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Here is the current Shards Online dev roadmap
Shards Online's Kickstarter may be over, but Citadel Studios looks to be even more determined to finish building its player-driven MMORPG sandbox. The firm has posted a new development roadmap on the game's official website, and Citadel co-founder Derek Brinkmann explains how the team is tightening its dev plan "to get to an alpha state as soon as possible." Brinkmann also mentions that one of Citadel's goals is to "have enough replayable content on our first map to keep players engaged while we continue development." Click past the cut to view the full roadmap.
Landmark roundtable video on giving the toolset love
In this week's Landmark roundtable video, SOE Senior Brand Manager Omeed Dariani is joined by Lead Building and UI Designer Jake Sones to discuss the results of a player poll about which Landmark tool needs the most work and love. Sones tells viewers that the results of the poll were even; apparently there's no one tool that needs serious work, just plenty of player sentiment that many of them need something. He specifically addresses changes being made to how tweak mode handles pasting large objects; ideally, the game will detach the preview from the mouse cursor and provide menus similar to those used by the prop tool. The pair also explain the studio's hesitation in implementing specialized and redundant tools like the cylinder tool, citing microvoxels -- a feature the developers didn't even know the game could do -- as something players came up with that might never have been discovered had every imaginable tool already existed to stifle their creativity. Enjoy the full video!
Storybricks starts Kickstarter campaign, welcomes aboard animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman
Build-your-own-MMO toolset Storybricks is getting a major second wind today as the company's announced that it's brought on board legendary animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman to assist in animation and character design. The two are well-known in both the film and video game industry for their work on The Secret of NIMH and Dragon's Lair (among many other projects). "We intend to bring our experience in animation and character design to help provide appealing, believable, thinking characters to Storybricks' founding partners' vision for gaming," Goldman said. The two join a dream team of advisors for the project that includes Richard Bartle, Liz Danforth, and Chris Avellone. Storybricks is also tapping the Kickstarter well to help fund the project. The team hopes to raise $250,000 in pledges by June 1st. "Though we have found the right people who share our mad (or perhaps inspired) vision of role-playing and storytelling in computer RPGs, we haven't been able to find enough people willing to write us a check," the team explains on the page. Sponsors can get copies of the game, beta keys, and even digital versions of themselves inserted into the final version. [Source: Storybricks press release]
Unreal Engine 3 dev kit adding iOS support tomorrow, Infinity Blade clones coming Friday
The Unreal Engine 3 already made a quite spectacular debut on iOS with Epic Games' own Infinity Blade, but the company's decided it's time to finally stop teasing and give us the software to really play with it. Tomorrow's planned update to the UDK will deliver iOS support, meaning that all the fancy tools that helped make Infinity Blade such a blindingly gorgeous game will be at your fingertips should you be feeling creative. Licensing for the Engine is free for testing and non-commercial use, but you'll have to pay $99 if you want to sell anything you produce with it, to be followed by a 25 percent slice of your earnings beyond $5,000 and, of course, Apple's 30 percent cut of whatever's left. That might not sound like the best business plan in the world, but consider that Infinity Blade is estimated to have racked up over $1.5 million in sales already -- we're sure there'll be enough change left for ice cream even after Epic and Apple have had their share.
Crytek interested in offering free development platform
When Epic offered the Unreal SDK free to all users, it got Crytek to thinking -- specifically, thinking about doing the same thing. Speaking to Develop, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said that his company is looking to offer a free platform for budding game developers "that will be up to speed" with CryEngine 3. It's nothing new to Crytek, which offered free versions of its previous platforms to the modding community, but this new venture is something different -- a "standalone free platform that people can run independent of CryEngine that will also be up to speed with the latest engine," Yerli hopes. While he's quick to point out it's not the same thing as what Epic and Unity are doing -- another popular game development tool that offers a bit of variety in free and premium toolsets -- we're hard-pressed to find much of a difference between the two. Crytek curently has no timetable for release of the new platform, nor has it commented on potential tech and licensing agreements stemming from the new venture.
Rumor: Epic to announce Unreal Engine 3 for consumers
Like our sister site Big Download, you may have been asking yourself, "What was going on at Epic Games yesterday?" Well, we think we have the answer: According to the Joystiq Mole™ -- the same mole who accurately predicted NBA 2K10 Draft Combine and LucasArts' Lucidity -- the epic announcement will be the release of an Unreal Engine 3 PC toolset for consumers.Our mole tells us that the toolset will ship with example objects, like weapons and maps, and will show users how to build their own custom assets. Odds are, the kit being a product for consumers (read: nonprofessionals), that the cost won't be all that high. Of course, knowing who's going to get their hands on this (again, read: nonprofessionals), we're totally frightened by the inevitable flood of Delta Squad fanfics that will unfold on YouTube.
GDC09: 'Cloth' becomes Havok's fastest selling product
Havok has produced a number of extremely popular software development kits and tool sets for developers to implement in their titles, though a surprising newcomer recently became the company's fastest selling product to date: "Cloth," an engine for processing movement in garments, hair and skin, is apparently all the rage. THQ sang the tool's praises at GDC, saying it allowed the publisher to "quickly generate and visualize high quality cloth assets" for its upcoming title, UFC 2009 Undisputed.The engine, which launched in March 2008, should start appearing in games released this spring. In short, virtual clothes are going to be way prettier this year. Who's not excited about that?
Quick Armory remixes Armory and achievement data with Greasemonkey
Erorus sent us some cool Armory-related tools he's been working on -- you can find them all at QuickArmory.com. Aside from the usual Armory lookup (with a much faster loading design), he's got an Heirloom item tracker (you put in your level and it will show you what the Heirloom items look like throughout the game), an Arena Points calculator, and perhaps most interesting, an Achievement Tracker. That last one actually does something a little different from most Armory sites -- it uses the Greasemonkey Firefox script to have your browser pull information from the Armory rather than Erorus' servers doing it. The output ends up looking more or less the same, but basically his site tells your browser what information to get, and your browser gets the info rather than his server. Interesting way of getting around the problem of stability, though the tradeoff is that you've got to use Firefox and install the addon to use his site.None of the tools provide quite as much functionality as some of the other more specialized Armory sites out there, but Erorus does some new and interesting things with the Armory information, on the Achievement tracker especially. If you can't get enough of your character's stats (and in this case, happen to also use Firefox), they're worth checking out.
Become a professional MetaPlace guru
Want to work for Raph Koster?If you have some object-oriented programming experience and a "familiarity with game and user-interface design," you may apply for a job as a Content Designer at Areae. If hired, you'll provide the MetaPlace community with game content as well as support and documentation for the MetaPlace toolset. Plus, you'll get to be one of Master Koster's Padawan learners.For those who are unfamiliar with Koster or MetaPlace, Koster was the lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He also worked on some other SOE projects, and wrote the book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Now, he's helming the Areae project MetaPlace, which is a platform on which users can create their own online games and virtual worlds.[Via Raph Koster]
Aspyr porting Neverwinter Nights 2
Aspyr, maker of many Mac game ports, has confirmed they're working on a port of Neverwinter Nights 2 for the Mac. The game features straight-up D&D action in the Forgotten Realms setting, and while not quite as critically acclaimed as Neverwinter Nights (that one was made by Bioware, after all), it did grab a pretty respectable rating of 82 over on Metacritic.There is one problem-- the toolset that players can use to create their own content which came with the PC version won't actually be ported to Mac (more evidence that we're getting leftovers). Those of us who buy NWN2 on the Mac will still be able to play that created content, and join up to all the persistent world servers players have put together (and some of that stuff is pretty cool). No release date yet, but we'll keep you posted.[via MacBytes]
