EiKON Games

We’ve added a couple of new galleries to the Epoch: Incursion Facebook Page showing some early combat chassis concept art and some WiP shots from the Combat Chassis build.
Both galleries are particularly note worthy as they show the underchassis of the droid without its armour in some detail, and also some examples of the fine texture detailing that Mark has been doing.

Enjoy!

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…

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.

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.