Citadel of Sorcery

Developer's Log
 
  • Programming has really picked up the pace recently and we are seeing weekly updates on the Enact tool. They are swiftly clearing up various bugs and adding new features. Right now we are concentrating on the A.I. net tool. This includes improvements on adjusting the net. All the mass connections were causing some slow ups, so they are redoing the data structure and other elements to keep our level designing team moving at a fast pace. But in addition to that we have also seen some preliminary screenshots of the much talked about (by programming) new terrain system. These are early shots with several months of work to go before it is complete, but they show great promise and demonstrate that we are still on track with this (excuse the pun) ground breaking technology.

    Art continues to develop new dynamic objects. We have begun some work on some final art elements and are now going back and improving elements done early on for the prototype. Currently we are slowing down on making NPCs as we have plenty for the time being, though some key NPCs involved in the Epic Story Line are still being developed.

    In Level Designing work is going on within the Enact tool as well as the Static and Dynamic object Editor. We will never have enough Level Designers, that is a fact. The world is very large and the more we have the faster we can develop things, but we are progressing. Right now they are still concentrating on two main areas, world development and the A.I. net (which controls our NPC lives). Enact was built so that Level Designers could practically create any A.I. they want for their NPCs and we are starting to see the power of the tool as programming fleshes it out and fixes up various bugs in the Enact tools. New tools within Enact will continue to be added over the next six months or so. The Level Designing team has gotten started now and will are beginning to breathe life into the world of the Citadel using the Enact tool set.

    In Quest/Mission/Adventure/Crisis etc. writing work continues at a steady pace. Like Level Designers, our writing staff can never be large enough. CoS is a content hungry system requiring some pretty amazing talent to write our quests. The current team has the talent, we just need to clone them all to speed up work (or find some equally talented individuals who want to be chained to a computer to write fantasy novel quality quest stories). But work continues. We anticipate that it will speed up some now that we have ironed out many of the wrinkles in our quest system and the writers have a clearer understanding of what it is that is expected from their stories in this complex (to write, not to play) system we use for this game. Practice makes perfect, as the saying goes, and their output speed should soon increase. Of course, we are always looking for new writers (as well as level designers and artists).

    The team expanded up to thirty people recently, but then we lost a few people to other endeavors and the complications of life, so for the moment we are holding at twenty-seven. This is still a small team for what we are doing, but we will continue to look for talented individuals who want to work on a truly amazing and ground breaking project. We ask a lot from our team members because we are unwilling to compromise on any of the design elements planned for this project.

    There is still no time table on completion, which is actually impossible to predict. With cutting edge development of new technology (which is very unpredictable), and a new system of quest writing never done before and many other innovative (and therefore at times painful) design goals, we often hit snags that slow up that part of the development. But, we have a goal and so far we have not had to compromise on what we are building. It will be done when we think it meets the original design goals, and not a moment before. However, we are slowly nearing a time when we will be willing to show the game to various publishers. This is a very exciting year in the development of CoS, and we expect to see great things. Our team is working seven days a week to bring it to you, be patient.
  • MMO Magic Inc. is going through another growth spurt as the Citadel of Sorcery project continues to roll. Recently we have added nine new people to the team: 4 artists, 1 Level Designer, 3 Quest Writers and 1 programmer.

    There is a lot of work going on in the design team as they write up all the personalities and lives of the NPCs that inhabit our world. This is no simple task as each has their job, hobbies, friends, family, enemies, daily routines, occasional oddities and events, troubles, etc. Work on player Abilities continues to be go through design, though they are still working through phase 3 of that development, having 270 Abilities now confirmed (but that leaves a lot to go still as there are around 1800).

    Programming is still buttoning up the new sound module, though we anticipate integration in the next two to three weeks. In addition some bug fixes to the Enact tool continue. Progress has been slow on these bugs, but they are making a concerted (and sleepless) effort to get a new build done by this Friday. The new Terrain system is on hold until that round of bug fixes is complete.

    Quest Writing has had some new blood introduced and we are starting to see more progress on these epic quest stories. It's still quite a challenge, but we're seeing good development.

    Work on the player races is also developing from a design standpoint and we will release information on a new race sometime next week. Design work and concept drawings for multiple new types of fantasy mounts (not horses) have been developed and are being reviewed for possible inclusion into the game. Additionally, concept and modeling are underway for new monsters for the game, with current work on Maggotmen and Insectoid races of creatures.

    People continue to ask when the game will be done, and we continue to tell them when it is finished. We have no idea when that will be, however we can guarantee that although we expect to see great strides forward this year visually, the game will NOT be released in 2010 (and we make no guarantees beyond that either). Really folks, this is new R&D and it will take as long as it takes. The best we can do is keep you informed of progress, (see above) :)

    Keep up the faith, we are working on it!
  • Tis the season to be jolly and all that stuff. We thought we would add a mid holiday update on our Citadel of Sorcery MMO game project. We have been spending a lot of time on the playable character races lately. As promised, we have started to release information on one of the six races each month (and we are due to release information on the second race sometime next week). This is not just a matter of what we want to tell you, there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes as we continue to develop these races. Design meetings continue to define the races and modify them to make the more interesting, and more fun to play. Art continues to refine the look of the races with new models and animation.

    In programming, among other things, we are currently working on the sound module. This includes all the ambient sound, noises, conversation, music and other sounds that bring the world to life. It also includes priority systems to make sure the player hears the more important sounds. Sound, in CoS, is not just ambient filler. We notice that in a lot of games we players turn the sounds down (or even off), since it does not really matter to the game play, it is mostly about immersion in the world. We want the immersion, of course, but we also want sound to be more than just ambiance. It should matter to your strategy and decisions.

    Like many areas, CoS looks to both movies, books, RPGs and table top gaming as we strive to bring more to the MMO game genre. In this case we looked at how a player uses sound in a Table Top game. They can ask to listen to a door, and what they hear (since there is no ambient track) is what the Game Master tells them they hear. This information can be very useful, for example you listen to a door and hear a conversation that tells you the location of a secret door... or you hear a particular grunt that tells you this room might have a certain monster waiting inside. This is valuable sound, and worth the effort to listen before leaping.

    Our sound system is attempting to bring more of this informational sound to the player so that they will want to listen. So they can hear the drag... step, drag... step sound of an approaching beastie in the dark, or the sound of flames from behind the door so that they do not just open it and get fried. Sounds that matter. From the movies we are trying to incorporate a dynamic sound system that adds to the tension of the moment, and allows you to hear the important sound rather than drown it out with music. This system tries to combine music with sound effects that are aware of each other and their relative importance, and vary accordingly.

    This new sound module is underway, but will be developing over some months to come.

    In other areas we continue to develop the character abilities. Right now we are still in our phase three of abilities design. We keep attacking the player ability system because we believe it is so critical to the enjoyment of the game. We are planning over 1,800 separate abilities, with numerous variables assigned to each. The system allows you to get ANY of these abilities as any player in the game, and improve the ones you wish with no cap. This makes the system inherently complex, which is why we are already in phase three of design, with lots still to work on before it is done. We have a complete list of Abilities created already back in Phase one. In Phase two we reworked the system based on everything that is possible to do in our engine. Phase three is attacking the system from a purely creative end, where we are just having open ended blue sky ideas presented, discussed and refined, as we try to make the best possible choices for players. Our goal is to make you want each and every one of the 1,800+ Abilities, so that, yes, you have to agonize over which ones you choose. Even though you can get any Ability does not mean you can get all of them. You get to pick the ones you want, but you can only pick so many. How many? Well, that is not a fixed number. The longer you play the more you can get, but... no, we do not believe anyone can play long enough to get all 1,800+. You would die of old age.

    Quest storyline writing continues to be one of our biggest challenges. We have ruined several writers who thought they could write our type of massive quest story, but in the end they found that it was too difficult. Still, we have located a few people who are excelling at this strange form of fantasy writing. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent out there to writing our quests. Novels are easier, and our quests have absolutely nothing to do with what other MMOs use. There is a current RPG released that lots of people are playing... and the story they include would only be just one of our quests, and it would have to be far less linear and tie into the world events as well as player individual stories... you get the picture. Still there is good news here. Some recent quest stories written for CoS are finally capturing the goals of the game. We feel that we now have a few people writing quality CoS storylines. We need more talented writers to add to this pool, but at least we have a few doing productive work now.

    Other areas getting attention right now would include the NPC behavioral A.I. This is another vastly important portion of the game. We are relying on a MASSIVE improvement in NPC behavior compared to previous MMO offerings. It is imperative to the game play for NPCs to have real and varying intelligence. We are trying to do away with the one strategy works for all, concept that works in most other MMOs.

    For example, with our varied intelligence system, the old Tank system of combat will not work in most situations, and in truth, we are trying to do away with it for the most part. When you are facing intelligent opponents who may employ changing group strategy against you, then the idea of having one Tank stand around while all of the monsters beat on him (or her) just will not fly. Players will need to adapt their strategy to the situation at hand, based on the terrain around them and the intelligence, distribution and tactics of their opponents. This sounds complex for the player, but it is not. We are just designing the game so that good strategy will reap benefits in combat.

    As for the holidays, it is nearly time for the annual MMO Magic holiday party. We always do something new in the game world for the party, but the details will have to come later on. It is a surprise! Sure, it is only for the team at this point, but later on when the game is released, we will continue to hold special holiday extravaganzas for the loyal player base as well; for now, this is good practice.
  • We've spent a lot of time on making some design changes recently. We want a living world where monsters don't pop back into existence after being killed. On top of that we don't want players forced into a typical level grinding situation where they stand around killing the same things over and over. To keep this from happening we have been working on the wilderness monster system. This includes how monsters inhabit these lands.

    To make the game even better we have recently redesigned the tool that manages the large wilderness portions of the world. We improved the design to make the monsters in the world both interesting, dynamic and changing.

    The wilderness areas of the Reflected Worlds deploy NPCs (monsters) by giving them tasks and goals and then turning them loose to achieve those results. Those monsters can make choices based on what happens to them as they go about their tasks.

    When NPCs are killed by Players they will replenish in that area over time, but not by popping back into existence. Instead, new monsters (or mobs) will move into the area. These new monsters have their own agendas and goals, and they will soon begin making their way into an available area to start their tasks.

    For example they might be a Raiding party of Recreated... sent out of No-Man's-Land to enter the Citadel lands in search of free people to kill so that they can drag their bodies back to be used to make more of the Recreated.

    They will have a target, like a particular town, village, farm, fort, etc., and head with purpose for that area. If they reach their goal they will try to take the free folk (NPCs), kill some and retreat with their bodies.

    Players may come upon this mob of raiders on their way to or from their goal. But... should the player not run into them directly, they may still cross their trail. This is a visible and traceable set of foot prints. Depending on the player's skill level in tracking, they will know varying amount of detail about the tracks they cross, and can choose to follow them to the Recreated raiding party, if they wish.

    Conversely, the raiding party might cross the player (and group) tracks and decide to alter their path to follow and attack the PCs. Thus, whether you run directly into your opponents, track down your prey, or become their prey, you may have to deal with this raiding party.

    All of the mobs and individual monsters out there have agendas, and can make decisions to change those agendas as they interact with the presence of the players.

    On this note, we also created two new classes of monsters for the game, the Dark Spawn and the Dark Defiled. We'll go into greater detail about these new classes of creatures, how they are created and what they are up to in the war between the Demons, the Citadel and Morphael.

    But for now, the new designs for them are very evil, nasty and downright disgusting in some cases.

    On other areas, lots of Level Building is being progressed on the game side. Work on the design of the Adventure creation tool has been completed.

    There have been further delays on the Enact Event Tool, but we hope to get the issues with it resolved soon.

    In art there has been a lot of progress on Dynamic object creation as we cut down the lists created by the Level Building team. New NPCs have also been added to the game, and work on key NPCs continues.

    We are hoping to get a big push in the next few months to get us to the next major milestone, more on that in future updates.
  • The last two months have seen progress in some areas and delays in others. We're still waiting on the latest build of the Trident3D engine. There have been additional delays due to some serious bugs and because of some last minute design changes. The part that is costing the most time is the Event Tool, which is an insanely complex tool. However, it will be worth the wait as it will allow us to breath an amazing amount of life into the world.

    This is one of the primary tools for making Citadel of Sorcery change every day, or truly, at any moment.

    For example, this is the tool that allows us to setup a situation where a bar room brawl might break out... and then spill out into the street. Or, have a building catch on fire and have the local NPCs react to that fire. Not only would they react, but the news of this fire would spread from one NPC to another naturally. Players could talk to an NPC who spoke to another NPC earlier about something that happened recently... all spread naturally through world using the Event Tool.

    Naturally, the power to allow events and rumors to spread naturally comes with the potential for bugs, and so we have seen delays in the tool as some of these issues are handled by the engineers.

    However, while we continue to wait for this powerful tool other areas of the game continue to expand. Level Building goes on as more details of the world are placed and added. NPC creation continues as well as we expand the number of models.

    A new tracking database has been created for the Level Building department to help us search out some of the bugs created in using a tool as powerful as our Enact world building tool. This database allows testers to track down who what where when and why something was added through Enact in the case of something strange going on in the world.

    For example, since the NPCs are created in Enact to have their own individual lives, and even we don't know exactly what they will do at any given moment, strange occurrences can sometimes take place. You might be wandering around with your character and find the streets kind of empty because most (or all) of the NPCs heard about something happening at the Citadel Palace and went to go see the event. This, though possible, isn't desirable. We would have to track down who messed with the A.I. net and caused such a powerful Event, and tone down the power of the rumor, or change the priority of this event. To do that we have to know what caused such an occurrence.

    The tracking database allows us to search on many different parameters and (hopefully) find out what some Level Builder may have done to affect the world so grandly.

    Design continues on the character races and we're planning to start releasing some information on each race through the www.citadelofsorcery.com website in the near future (one race at a time). As always, the Quest system continues to go through more and more design phases. This is the main thrust of the entire game. We want quests to be everything you have ever dreamed of in a game, and never gotten. This means that we have to spend a lot of time designing, writing, testing and constantly improving the game play. As those of you who play a lot of games know, a world that has unique quests for every player, that changes due to what players accomplish, that moves forward in time, has many, many MANY difficulties in design.

    We have received countless emails from concerned players wanting to know how we plan to overcome these challenges. Well, we can't release all of that information, it's what sets our game apart from other MMO games. Still, we can say that we know the challenges , we understand the conundrums, paradoxes and dangers. Our design team works constantly, going back over the system again and again, looking for those problems.

    We're trying to balance a system that will give the player all of these things and yet still explain as much of the system as naturally as possible in our game universe. We don't like arbitrary rules, so we try to work everything into the mythos of the world, and yet give the player the richest experience we can in a changing world. It's not easy, but we feel we're getting it there. We are no longer having to swing at it with a virtual design sledge hammer and are down to more gentle taps. These small mods will continue until the game releases (and probably beyond, hey, this isn't easy!)

    So, this brings us to the most asked question we receive in email... When? No answer there. Not for awhile, and not before it's done. We have sworn to the Dead gods that we will not release this game until it has achieved all our goals, and since we are aiming so high, this could take awhile. We will not be rushed, sorry. We will continue to release development news as it becomes available so that you can follow the progress, though we don't guarantee when these posts will happen. We only post when there is something worth saying... and though work is ALWAYS going on, sometimes it is just a lot more of the same, and not very exciting. Still, we'll try to post something somewhat regularly.

    Keep up the faith, work continues.
  • The MMO Magic team is growing! We've recently added two new people to the Quest Writing staff. Our game takes a very special type of writer and we are constantly looking and testing people to find those capable and foolish enough to want to take on this difficult task. Writing just one of our quests is like attempting to write a detailed outline of an epic fantasy novel, and that story changes every time you read the darn thing. It takes the average Quest Writer more than a month to write just one of our quests. It takes a kind of masochistic writer to want to punish themselves in writing in this style. However, we have found two more writers who do it quite well. Since each of our quests takes an average of a week of play to complete, you will only go through about 50 quests in a year, but due to the time it takes to write each of these epic changing stories we are increasing the size of our writing staff to handle the work load.

    In art we have been working hard on NPC animations, additional structures for villages and towns.

    Level Building continues to add to the world as they try to get ahead of those who will be adding our 'living' NPCs to those same areas. Right now placeholder terrain is used, since the real terrain system is still under construction (hence, no screenshots released yet).

    The Trident3D engine is nearing the next build. There have been a lot of requests from the game designers on changes to features in the Enact tool and they are attempting to get a build out soon.

    We took off some time and most of the company went to the E3 game industry show. We were both disappointed and thrilled to see that there wasn't a lot of competition for CoS in the MMO arena. We were disappointed in that there were no game coming out that we wanted to play (we are game players, even if we are also working on our own game). And we were thrilled because there still wasn't anything like Citadel of Sorcery being shown. The games we saw demonstrated had the same old game play and technology that we've seen for several years. Our company goal of releasing a new type of MMO game using new technology are still on track. :) We returned to work ready to redouble our efforts to bring this game to the public as soon as possible.

    Unfortunately, there is still a lot of road ahead of us. Fortunately, most of that road involves the more exciting parts of development, writing, building and testing quests and combat, for example.

    One last note, we continue to get emails constantly asking us if we are like this game, or that game, if we are PVP or PVE, if we will have crafting, etc. We want to state again, you have to forget other MMO games when talking about CoS. This is a new type of game, and therefore we don't have what other MMO games have, we're simply not like other MMO games. Expect something different and stop trying to fit us into some pigeon hole. For better or worse, this game will be something new. We hope you will like it.
  • Time for a small update (to keep the wolves at bay). Work progresses in all departments.

    Programming has been handling some issues with Enact, mostly server communication and a few other areas. The fact that Enact works in the live game world has made for some interesting bugs. They will soon be moving onto the world terrain creator (the world is currently using older style hand created terrain pieces, but this is placeholder).

    Art continues to add structures and NPCs. Upcoming work includes some architecture based on the different ages of the world (some of this will be ruins, of course, but some castle and keeps as well).

    Quest Writers are working on writing more quests, and pushing the limits of what can be done in quests to make them exciting, fun and as addictive as possible. These Quest designs take an incredible amount of work. A single Quest design for CoS can be 50 to 100 pages, including various flow charts and spreadsheets, and each one is a mental maze to design since the player choices change the way the quest unfolds AND the quest has to be adaptive for use within the customization system for individual player stories. Novels are easier to write, trust me.

    Level Designers are currently writing Bios for various. NPCs. Since all of our NPCs have lives, jobs, hobbies, interactions with other NPCs and players, friends, enemies, political views, etc., each has to be designed with a full bio. NPCs also have to work within the community, meaning have proper interaction with all the other NPCs. Work on this is barely started and will go on for months.

    Game Design is working on character Abilities (which seems to be endless, with approximately 1400 to design). The Story Tool has recently been completely redesigned to handle some of the new quests and missions being written by the Quest Writers. The object of the Story Tool is to allow the writers to design any quest they can imagine. As previously stated, our quests should take players a week or two to complete if they play a couple hours every day (although there are smaller achievements within each quest so that you get a chance for payoffs along the way rather than just the big one when you reach the grand climax of the story).

    Overall the game progress is steady, and fairly on track. People keep asking us how close we are to being finished, which is a question that cannot be answered. With all of the R&D work and pushing the game and MMO design envelop, the project will just be done when it is done. Thanks for your patience, we are working hard, and Citadel of Sorcery is progressing.
  • As stated in the previous post, we're in a long development cycle right now. However, here is a little information on what is happening on CoS.

    1) The new client update system is working well now. We're going to be adding the 'news' system to it in the near future. This is a daily newspaper that comes out telling players what is happening in the game world today, and what transpired yesterday. What towns fell, or were liberated. What players did, what guilds were formed, what new offensive Morphael is rumored to be planning, etc. Players can read this while they wait for any file updates, this way they know what is happening before they get into the world. Right now programming is adding the news display system to the client updater. Later the news generation system will be worked on as well.

    2) Art is working on several areas. We're creating the structures for the first questing territory, villages, towns, forts, castles, ruins, towers, etc. In addition work continues on the Citadel as well, adding some headquarters for the strange 'commanders' of the Citadel forces. We haven't released information on these nasty guys that you work for as a player, but we will down the road. We've also started modeling some of the commanders as well.

    3) Level building is eagerly awaiting Enact. Though the tool is working, it has not been turned over to them for use as design and programming work out some of the issues with this new piece of technology. However, we expect to give it to them in the next few days.

    4) Design continues to expand the player Abilities and will do so for month to come. In addition a new element of the game is under design, the Spirit World. More on that later.

    5) Quest writing goes on, the system is now generally in place and we just continue to fine tune it and add more content to the system.

    6) New team members! We added two new people to the team (one quest writer and one artist, a modeler/texturer). We have also added three new interns recently, one to Level Building and two to Quest Writing. They are learning the ropes still, and we hope to get them up to speed soon. Of the previous round of Interns,five made it through to the second internship (a one year stint).

    7) The new game, update and database servers have run into some hardware snags, but we should have the new systems up and running soon. We got a couple of bad pieces of hardware, but should have the replacements back soon. This is a necessary upgrade so that we can stress test the game with larger groups of players later this year. We need to get these new servers up and running so that the testing phase can happen on schedule. No, we're not signing up testers yet, though we have been compiling a list of people who want to be notified when that time approaches.
  • A short update:

    Not a lot of 'new' things to report, just a lot of work done on furthering existing elements such as:

    Final touches on Enact Phase 1 (in game level building tool).

    Testing and tweaks on the new game client update system.

    More NPC character development.

    Lots of design work on player Abilities.

    100s of bug fixes to existing elements in game.

    Level building continues to add dynamic objects.

    New models pouring in, both static and dynamic.

    Design tweaks here and there on the game.

    We're going to be entering a period of development in the next few months where this will be the norm. Meaning, we have already finished much of the core functionality, and now we're just adding more and more using the existing tools. Of course this doesn't mean we won't post progress updates, otherwise people seem to get worried. Don't! Progress is continuous.
  • Well, it's Friday the 13th, but we're not superstitious. We were holding out on the next update for Enact Phase 1 to be finished, however, there have been some unavoidable delays in finishing the tool. Of course, other work has been done in the meantime, so we decided to go ahead and post a short 'interim' update report. So here goes...

    Recently the art department has been working on several areas of the game. The main screen user interface final art has been started, working off the previous design art. In addition several new NPC characters have been modeled and animated. Work on character races has also continued, with particular work on Jenemos and Waerian player characters. As for structures, The Black Market is under construction, which is part of the sewer system, and is where players can shop during the night while the shops of the Citadel are closed.

    In Level Building we have been fixing bugs in existing city areas. Planning has begun on the NPCs that live in Tier one of the Citadel. Since they each live their own life, we have begun work on the places they live, work and what they do during their leisure time. This work is in anticipation of the Enact Tool, phase 1 being completed.

    Design has continued work on player abilities. This is a very long process. Our issues are simple, since players can get any ability from any league we cannot have any ability from any league be similar. Each ability should be unique. This may not seem odd, yet most other games have similar abilities for different classes. Example, they may have a healing spell for a cleric and another slightly different healing ability for a warrior. But since any character in CoS can have any ability, we want them all to be unique. Who needs two healing spells? Since we are planning over 1,400 ability choices, this is a daunting task. Work goes on.

    Other areas that have seen recent work in design include the combat system and the ongoing history of our progressing world story. Our system of an advancing world time line gives us unique challenges in keeping the world history progressing.

    We expect the next update on the Trident3D engine soon. There have been some delays on the completion of the Enact tool, but we expect that to be delivered in the near future. From our end there has been work on the game client updating system and work continues on the audio module. Finally, server security code is being improved (got to keep your character data safe!)

    New servers have been added to run the game. These will help with testing phases planned for later on this year. We will need to stress test the system and find out what each World Server can handle. Since we are doing things on the server end a bit differently than most other MMO games (like everything else in this project) there are some aspects of our server system that need some serious hammering to make sure there are not any issues. This includes the ability for players to move between any World Server in their geographic territory any time they wish. The objective is to make it so that players do not have to pick a server when they start the game, and can move to any server they want at any moment, easily.

    Bug fixing continues (it never ends). Several new people have joined the team in 2009, and we anticipate more over time. We're a snow ball gathering size as we get closer to the bottom of the hill.

    In the last report we mentioned demolishing the Guild District. Plans have changed. We have decided to let it remain as the Housing District (which is what it was originally) though we will improve NPC housing in the District. Of course this means we are left without a Guild Distinct. Don't despair! Design has decided that Guilds will get to construct their own Guild Halls. Sites in the Reflected Worlds can be selected by the prospective Guild and then construction of their Guild Keep can begin. Over time they can expand and improve their Guild.

    In addition, we're considering player housing (please keep in mind that some of this stuff is in flux, don't flame us later if it changes). This would manifest as a village or town springing up around the Guild Keep. Guild members could choose to construct their own house near their Guild Keep. They can invite non-Guild members to come visit their home in their town or village, though access to the inside of the Guild Keep would be restricted to Guild members. To reach a Guild Hall players will use the portal system, which can take them there from the Citadel and many other places around the Reflected Worlds (any permanent Portal will do).

    We'll talk more about Guilds and Guild Keeps and Guild villages and towns in the future as more of the design is detailed. Since Guild Keeps are now part of the Reflected Worlds, this system will be dependent on the World Generator, which is technology still in progress. So, it will be a while still :)

    All right, that's it for now, but we will have another update much sooner than the last as several things are nearing readiness.
  • OK, time for an update on the progress of Citadel of Sorcery. First though, a happy holidays to you, we hope you enjoy the season. Now,as to what we have been up to at MMO Magic, Inc.

    It has been a busy time at MMO Magic, lots of work getting done, lots of progress on the game and engine. Let's start there, with technology.

    We have a new game editor. It has been revamped and we had to extract out the old systems for animation and add in the new. Artists can now take their work in a more streamlined pipeline from our modeler into our animation package, and from there straight into the game editor. This vastly improves the speed in which art can be made and gotten into the game. The editor also allows adjustments and refinements of the art and animation, while showing it in the game rendering system. Thus we can now tweak tints, attach normal maps, specular maps, attach and adjust animations, etc.

    In game, we have added the support for dynamic object shadows (to go along with other static geo shadowing we already had in place). These nice 'soft' shadows add a lot of realism to the look of the world as they cast shadows from sun and moon light. We'll be posting some screenshots of the new lighting very soon. These also include the character shadows, which replace the old system.

    There has also been a round of bug fixing that has fixed up a number of the more serious bugs, like a memory leak that caused a graphic glitch after about 30 minutes into the game session, a loss of camera collision in certain areas, a ground 'mush' bug that made you sink into apparent stone like it was made of mud. A Vista only bug was also fixed, where the cursor showed 'busy' all the time. And more bugs were fixed, too many to list here.

    Also, the support for our new animation format has been added, so that the game is fully switched over to using Collada models and animation now and all old legacy code has been removed.

    We have added the Data server system to track PC world interaction. The character select screen has been added. You can now create characters, and save them for later use. The game now tracks data about the player and writes to the database server. This was an important step on the way to the next milestone, which is the completion of the in game editor, phase 1, of Enact. Progress continues on that tool, and we are already seeing NPCs moving about in the game as testing of Enact commences. This has a lot of work to go, but the completion of Enact Phase 1 is the current focus of programming and will be the next milestone you see listed here (in the next update).

    The sound module has also seen work, though it will be part of the next milestone. We're using Ogg Vorbis as our sound compression format. We'll talk more about the sound module in the next update.

    Of course, a character select system means that we now can have many characters in the game, finally. For awhile there we were all clones of the same ugly placeholder model. We have seen the last of the original placeholder character. Which brings us to art.

    Artists have been concentrating on creating PC and NPC characters, both for the new PC select and creation and for the upcoming Enact control of NPCs. Many of the PCs being added now will be replaced later when we implement the character model adjustment system. For now, we don’t have the ability to change the shape of the PC models, though we do have some control of the texture and tints. The model adjustment system is actually one of the last things we will be working on, just prior to Beta, so for now we will only have so many models to choose from when making a character.

    Animators have been working in the new Collada system to apply more motion capture data and the inevitable tweaking it always needs. We are building up a library of 'cleaned' motions that can be transferred onto new incoming PC and NPC models. This work has only just begun, and will continue for many months to come as we build up all the standard animations and emotes for PCs and NPCs. The good news is that the pipeline is working, and an artist can make a motion and get it onto a character and in the game in rapid fashion now; all on their own. This means more rapid progress in the animations as artists can get their work in the game in moments after doing the work and see it in the game engine.

    Level building has been continuing the placement of dynamic objects, with special work being done to the Merchant district and all the tiny little shops that wind through the narrow streets. Places like the Apothecary, shield shop, map store, wine shop, and others. Other areas of Tier 1 are also being decorated.

    We're probably going to demolish Section A of the city and replace it with a new District called the Guild District. Design has decided to make a District filled with various Guild halls. Work on this is just beginning. Speaking of the design group, weekly meetings are helping as we rework and rework things like the combat system and player Abilities. This has been a concentration of the design team and will continue to be worked until we reach that phase of implementation, which is still several months away. Right now they are working on a system that gives players the chance to react to their opponent's moves and spells. In the Abilities arena, the work continues as we work on the hundreds of Abilities, with their multiple Echelons and endless Skill point improvements. It’s a massive undertaking that we will be tweaking, changing and balancing… well, as long as we work on this game (even after release).

    Quest Design has slowed a little as we are concentrating on other areas, but we plan to get back to that soon. Right now more detailed political and societal aspects of the Reflected worlds are being further detailed to help with the quest writing consistency. Races are being further defined as well, and information on them will be released on the CoS web site in the future.

    On a fun note, we took a break for our company Holiday party and had the artist do some quick decorations of the Citadel city, as well as a scavenger hunt. Some of our more distant team members made the trip to Southern California to come to the party, while others joined us virtually in the game.

    So, what's next? Enact, Phase 1. As noted, work has already been done, but our next milestone is to finish Phase 1 of Enact, which lets us edit the world from within the running game, allowing instant testing without a 'build' process as we create the A.I. net for NPCs, add events and generally construct the things that players interact with in the game. Meanwhile, art will concentrate on using the new build that allows them to add more characters into the world. They will also be concentrating on NPCs in the next few weeks, getting those ready for the A.Io net coming with Enact Phase 1.
  • As part of the game building tool, Enact: Phase 2, we have reworked the Story Building portion of the tool to handle recent changes to the Quest system.

    The objective of Enact has always been to put powerful tools capable of making almost any quest concept into the game without requiring programming skills. Enact is a series of different tools with a GUI interface that runs inside the game for live editing of Quests and other aspects of the world.

    In writing more quests for the game, we have reworked the Story tool set to handle the branching aspects of the quest system. The tool can now handle more types of player decisions and map these out in tree form to make translation of the text and flowcharts of the quest design into the actual quest built in the game.

    Further testing of the new changes to Enact continue, and the Level Design Interns have been valuable in working with our team. They will continue to be one of the main testing sources for the new tool designs and later, function.
  • We have had additional progress on our new animation system for NPCs. This was a complex crossover from our previous placeholder system to the final animation system. It involved changing which 3D package we use to animate, changing model and animation formats to Collada, tweaking our animation pipeline to work with these, and programming our own code to read these formats. This has been a long crossover Work is still going on to fix various bugs in this new system, but we anticipate being fully functional next week.

    In art, work continues despite the disruption of changing formats. We have lost a modeler, but immediately replaced him with a new artist, though the new modeler is still getting up to speed on our ways of of doing things, and using our tools. New model additions to the world this month include the University (with all 31 Cadre locations), the Spirit League Interior, finishing work on the Heroes League and Marksman League and the main Theater in the Carnival District. New character models and NPC models are also in progress as well as our first monsters (if you must know, a Ravager Fiend,and an Shadow Imp, two creatures from the DarkHalls). These have been turned over to the texture artists for completion before animation.

    Concept art is now being done on Silvarian, the Eyes of Darkness. She is the key character who rules the Citadel. We're also starting concept art on the final look of the character races so that modeling can get cracking there as well. Up until now all characters and NPC models have been human.

    We're still waiting on the next engine update, but have hopes for getting it in the next few weeks.

    Design work (which is never ending on CoS) has been done in many areas, though character Abilities has been a major area of concentration lately. Currently a revamp of the Quest building process and corresponding portion of our Enact tool (phase two) has been getting our design teams attention as well.

    In Level building the Tavern District is finished with all dynamic objects (decorations and such) in place. The Warehouse district is now under construction and work continues on the Merchant District. We're still concentrated on the Citadel area until programming gets to the main terrain system (this will be some months away still). Meanwhile we continue to work with terrain made the old fashion way, by hand. All that placeholder terrain will go away and be replaced by the new system terrain generator eventually (more on that when we get there).

    Quest design also continues, though at a slower pace currently as we are concentrating on other areas of the game.

    As for a new look to the CoS web site, some work has been done on this, but being low priority, it may be another month or so before we put that up on the web.

    That's the news on Citadel of Sorcery in September; progress goes on at a steady pace.
  • We’re waiting on the latest update on the Trident3D engine. While we wait, we have been working on many other areas, including refining the game design. Design changes have gone into many areas, including monster races, world history, how horses work, bargaining with evil, death penalties, character abilities and more.

    One area of the game design that we changed has a large impact on the game world. This involved the lands under Citadel control in the war against Morphael. We decided that it was too peaceful. With only some untamed areas, and occasional forays by Morphael’s war parties, it was just too sedate. The answer… anarchy. We changed the story so that all the lands that the Citadel now claims are in various states of anarchy. There are small feudal kingdoms, areas held by strange cults, wild areas ruled by bandit gangs, all kinds of political, religious, criminal and just plain untamed areas. Meanwhile the Citadel is attempting to bring order to chaos before these lands are overwhelmed by the more organized forces of Morphael. We’ve spent a lot of time working out this new wrinkle to the game, and we have found that the Citadel lands are now ripe for almost any kind of quest and adventure. Everywhere you will go is different and danger hides around every corner. Design work is ongoing to develop this new concept of the world situation.

    In art we continue to develop models getting ready for the expansion of the Reflected Worlds terrain. This will take quite some time as it is the largest piece of work left in technology. Many areas we have already modeled have a lot of ground that is placeholder, and a lot of textures are temporary while we wait for this critical piece of the engine to be finished.

    Meanwhile, we are preparing assets for the launch of Enact, phase 1, our world editor. Up until now we have been using the original editor that came with the Trident3D engine, but it will not suffice for the quest system we designed. Programming on Enact goes on, but we don’t have a completion date yet. We’re looking forward to Enact as it has the fundamental difference from the original editor in that it works inside the live game rather than outside requiring a compile phase. Enact allows us to edit a quest in real time, while the game world runs. This allows for much faster work and instant testing of quests , missions, adventures, and more.

    Our Level Design Interns have now been with us for several months and are starting to grasp what it takes to design one of our quests. They are learning how a single original story written in the correct format can be fed into the game system and become many different adventures for players. This extremely specialized style of writing is difficult to learn, but they are doing an admirable job so far. Four of the original Interns will be continuing on to the next session. We may take on a few new interns who are committed and crazy enough to take on learning this very difficult system of quest writing.

    Another area that has seen recent progress is the user interface design and art prototyping. We’re starting to get a good idea of what the main interface to players will be like. We may post some screenshots of that soon so that we can get some feedback from players.

    There hasn’t been any time to work on a new website yet, it’s just not a high priority. We need to advance the game long before we worry about pretty web site graphics.

    Well, that’s the state of the game… for now. We’ll post more news as things progress.
  • We haven't posted a news article here recently, so we thought we would at least add an update on progress.

    1. There have been some delays in the programming of the tool set for building the A.I. net for the NPCs of the world. We got side tracked with some other problems, but work will be back on track this week. We're very excited about this portion of the game building tool. Once Phase 1 is complete we can build our A.I. nets in the world and then toss in NPCs who will immediately go about living their lives within the game world. This system will bring unprecedented realism to our NPCs. We'll release more on this when Phase 1 is completed.

    2. Animation Pipeline. We've had some success in our new animation pipeline, which is automating our system for bringing character models into the world with a full set of animations ready to go. Once completed this system will shorten the time it takes to get a completed NPC model into the game. With the numbers of NPCs we need living in our world we had to have a pipeline like this in order to quickly populate the game. This pipeline is still in progress at this point, but we have gotten the basic system functional and we're testing with the first NPC output by the system. If this works out like we hope we will soon be abandoning the old slow hand done system completely and starting to mass produce NPCs for the game.

    3. Game Design. Going along with the recent revamp of our Quest system (see earlier news post) we have been adjusting the system further. Quests are a hybrid of human written story, hand made portions and generated Quest segments. All of this within a system that allows the player's decisions to change the course and outcome of each quest to thousands of possibilities. We currently believe that a typical quest in our system will take average players between one and two weeks (real time) to complete. Don't worry about that long of a quest, there are lots of 'chapters' along the way so you can have some satisfaction in the short run before reaching the grand climax.

    4. Art continues to improve, though at a slow rate. We are not concerned with the aesthetic side of the game at this juncture, but plan to attack that at a much later date when we can assign more assets. For now the game art is certainly functional enough to play test the world, and that is all we need while we develop the game play, which IS our primary focus.

    5. We will be addressing the CoS web site with a redesign and overhaul. Not sure when this will go live, but work will get started on this soon. (It's low priority though).

    That's what's happening at MMO Magic, Inc. on Citadel of Sorcery.
  • We have finally started our internship program. This program serves two purposes; we get some talented (but usually inexperienced) help in some areas of the game creation. More importantly, we help these hardworking souls to gain some experience, insight and game credits for working at a game company on an actual title.

    We've recently started six Interns, but are still looking for a few more. We're particularly interested in artists as this is the area currently needing the most development and is where we have the least number of interns.

    Please note that Interns can work from remote locations; the Internet brings us all together.

    If you are a budding artist, and want to get some experience and credits working on a game, contact us at Info@citadelofsorcery.com. Of course, we may take new interns in programming or Level Design as well, but you would have to have some decent skills already as we have several people already working as Interns in those departments.
  • As we tested out Quest designs we found two things were true, our quest were far more involved and interesting than other MMO games we'd played, and they still didn't meet our original design goals.

    So we gathered some of our design team and had a multi-day intensive redesign of the entire system. I'm happy to report that our original goals are now met with the new changes to the system. We didn't get rid of anything we had before, we just expanded the system to allow far more player interaction.

    Where before you would have had unique quests that tied into your story, now your actions during the quest have far greater impact on the quest as it develops and builds toward the climax... a climax that will be affected and changed by what you did along the way and what you do during the climax.

    This new system also expands the quality and quantity of quests. This, of course, requires a redesign now of our quest building tool, and that is underway. More news on that later.
  • The Citadel of Sorcery development team is pleased to welcome four new artists. One is an accomplished animation pipeline specialist, another is an experienced Art Director we've worked with on past projects, the third a modeler new to us, but an accomplished artist and the fourth a Concept Artist that we've worked with on many shipped titles in the past.

    We're still looking for even more artists to join this amazing project. Please contact us if you want to become part of the most exciting MMO game ever built.
  • We have added the menu tool to the Trident3D engine and Enact Editing tool. The tool can now modify itself as well as create the menus and logic for the in game User Interface screens. Since Enact is actually inside a special development copy of Citadel of Sorcery this means that all the previously created art for the game menu system will soon start to show up in the game for the first time.
  • The entire Citadel of Sorcery team wishes you all a Happy Holidays!

    BTW: We're still looking for other talented artists who want to get in early on this new and unique game. So if you want to be part of an exciting development team, drop us a line.
  • Today our engineering staff completed a new build, version 0.2.0.71209.0 of the Trident 3D engine.

    This build of the Trident 3D engine addressed several bugs and issues to do with the physics collision with dynamic objects, as well as rendering problems. It also fixed the instanced Object appearance error, as well as building interior malfunctions, and added a static geometry cache to stop memory fragmentation with an overflow buffer system.

    In short, rendering is far more solid now with little chance of any missing geometry.
  • Today we finished the new layout of Tier 1 of the Citadel. The hub and spoke design worked out well and should be an asset for players in understanding where they are in this large city.
  • We have completed several meetings where we addressed issues we'd discovered in the quest system. In attempting to give players interesting quests that tie into and are influenced by their past and that work with their personal story, we were running into several problems when it came to players grouping up for these adventures and then having the leader of the quest leave during the adventure.

    We have now solved the issue and believe we have a quest system that will handle both personal quests and group quests for the player. This is an amazing quest system the likes of which no MMORPG has ever attempted in the past (due no doubt to having to solve the same issues we went through). But, we have it designed now and plan to start implementation of the Quest building tool fairly soon.
  • Now that Tier 1 is built, after wandering round the streets and buildings of the city we decided that such a complex city needed a better layout, so that players could easily find what they were looking for without constantly needing a map.

    In order to accomplish this we decided to change a good portion of the Tier 1 city layout. Now you will enter through the main gates, go through a grand entry park and go straight into the inner city. The inner city is a very open and large area where you can easily see the five league structures and the palace out on the lake.

    From the inner city it is easy to find the District you are seeking at the moment. There are gates in the inner city wall with the name of the District you would reach by using the gate. The Districts surround the inner city like spokes on a wheel with the inner city as the hub. The Districts are:

    1) Tavern District: This is where you can find a common room to use the grouping board, or just hang out in one of the taverns looking for a group to join. Need a group member for an adventure? This is the place to come to find one.

    2) Guild District: This is where playesr can start their own Guild and where they go to enter the guild premises. Guilds in CoS are more than a spreadsheet, they have an actual physical location. Guild members can hang out there and use the various guild facilities.

    3) Carnival District: Players come here to amuse themselves with various entertainments while waiting for their friends to log into the game. Here they can find the bathhouse, fortune teller, dance hall, theaters, casino, races and pubs.

    4) Municipal District: Here players can take a tour of the city, use the post office to send mail or items, access the library to start a quest, get summoned to the courthouse or visit or supply the museum with new artifacts.

    5) Warehouse District: Players can use this district to store nearly unlimited amounts of treasure. They may also take part in real time auctions where they bid in person or by proxy.

    6) Monastery District: This is where you visit the graveyard, or get resurrected or healed).

    7) Arena District: Here you can challenge other players to do battle in the Coliseum, or bet on those battles.

    8) Merchant District: Here you can go to actual shops and make deals with the store keeper, or sell them items. You can also craft items into bigger and better things.

    9) League District: (Within the inner city) Here you can join a League and work on new abilities for your character. Or, visit the University to get information on what you want your character to become.

  • We decided to improve the standard system for character control. No, don't panic. We are not taking anything you are used to away, only adding additional controls that you may choose to use. We believe these controls improve the standard control system by allowing a player to walk, run, step back, trot back, turn left and right, look up and down and jump... all from the mouse only.

    No longer must you keep your other hand on the ASDW and space bar for these controls. Just one hand on the mouse and you can move your character around the world in complete control. Of course, you must have a wheel mouse to do so, but hey, that's the current standard.

    If you don't have a wheel mouse, don't worry, the standard ASDW and Space bar all still work for you.
  • Well, it didn't really eat them, but it affected many other system. The way our game streams textures and geometry into and out of the game so that players do not have to wait for loads is tied into this memory fragmentation fix.

    We have had to do some serious re-writes of the Trident3D engine to accommodate the fixes needed to make the game work with the LOD code, Streaming code and memory management code. This has taken several months, but is finally nearly finished. Because of this we are currently writing a new system for long distant LODs. It will fix the issue, but also add greater detail in the distant view while reducing the cost on the system to render the view.

    We can therefore show you more in greater detail further away, and keep your frame rate running smoothly. This system is nearly finished, and preliminary screen shots of it in action are very promising.
  • Tier 1 is built. That is to say, all Districts are filled in with their buildings and there are no holes in the world with nothing there. 80 percent of the interiors are all built as well, so you can go inside most of the buildings. The rest of the structures will either be locked up at the door, or the interior completed soon.
  • Objects were disappearing in the world. We tracked it down to the texture streaming system. As we stream textures into and out of the video card the memory is getting fragmented so that a larger set of textures cannot find room to be loaded.

    In order to fix this issue we have to write video 'chunk' system to guarantee that memory does not get fragmented in the future. Separate systems were needed for dynamic and static geometry. We're getting started on that code now.
  • We've decided to go with motion capture for the character animation. We tried hand animation, but the motion capture adds far more realism to the movement of the characters. We have 70% of the motion capture data ready now, and several characters, all human so far.
  • Now we can add almost any number of lights to a scene without slowing down the frame rate of the game significantly. The Trident3D engine mixes real time lighting with cube map lighting to get the effect of thousands of real lights in the scene and visible at any given moment. This allows our game to have a amazing night scenes where you look out across the a city and see hundreds if not thousands of lights.
  • Dynamic objects can now contain light, have emissive textures and cast shadows from the light. For example, if I build a lantern, place a candle inside, and put a light within the lantern, the candle will glow, the glass will glow as the light passes through. The frame and supports around the lantern will cast shadows as they block the light from within. The light picks up the tint from the glass, which colors the light that passes through. The light is in real time, so if the lantern is carried by a player, the light swings and moves casting real time light and shadows everywhere.
  • Based on the Design Guide, the User Interface screen art has been completed for the main view, and all major menus: Inventory,Character, Stats, Potions, Trades, Abilities Codex.
  • The Trident3d engine uses streaming technology to add new models and textures into the world in real time rather than make players wait on load screens. In other words, when you are in the game wandering round the Citadel or out in a Reflected world on an adventure, you will NEVER be stopped to load. Everything is constantly streaming into your video card as you move around the world, so nothing gets between you and constant fun. No loads when entering new buildings, caves, castles, dungeons, towns, villages, terrain... none. Once you are in the world, you never have to wait and interrupt your adventure.
  • The Trident3D engine has the dynamic objects system now. This allows us to place all the little items of high detail into the world. These are objects that only show when you are close enough to them, but they are higher detailed objects than static geometry.
  • In CoS when you walk into any building we do not load a separate place like most other games. All of our interiors are actually inside the building you see, like a real building. This means you never have to wait for separate loads when entering or exiting a building. In addition, it means that all the windows and doors actually are windows and doors. You can walk to a window, look out through the glass and see the outside world. Light from the outside world comes in through the real windows to light the room (depending on the time of day and (eventually) weather.
  • It took a while, but we wrote all the code necessary so that we will no longer have the issues caused by the Nvidia / D3D incompatibility issue.
  • Well, we developed a BAD crash bug in the program. It took the programming staff several months to narrow it down to the real problem. After going through several of our own systems, writing new memory management, and other fixes, we finally discovered the real problem. There is a bug in the Nvidia drivers that doesn't work properly with D3D 9. We've contacted Nvidia about this issue, but gotten zero response. We looked at other released games, and they crash with this bug as well. The publishers of those games must have just given up and let their game go out with the occasional crash. In order to fix this problem, since Nvidia isn't going to take care of it, we have to write all our own code to handle error checking issues with D3D. This will take us considerable time and effort, but in the end we will no longer be dependent on the Nvidia code to keep our game solid.
  • The Trident3D engine now supports texture Level of Detail changing based on distance. The world automatically adjusts the resolution of textures on the fly so that no matter how much video ram a player's card has, and how much texture is needed on screen, the game can always render the scene. This brings the game's target of running on a 128 meg video card possible.
  • We've added improvements the level of detail system to include real time shadows LODs. In addition, objects can now case self shadowing. In other words, if the shadow cast by the object fall somewhere onto the same object the shadows is also cast on the object.
  • We are considering five races plus human for the players to choose from in the game. We decided to create our own races rather than go with over used standards from the 'tolkien' universe. At this time we have ten races, but we're going to try to reduce that down to six total.
  • To allow us to create a city of massive complexity, it was necessary to create an LOD system to help the game handle the poly counts without grinding to a halt. We decided on a system that welds the ground and all the buildings and other large objects into one giant mesh. At that point we can alter the poly density on the fly so that as object move away or get closer they morph through various complexities of polygons, less with distance, more as you get closer. This system is being added to the Trident3D engine, and art is making the static models so that they can be welded together automatically by the engine.
  • The level building tool design is at version 1.0. This tool allows the Level Builder unprecedented control of the world. The idea was to put programming level control into the hands of a level builder, yet they don't have to know any programming. Level Builders can use this tool to create almost unlimited quality quests for the game, make NPCs and Monster behaviors and varying intelligence. They can program NPCs lives so that they live in the world rather than stand around some place. This is version one of the design, but actual construction of this tool is still more than a year away, so there is lots of room for improvment to the design prior to construction.
  • We decided to go with an NPC subject system rather than a tree system for PC to NPC communication. With our greater concentration on engaging quests, how you communicate with NPCs is important. With the subject system we're proposing players will not have to go back through the conversation tree several times to make sure they got all the information. Each subject you pick plays all the information about that subject, no branching. They will be written so that players feel it is a conversation going on, but there is no back and forth needed. Example: A player talks to an NPC, they have several subjects listed, one is "The old Mill." If the player chooses that the NPC says, "You want to know about the Old Mill, hey? Yes, I've heard that story about the ghost living there. No truth to it I tell you. All right, keep your shirt on, I'll tell you the old tale..." etc.
  • We've decided to sub divide Tier 1 into sections of city. This is due to how the Trident3d editor will handle the construction of the city. With 10s of millions of polygons planned in the city, it will be difficult for any tool to handle the entire city at one time. The game engine can handle it because of LOD systems, where the editor has to render every poly all the time. So we're keeping each section of the city to about 500,000 polygons of static geometry.

    This is also led to the idea of City Districts. Since we were dividing the city up anyway, we decided to make the divisions based on the Districts of the city. A District is something like: Merchant Disrict (for shopping), or the Entertainment District (where players waiting for friends to come into the game can go for some in game entertainment, like gambling, dancehalls, zoo, fortune telling, etc.)
  • We have an character ability system roughed out. The system is Skill Based. Players will adventure for tomes of knowledge. When they go up levels they gain study points which they can apply to any Ability books they own (representing time studied). This way the players can gain any ability they wish for their player, by seeking the tome, and then study it as much as they want to improve the ability. In addition, practicing the ability (using it) will also advance their skill in that ability. Thus there are both empirical and theoretical methods of Ability advancement.
  • The Test City has done all it can do for us. The design is far enough along now for us to start working on Tier 1 of the real Citadel.

    Art is starting work on the Tier 1 buildings. Much of the terrain for the city is placeholder, though some of the buildings are now real game assets. The city will be expanded and improved over the next two years of development.
  • The Trident 3D engine had a point light system added today. This is an early system allowing just some simple point lighting around the world, however, it is the beginning of what will be come a very robust lighting system yet to come. Shadows are cast appropriately by the point lights.
  • The first changing lighting in the world was added today. There is now a sun and moon, both casting their appropriate light and moving across the sky in a day/night cycle. Lighting changes with appropriate color shift depending on where the sun is located. It's a very realistic looking sun and moon light system.
  • Today we started work on the Epic Story. We've decided that the game will feature a unique story written specially for the game. This decision was not taken lightly. There are good reasons why games are often based on existing licenses, for example, a famous fantasy book series. However, while this helps the sales of the game initially, it can hurt the game play in the long run.

    By writing a unique story for the game itself, we believe we can make a world and epic story that has timed revelations that consistently progress the story over the long term play of a MMORPG.

    We have assigned the writing of this story to a fantasy novelist, who is also a game designer. The combination of game designer and author gives him a unique perspective on writing the story to work as a novel worthy tale, and as a game story.

    It is important to note that this is not a back story. Many MMOs have a back story that is just window dressing for the game, and once you start playing in the static world the back story really doesn't matter. Because of this most people don't read or care about the story of the game.

    In CoS we are designing the story to happen in real time for each player. You will not only 'live' through the story, but you will be a major character within that epic story.

    If this were Lord of the Rings, you would play the part of Aragorn, or Frodo, for example. Yet, you would make you own decisions and guide your own destiny. We can do this because our game is NOT static. There is a real calender, and time marches on every day. The world lives in real time, as the story progresses.
  • Real time shadows were added today to the Trident3D engine. These shadows use soft edges and work on all static geometry. Our shadow system is designed to push the envelope compared to any MMORPG so far. Shadows, though they don't sound exciting, add the ambience to a scene that can make or break the look and feel of a world.
  • Up until this point the game design was simply notes from meetings and other discussions. However, it is now time to get started on the actual Game Design document so that everyone is on the same page and because a game of this size can take a long time to design correctly.

    In fact, most developers do not spend enough time on the initial design of the game. This leads to poor designs and missing deadlines.

    In order to make CoS the best game possible, we have decided to spend a long time on the design prior to going to a publisher. We also decided to create all the risky elements, also prior to presenting the game to a publisher. The idea is simple, now we get the best game design, and we remove the main risks to the Publisher's investment. They get to see what they get prior to risking their capitol. This means we are footing the initial game development costs internally.

    Now, it is true that a Design Guide is never finished, but we plan to spend a full year just on the initial document. We're doing this to make sure we have designed th best MMORPG game possible for the players. The work on that Design Guide begins today and will continue for the next year... and beyond.
  • Due to the use of the Trident3D engine, it didn't take long before we were able to put up a test city online. This allowed us to test some network code with ten players in a small quickly built city of placeholder art. Initial tests were positive. We noticed some surging when watching one of the other players running along side your character and will be adding a smoothing system to handle this visual issue.
  • Today the programmers finished up the first version of the scene Editor. This will allow level builders to start placing models into a test world.
  • In order to deliver the Epic Story portion of the game, yet allow new players to come along later, we've decided to divide the Citadel into a spiral set of Tiers. You start at the lowest Tier at the base of the spiral mountain. As you progress your personal story far enough you will gain opportunities to earn your way to the next Tier of the Citadel.

    This advancement in Tiers is then tied to the delivery of the next section of the Epic storyline. Thus, you must ascend through the Tiers in order to gain the next 'chapter' of the story. So even if you are further along the story than a new player, that new player will start in Tier 1 where the story begins.

    However, we will not lock you within your Tier. If you want to go back down to a lower Tier and adventure with a new player, you may do so. This will not affect your story progression, only slow it down until you return to your current Tier.

    Additionally, new areas of the world will be opened up based on your Tier progression, allowing a natural progression of game difficulty with player advancement.
  • After looking at various name proposals, today we settled on the game title Citadel of Sorcery. We liked the three letter acronym CoS, as well as the shortened 'Citadel'. It also tied in nicely with our concept of a central large city that is a massive multiplayer area, called the 'Citadel'. Sorcery in the title lets players know that this is a fantasy motif game.
  • Looking at current MMORPG games we soon realized that game quests were the area where the most improvement is available. Quests in typical and current MMOs are, for the most part, boring. We call them 'grocery list' quests. A quest in a current MMORPG might be, "Bring me 32 thigh bones from an Orc". Or, they might be, "Take this apple to Bob the Inn Keeper". Again, 'fetch me this or deliver me that' quests.

    We have decided that in our MMO you will be the main character in your own amazing story. EVERY quest that you undertake will be part of your personal story, and NOT ONCE will it be a grocery list quest telling you to fetch a number of the same items or deliver some boring object to someone.

    Of course, there is a reason current MMOs don't do this, it's hard. But just because it's difficult to accomplish is no reason not to undertake the goal.

    The most fundamental reason that quests are so repetitive and simplistic in current MMOs is the very basis of their world design. Their world is a static place. This means things always return to the same state. If you kill a bear, that bear will reappear a few moments later. Any effect you have on the world is incredibly temporary. They must do this because their play area is massive multi player.

    So, we said, what if instead we took the world and made it change, every day? What if nothing remained the same, or EVER returned to the previous state a few minutes later? In order to do this we had to redesign the very concept of how the world worked for players.

    What we have decided to do is create a large Massive multi player area. Here you can do all the things that you need to do in a massive multi player game. You interact with other players, form up groups for adventuring, do commerce with other players, pick up quests and other story advancement, seek entertainment while waiting for friends, form guilds, craft objects, etc.

    However, we've also noticed that once you are on your quest with your current group of adventurers, the other players (not in your group), tend to be a distraction and at times an annoyance. They get to the guy you want to kill before you do, and kill him. You end up standing around waiting... until the monster 'pops' back into existence. Sometimes you then have to try to attack him as fast as possible so that another group doesn’t 'agro' him and make you wait yet again.

    Not only that, but because there are other players in your adventure, there are many types of interesting adventures that just aren't possible to create.

    So, some of these games make little instanced areas trying to keep other players out of your hair during the adventure. However, this is a bandage, rather than a cure. In order to have real adventures with intriguing plot twists and personalized encounters, the entire adventure needs to be in an instanced area.

    This is what we plan to do. You can go into the massive multi player part of the world any time you wish to do all the good things about an MMO, and when you want a REAL adventure, you and your group can go into a dynamic world where the adventure is built just for your group. You get all the advantages of an MMO and all the advantages of an RPG.

    Quests can now be amazing adventures. Players can join or leave your group almost at any time, yet you won't run into other groups who will mess up your adventure. However, when you want to find other players, a quick trip to the massive multi player area will do the trick.
  • Now that we have decided to create an MMORPG for our next project, our first order of business was to make a plan on how to create our as yet un-named MMORPG. Should we purchase an existing engine for the game, or build our own from scratch? After looking at what was available, and what we needed for a cutting edge game, we quickly realized we would need a custom engine. In the end we went with both ideas. We licensed an existing engine that allowed us to modify the source code and customize it for our use.

    The Trident3D engine has worked out well in our plans.

    The original form of the engine was actually started several years previously. It was then improved for two years (2002-2004) and used on several 3D programs (not games). With some additional work it was soon ready to start rendering our MMORPG world.

  • It is time to decide on our next project. We had several design concepts presented. Of these possibilities we choose to develop an MMORPG idea that has some unique design elements.

    The decision to go with the MMORPG concept was based on the fact that MMORPGs were popular, but that no other company had as yet created one that we felt was exciting and well designed for he player. This left us room to improve on what players had experienced in this genre. We also picked this project because we felt passionate about the proposed concept. We feel that this project can be a viable game that can bring in a large base of players who are all looking for an MMORPG that shows innovation and long term playability.

    Simply put, we felt we could do a better MMORPG game than anything we had seen on the market.
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