Your Development Projects

This is pretty much a thread for *you* to make a post about the project(s) you are currently working on and for others to post comments/ask questions. Doesn't matter if it's a map, mod, game, application, website, etc... all are equally valid for the thread.

So... I'll start xD

My current overarching project is Warshop Studios which I started a couple of months back to serve as a formal entity for my and my team's game development projects. We are currently working in concert with VK Designs and Indigo Illusions. Our relationship with VK Designs will be a lot more visible a few months down the road, but currently they are working with us and other studios to form a development network of sorts and we are assisting them with some of our talent on some of their projects and are similarly working with some of their personnel on our own projects. Of course, that's all behind the scenes at the moment but like I said a few months down the road the cooperation will be much more visible.

Our relationship with Indigo Illusions, on the other hand, is much more visible. Indigo Illusions are the creators of the Sakura Engine (I'd link you to their site but they're redesigning it atm and are getting new screenshots up as the current site and shots just don't do the engine justice) which all of Warshop Studios' current projects are using. At its core, Indigo Illusions is a team of two programmers who have been working for years on the Sakura Engine. Sakura is capable of putting forth next-generation PC visuals and I won't go into too much detail on exactly what it supports because a lot of that is NDA atm, but I will say that from a technical standpoint it measures-up very well against CryEngine 2 and Leadwerks 2. Unlike Leadwerks 2, Sakura is a full-fledged game engine and supports AI, physics, etc... Its physics are particularly notable as the team uses a highly modified version of the nVidia PhysX engine, thus offering a much nicer package that achieves better results than the standard PhysX API but that still retains the benefits of PPU and GPGPU acceleration.

So how does Warshop Studios have access to Sakura despite much of it being NDA atm? One of the two Indigo Illusions programmers is our Lead Programmer. Thus, our art department aids Indigo Illusions whenever necessary with test models and showcase art to foment the continued development of the engine and our game projects provide real-world testing and direct feedback for Indigo Illusions to allow them to mold Sakura into a product that provides the features and toolsets that developers need.

Warshop Studios itself has only come into existence in the last couple of months, but it really was formed almost a nine months ago when Wartide began. Wartide is an RTS/RTT game project that arose from the ashes of the Dark Future project at SAMODS. At the time, I had been working on the Great Troll War Mod for WarCraft 3 but while we had been making good progress, we were finding that the WC3 community was losing talented and experienced members by the day and ultimately had fallen into a decline that left us unable to recruit the additional talent we needed in sufficient numbers to complete GTW in a reasonable amount of time. If the project had begun a year after The Frozen Throne's release, the project likely would have been feasible, but having been started three years after that time it unfortunately did not have a chance of completion. Nevertheless, in GTW's waning days I was contacted by a member of the Dark Future team and they requested my assistance in developing that project. I "signed-on" as a Senior Designer and immediately began delving through the pages and pages of documents they had organized for the project. I quickly realized that perhaps the only feature they had not included was a kitchen sink. I brought my concerns to the team and requested that a vision statement be put forth. However, the team had only a single modeler and a single programmer but many designers and an inactive leader and thus it pretty much died rather than produce a vision statement.

Still, the ashes of the project provided a starting point from which I worked with the community to develop the very basic concepts behind a new project that would take its place. Obviously, any such new project would be a strategy game as Dark Future was and as the SAMODS community is largely based around StarCraft and WarCraft 3 (hence my involvement in it to elicit the aforementioned offer in the first place). Thus it was determined that the new project should be set in a sci-fi fantasy universe and I began designing the game from that point. The designer who originally contacted me to aid with Dark Future became the new project's (at that time, the project was simply called the "SA Game") Senior Designer and I tapped into some of my WC3 contacts and GTW team members to flesh-out the rest of the team. Since then we have, of course, had additional recruits and have been moving forth with the project.

Wartide is an RTS/RTT that focuses on customizable automation and highly diverse factions as well as realistic combat systems. Customizable automation is simply the concept that the user should have control over what is automated and how such things are automated. All RTS and RTT games that I have observed utilize only developer-directed automation or boolean automation (which itself is a sub-type of developer-directed automation). Many players complain that automation, "allows the game to play itself," and when players do not have control over what is automated or how it is automated and can at most only turn automation off or on, then of course this will be the effect. To this day, StarCraft is prized for the near total control it gives players and the excessively small amount of automation it offers- Medics are one of the very few exceptions. However, this lack of automation comes at a cost- there is a point at which skill in StarCraft is no longer determined by the strategic or tactical prowess of an individual, but rather their APM (Actions Per Minute). At this point, StarCraft quite literally becomes a sport rather than a strategy game. And yet, while games that utilize heavy amounts of automation such as Company of Heroes have managed to lessen the APM issue, they have brought to bear issues of their own in that they arguably remove too much control from the user. And, hell, even Company of Heroes is heavily influenced by APM- the game is designed to have the player spend as little time as possible managing construction, training, and resource management and as much time as possible on the frontlines managing grenade tosses, unit positioning, and etc... It thus reduces one devourer of APM to emphasize another and allow that other to be feasible. Customizable automation essentially hybridizes the accessibility of automation with the exhilaration of complete control.

Wartide possesses multiple levels of customizable automation. At its most basic level, users have options to enable or disable preset automation procedures, alter unit "stances/behavior", and to form multiple units into a squad that itself possesses a variety of preset automation behaviors. Above this level, players can tweak hundreds of settings for units, unit types, and beyond- from target priorities (because haven't we all had that one rifleman that thinks he can take down a tank?) to transportation (ever just have Dropships sitting around waiting for something to do because you just can't devote the APM to constantly micromanage them properly?) and beyond. Beyond this, users can create and save various command sets that can be executed on-the-fly. Beyond even this, players can utilize GUI triggering to create their own forms of automation. Finally, players can even script their own automation. Theoretically, a player can script automation so thoroughly that during a game they do not even need to click the mouse once. While at first glance this power of automation seems as it it would grossly imbalance the game, Wartide's detailed and complex combat systems that take into account cover, visibility, supply lines, etc... (and how does Wartide incorporate all these so seamlessly when other game can not? Customizable automation, as, for example, supply lines can be controlled yet automated) ensure that the creator of the script must either have a huge amount of experience with the game to take thousands of possibilities into account or will be making constant tweaks and adjustments in-game on the fly. The game, in essence, is scalable to the amount of automation that user wants to utilize and thus allows strategy and tactics to reign supreme over APM while ensuring that gameplay is entirely player-dependent.

Wartide also features four significantly diverse factions. Each faction has its own resource and unit acquisition system- gone are the days of infantrymen magically appearing from the Barracks and minerals magically being turned into tanks. Wartide molds the resource and unit acquisition systems of each faction to its gameplay style in a complementary (and even purposefully detrimentally) manner. Testament to the factional diversity and deep combat systems of Wartide are the existence of two factions that rely heavily on guerrilla/surgical warfare (and yet, despite this, they each play completely differently).

Wartide is of course still in development, but recently another project has been started as well- Dilogus. This project directly led to the official formation of Warshop Studios as with two projects in development, "Wartide Development Team" no longer sufficed. So why begin a SECOND major project before the first has been completed? We linked-up with Indigo Illusions over the summer, and while Sakura can definitely handle Wartide, its current configuration is more conducive to a first or third-person game and in the short-term that would do a much better job of showcasing the engine. Dilogus is a game that can be completed much sooner than Wartide without sacrificing quality and that can nevertheless aid Wartide's development by aiding the refinement of Sakura and aiding with recruitment of quality talent (not to mention capital).

I can't talk quite as much about Dilogus as I can about Wartide because it is a much newer project- in fact, you'll be hard-pressed to even find much about it on our forums at the moment. However, we are working on some media releases and hope to have those out soon. Dilogus, essentially, is a first person or third person (your choice) action RPG. I somewhat cringe at using the term RPG because that generally connotes a game that emphasizes world exploration, leveling, and item-acquisition over skillful combat and level design, but nor can I particularly eliminate the freer nature of Dilogus and its use of subtle RPG elements. Anyway, one of the really major emphases of Dilogus is its melee combat system (it is a fantasy game) that will utilize the mouse and keyboard set-up to grant players the most precise control over their attacks and defenses as possible. The system, unlike almost all melee combat systems, does not rely on preset attacks and combos but rather grants the player complete control of their weaponry to make their own attacks and combos. The storyline is also a major focus and we are doing our utmost to ensure that players will get to experience a truly unique and well-developed fantasy universe, one that pleasingly strays from the standard formula. We will also be focusing on level design, and currently you should expect levels that are open yet well-designed such as those Crysis sports as opposed to... Mass Effect.

Now, perhaps one of the most interesting bits about Dilogus actually has nothing to do with its gameplay but rather its distribution model. The plan is to initially offer the game for $2.50 (or some similarly low price). However, we will continue to supply the game with meaningful updates and content additions (that forward the storyline- consider that most of the currently-planned additions will be larger than the original game but will weave smoothly into the story, perhaps treading a bit closer to true episodic content than what Half-Life 2 has done but free) that are completely free for anyone who has already bought the game. But, because of the content of the game is increasing so is its value and thus the buy-in price will rise. It's one of the more effective alternate distribution model concepts floating around at the moment as it takes full advantage of the PC's capacity for rapid, continuous updates and content additions and PC games' tendency to sell very well over time (certainly you undoubtedly constantly hear about how the console version of Game X sold much better than the PC version of that game, but what you don't hear is that the PC version will generally continue to sell at a rate not much diminished from what it did at launch whereas sales of the console version will significantly drop-off and deaden within a month of launch).

So, that's a relatively "quick" overview of the two projects I am working on atm (as Lead Designer and Producer for both).

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LANKnights / Electronic Gaming Society at UCF: Your Development Projects - LANKnights / Electronic Gaming Society at UCF

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