One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development

After having been up for over 30 hours trying to get some stuff working that I feel very close to, I decided it was time to make a new DevBlog post, however after reading it back to myself, I was suddenly confronted with the reality that it will probably make me seem like The Unabomber.

My first response was to scrap the whole thing, then pick it back up tomorrow. Then, after weighing the consequenes, I decided to go ahead and keep it exactly as-is; A somewhat nonsensical collection of points that don't really relate to one another as much as they seemed to have in my mind at the time I wrote them down. I've decided to keep it as-is because keeping with the policy of honesty that I try to sell as the focal point of my campaign, it's best that people understand who and what they're getting involved in, for better or for worse.

And so without further ado:

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Devblog: May 20th.
One-Month Recap and My Adventures in Game Development

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Common is the practice of game developers (especially MMORPG developers) who make broad claims about how kickass their product is going to be; How innovative and game-changing their creative vision, then once the obligatory "reality check sets in" they must recede from the original grand design of their heart's desire to something more realistic. It's called "settling".

Now imagine my surprise to find that I get to be a part of the first time, as far as I'm aware, that the opposite has actually happened. Less than one month has passed since the final day of our first financing campaign and the game is at least twice as far along as I had thought it could possibly be. We're not only on-schedule, but actually ahead of it. It might still go into testing at the same period, but it'll be better at that time than I previously figured it would be.

What's the secret?

Obviously the secret is hate. Anyone who watched either or both of my first two videos for our first campaign could probably glean with little effort how difficult it has become for me to mask my contempt for the state of MMO-gaming. As far as I'm concerned, WoW and companies like EA impregnated my once-beloved genre with the foul seed of corruption until it's belly was laid fat and bloated with millions of meme-spewing fetuses and their bad fucking English.

Yes, it's true. I am mostly ruined. However, ruined as I may very well be, I can still be useful at something.

This. I can be useful - at this, and that is enough for me.

There's an upside to trying and failing at something for seven years simply because you have no money however. The benefit is efficiency. When you have nothing for a long enough time, you slowly become the master of finding out ways to do things cheaply. Just as the human body becomes an engine of brutal efficiency if kept just above the point of starvation for long enough, so then has Stained Glass Llama gradually solidified into a lean lumberjack of game development somehow.

And then you suddenly have money. For me, it was compliments of a few hundred desperate MMOers who, if i had a people (which I don't) I would hesitate but for a moment to call them "my people". They are the closest thing that might exist.

Now the body has fuel and thus, now the money goes far. Very far in fact. Although still an expensive trade, building an mmorpg, if it isn't essential it doesn't stay.

Good family man? Good husband? Taking the family out camping on the weekend you say? Well, fuck you I'm paying the foreign guy who bleeds coffee on a Saturday night to help me get that feature working.

Why? Because that is what those 366 backers have entrusted me to do with their hard-earned money.

The more the cache in the pool rose day by day the more I began to feel an increasing sense of responsibility to those people. I think it finally hit me somewhere around the $20,000 mark; the critical mass of, "Oh shit... Now i really DO have to make this work..."

Then there was also an emotional component that I hadn't expected.

All in all, I received probably three negative "you will fail" messages and over 500 "you can do it" ones. I have spent the better part of my entire life being the adversary of my own species and here were these random humans throwing their money at me and begging me to continue. Begging.

I'll always remember one letter a guy sent me. It was a very emotional paragraph baring the trademark inconsistency and sentence structure of someone genuinely unstable. It took me two sittings to finish it only because the fellow really put you in a room with him and his troubles while he explained that the good times of his past (what i refer to as "The Golden Days of MMOs" mainly centered around EQ, AO and later, SWG) were gone and would never come around again, and somehow this was an allegory his life in general. That those good feelings derived from a silly little game, being a part of a real community where he had friends, had people waiting on him to log in and the freedom he enjoyed were over because of the new climate of the genre. It was a story of prison, suffering, loss and desperation for a chance to have back those good times.

You could count the number of things I believe in on one hand, but one thing that I have to believe is that given enough time even the deepest wounds can be healed, or at the very least mended. Moving on requires the brain to accrue new memories and experiences, and sometimes a shitload of them for a serious enough trauma. The more distracted you can keep your thoughts, the quicker that time will pass and in theory, the sooner you can return to the world as something like a whole person.

And so I came to realize that I'm creating a distraction; An alternate reality for people to "escape into" and in many circles, such a practice is considered a negative one.

I decided to say, "Yeah? Screw it." If it keeps a guy from murdering his ex-wife and spending the rest of his life in prison, how can that possibly be a bad thing? Not that the pursuit of vengeance is not a valid cause in my opinion, which it most certainly is, but the ideal situation is one in which you are simply able to "Get over it". If you can't, by all means,go forth and seek vengeance. If you can however, do so.

The universe will not stand in judgement of me, or anyone else for that matter. It is both the responsibility and the right of the individual creature to find or create purpose should we need it.

I've accepted that my purpose right now is to create an artificial reality for emotionally unstable weirdos.

So be it.

New Script Finalized

Recently I finished the new script for the next video. I could spend that time yammering on about various things with regards to the setting or lore, but the overall feel I'm getting is that the great majority of people would prefer being able to see some new part of the game in action as opposed to just that. Therefore, that's where I'm devoting my energy right now.

All work regarding to the new campaign has been consigned. All features required for the new video are under work right now by myself and various parties. The existing game world viewable in previous videos has been successfully integrated into the streamed format necessary for the crazy features you're going to be seeing once they're ready.

I'd show some images but the statement was, "Super Secret" and frankly it would spoil the affect of everyone witnessing it at the same time with no preconceived expectations. Rest assured, everyone will be surprised.

A few weeks.

20K Milestone Crossed!

In the wake of Divergence crossing over the 20K contributions milestone I thought it prudent to take a few minutes away from development and spread a little news across the collective community bread so to speak.

Where is development at right now?

Right now we're focused solely on the features that form the core of the Divergence experience; The streaming, totally modifiable world. Fortunately, we aren't just starting this task and in fact we began it over a year ago, however completely flat broke at the time it was impossible to devote the time we wanted to it and  progress ground to a halt. This was the sole reason why I restarted the project with our first crowdsourcing campaign so that I personally could hire some full-time help to finish up what we started previously.

I've been blessed at cursed both as a result. A lot of people have emailed myself with programming skill available and we've made great progress. The flip side of that is, Divergence still does not have a Lead Programmer, it has several contributing individuals making considerable progress, but for all intents and purposes, we're still looking for a department lead who can devote at least 40 hours per week to organizing our individual contributors.

It isn't something I can do. I have a full team of artists, 2D and 3D and even two new animators to train and supervise every day, in addition to trying to get caught up on islands that people have ordered. It's 16-20 hour days for me just to keep my head above the water.

The good news is that every single day it's closer to being in a playable state than it was yesterday. The contributors coming in are a major major help in bolstering morale of the group. Everyone wants to be a part of something that is actually successful and moving.

Enough of this technical crap, what do you really mean about this progress? What is really going on right now?

Here is my best explanation of where Divergence is at right now, feature-wise.

The single biggest undertaking with this project, the one thing that sets it aside from all other mmorpgs is it's completely streamed and modifiable world.

But the videos of the world and islands already look great! What do you still have to do to it?

Well the world is awesome, don't get me wrong, but that world you see in the videos isn't directly modifiable by players yet, and that's the current push. Only areas created inside the game are modifiable and that isn't good enough. There are two game worlds... The first is the world you see in the videos; What I call "The Hard World" that is created from scratch. The second is "The Streamed World" which is what you get when you're actually playing the game. Once the world itself is updated/created on our end, it must be converted and compressed into a format that can be streamed over the internet as changes are made to it in real-time.

Nobody else that i'm aware of has this, which is why it's such a big deal.

How far along are we with it? Extremely.. ridiculously close. In fact the game already has the capability to create new area with all of those capabilities in real-time as-is. The work right now is to convert what we already have into that same format so that world artists such as myself can continue to build world in our advanced editors as opposed to "inside the game" which is much slower.

Will there be another crowdsourcing campaign?

Oh yes. There will most likely be a few more, each with their own new and unique perks as well as a few previous ones. I don't think we can pump out $50K to get this finished in just one push in under 30 days, so instead I'd like to do several of 10-20K each. It's must safer that way.

When will the next begin?

The next campaign will begin when we're able to show the progress we've made with proceeds from the first campaign. I'd love to be able to start the new one hot on the heels of the last, but more important than that is being able to show the work, and I can't start the new one without being able to demonstrate that in most likely a new really cool video. I'm hoping to begin the new campaign within a few weeks of the last, but again that's me saying "the major features will be ready to show in just a few weeks" which is a hard claim to make when I don't control how quickly those things are done (without tons of money of course).

You reached your $20K goal, what's up with this big secret feature?

You'll find that out in the video ;) The more financing the project pulls in, the more pull I have with game programmers in being able to prove it's worth their time to call in sick days, use up vacation and leave to get it done sooner rather than later.

What about the Factions video?!

I'll get to it when i damn well get to it! Honestly the truth is there is a good amount of new artwork involving that very subject as well as concepts for new armor and so on that I'd like to include in the presentation, so I guess it's more accurate to say, "I'll get to it when that stuff can be included in it for maximum effect".

Facebook

My original idea was to make today's post something completely different since I'm really looking forward to updating the community on our status but there's one thing that I really don't think can be put off any longer:

Facebook.

I'm getting a lot, and i do mean a lot of friend requests every day. As cool at this feels, it also makes me feel like crap because none of these people realize that I don't... really... use facebook. I have all of 58 friends on Facebook and that's about all I can manage as is, being on it maybe once per week.

The point I'm trying to make is, if you sent me a friend request and I didn't accept, it isn't because you were ignored. The reason is because truthfully, I'm a hermit and I cherish the ability to say and do what I want without having to worry about it spilling over onto Divergence.

I let in two people at the beginning and immediately someone quoted me as saying, "I fucking hate people who name their kids after Twilight characters" onto Divergence's forums. As i cannot very well reconcile the ridiculous way people live their lives around me, or the way I feel about the things they do,  I can however choose to subject only those closest to me to those opinions. Most of which are people I share blood with, or have either helped me change a tire, move a couch or bail me out of jail.

There are a shitload of cons and virtually no pros is what I'm saying. Maybe in the future. Who knows.

Thanks for understanding. Like I said, I didn't want anyone to think they were being ignored.

Next update is in a few days! Hopefully with the one island video out of the way (and only 3 more to do still lol) I can put together the factions video I've been wanting to soon.

-Ethan

First Player Island Goes Live!

After much anticipation our first player-island is more or less ready. We'll still be making a few tweaks here and there but it's in good enough shape (I think) to at least show a few minute preview of it.

New Website is LIVE!

A promise is a promise ;)

As the title implies, the new site is finally live. I'll be taking feedback from a few internal sources heavily at first, and making tweaks here and there both in graphics and functionality, but so far it's by far one of the best sites I've ever put my name to. Several of the pages, especially in both the factions and civilizations tabs need to be improved and in some cases, finished.

I am not a godamn web developer! So please keep that in mind before offering criticism :P

I have it hosted off-site until I'm satisfied no major changes need to be made, but you can still get there from the trusty www.Divergence-Online.com link.

Enjoy, I hope!

Game and Funding Update

Hey gang. I thought I'd step in for a sec while i had a minute or two and catch everyone up to what's going on with the game, maybe clear up some inquiries I seem to be getting.

First off, I'm getting a lot of people saying, "There's only 5 1/2 weeks left and you still need over 40K, what happens when you don't meet that goal??"

Well the answer to that requires an understand of just how much coke you can get for $7,000. I'm waiting on a reply to an email I left Ozzy and it varies from state-to-state but at the very least our small dev team can have a weekend of ritual excess.

I jest, of course.

Here's the deal. It needs to get to at least $30,000 out of the 50. Why? Because if I absolutely had to, there's a place I didn't want to have to go to for money that I will if that's what it takes. Sure, I'll owe 20K, but what's the in the grand scheme of things. Besides, we can always do another campaign later on for much much less money to close the gap.

The campaign was still a very very good idea and I couldn't be more glad that we're doing it. It's brought not just funding but some very useful assets that found me through it who are making the technical side of it possible.

And now onto the state of the game:

Where are we at right now? What's going on? Well the answer to that is actually much simpler than you might suppose. We're working on the code to allow for the persistent state. This is absolutely necessary if we expect people's homes and harvesters to stay there when the server restarts. The upside is, we don't have to "create" hardly any of that, it already exists. Currently the server IS creating storage for both the world and objects,which it wasn't doing last week, it just isn't saving them yet. Progress is being made, but we spend a lot of time waiting on responses from our engine maker.

Regardless of how annoying I have to be to get what we need, it'll come. It took SOE years to get their persistent world working. Supporting us a few days or weeks won't kill you ;)

That's all for now. I need to get back to work on the world and then hopefully resolve this "post approval" deal on the forums.

Thanks for your support, please keep it coming!