll just make them instinctively. You can’t buy that kind of advantage when trying to attract a new player to your property.

As an unknown developer making our first ever game we’d be foolish to try and force someone down another path and waste any of that first golden 10 minutes just teaching people (already familiar with the genre) what our gun looks like and what it does.
With that aside that’s still one less thing we have to design, re-design and then approve and build. There’s no good reason for us to have fictional weapons for our recognisable archetypes… it “costs” us lots to do (God, I wish we had a budget) and gives us nothing back in return – in fact we lose out by doing it and it cuts into the golden 10 minute period.

Barrier.

So …decision made then.

We’ve done some recruiting as well ….we now have a commercial director (someone to talk sensible stuff and pour over spreadsheets when required) and we’ve recruited the services of a commercial lawyer (both were so excited and inspired by what showed them that they practically bit my hand off ) ~ Exciting days ahead.

Right then…

Time for some cold hard facts (s’all good – fear not).

When we first mooted the idea of this project as a group we had no idea what we were doing.  None of us had worked in a game development gig before, none of us had even been involved in a mod project, we just wanted to make video games.

At the time we had no idea how difficult it would be and we had no clue where to start… everything we’ve done up til now, we had to learn pretty much from the ground up.

We started with a grand idea… called Epoch: Battlescape, an idea just a little too grand as it turns out. lesson learnt.

So Epoch: Battlescape was put on hold – however – we always envisioned Epoch as a franchise, a series of games, so we are still making an Epoch Universe game – just a slightly smaller one, to begin with.

So, for the last few months or so we’ve been focussed on (drum roll please) … “Epoch: Incursion”.
A multiplayer centric, squad based, tactical first person shooter set in the very near future, with a heavy emphasis on accessibility and ease of use whilst not ignoring the word “tactical” that is banded about so much in press releases relating to this genre and then paid no heed thereafter.

I’m hugely pleased to be able to announce that we’re now making actual quantifiable progress. We have a completely remodelled player character (100% in-house) and actual playable code.
We’re working on an in-house / non public, commercial demo level at the moment and off the back of that work we will have a promo video and screenshots to make public.

We’ve done some recruiting as well ….we now have a commercial director (someone to talk sensible stuff and pour over spreadsheets when required) and we’ve recruited the services of a commercial lawyer (both were so excited and inspired by what showed them that they practically bit my hand off ) ~ Exciting days ahead.Hoping to be able to post our first proper screenshot very soon…

I was heartened to see in the recent UK budget that the Video Games industry got a mention.
At last it does seem that true recognition and practical encouragement (gifv tax concessions, k,thx) is starting to look more likely.

Mr Darling stopped short of actually detailing what the government would do exactly, and they have yet to survive the imminent general election to make good on any promise …but hey, yet again, we got a mention by a bloke in a suit that didn’t involve random violence or the lethargy of the masses.

BBC NEWS Technology Australia seeks new army robots.

Needless to say anything involving the military use of robots gets my attention.

From the article:

“The winning design must help soldiers fight by remote control in urban combat zones”
“The aim is to reduce casualties in urban areas where fighting is unpredictable and treacherous.”
“The ultimate plan is for groups of these sophisticated machines to be sent into battle to help neutralise the enemy.”

We’ve got some ideas they may want to look at

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.

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?)