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.

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.