EiKON Games

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.