EiKON Games

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?)

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.