Atriarch - Latest News Round-Up

[Detomah]

November 2008

Emails have been pouring in lately asking about Atriarch. We think gamers are anxious to see something new and different and are hoping Atriarch will be it. Many people are curious if Atriarch is still in development? What is the status? Why are we so horrible at updating? Anything cool you can show us?

The answers are simple and positive.

Yes, we are working on Atriarch. Yes, it is absolutely in development! We remain dedicated to and excited about the World of Atriana and possibilities this new alien world brings to fans of MOGs.

The small and dedicated Atriarch team is working feverishly on as much alieness fun as possible! This Summer and Fall a lot of progress was made. Here is some of what has been going on in the world of Atriana....

We are bringing forth a new style of user interface. Our goal is to cut down on clutter and UI distractions and make the interface less intrusive. Our philosophy is that a user interface is there to enhance your game experience, not be the game itself. Part of the new style is already implemented; more to go. As with anything new, we will definitely need to work out the kinks.

World building and authoring capability has been significantly improved. Previously, adding creatures and characters and general stuff to the world was a somewhat painful process. For example, changes to character and creature stats had to be made offline. Now all these types of changes are done live. Moving stuff around, trying out new things, and testing the world is much faster and easier than before. More importantly, it is a lot more fun! Hmmm... what would happen if I dropped 600 Mygrym creatures on this Tyrusin guard tower and cranked up their appetite?

Character pathing is the current focus for the dev team. Creatures and characters have general pathing guidelines which are defined by their AI behavior. We are expanding the AI behavior to include specific pathing as well the general.

On the note of release dates and time.... yes, we understand this is taking a longer time than most people would expect, including us. Essentially, time is the trade-off we have had to make for choosing to do Atriarch ourselves and with little budget. We have a passion for creating unique and alien worlds. We also have the dedication and the long attention span necessary to ensure this living, breathing artistic passion is birthed into the game space.

Someday everyone will want to live in a custom structural masterpiece from an Eshlar architect. Someday everyone will know to visit the Cavolon scientist for that unique elixir that makes their garden grow twice as high as their neighbors. Someday everyone will dream of joining the Lokai on their adventures across the Sinking Desert to trade for rare and exotic goods. Someday everyone seek to hail amongst the Tyrusin warriors in great battles of honor and courage! Someday, the Unarra will reveal themselves. We just don't know when that someday is yet... but we promise to tell you as soon as we know. And yes, we suck at updating. We will eventually get better at that :-)

April 2008

We were excited to see a few long-time Atriarch fans at the IMGDC conference last month. Just like the GDC in February, many people who have been quietly following Atriarch's development--albeit slow--progress are starting to come out of the alien woodwork. There continues to be a yearning out there for a world that is unique, imaginative, and unusual. We believe that Atriarch will be that world. This motivates us to keep fighting the challenges that face an independent developer. To those of you still following our journey: you're awesome! Woohoo!

World Fusion is now implementing a new internship program, as we have done before with great success. In exchange for the excellent work on Atriarch, our previous interns gained real world, commercial game development experience that led to industry jobs. Two previous interns went on to become leads for other game companies, and both had no game development experience before working for World Fusion. We will post more information about this program in the coming weeks. In the meantime, if you would like to be considered for this, please e-mail us and we'll put you on the contact list when the details are available.

March 2008

Serafina, World Fusion's President and Atriarch Designer, will be giving a presentation at the Independent MMO Game Developer's Conference on March 30. IMGDC is a conference specifically for independent development teams and companies. She will talk about the different strategies World Fusion used to generate revenue so World Fusion could continue to work on Atriarch as an independent developer. She will also discuss which strategies did not work. She hopes it will help give other indie devs some insight that will jumpstart their revenue generating endeavors. (Just because buying a lottery ticket every week hasn't worked out yet, is no reason to stop trying.)

At GDC while demoing the many ways to overpopulate an area with my favorite character, we learned that the AI needs considerable improvement. Some very cool stuff is emerging from this. More on this to come.

February 2008

This month we attended the Game Developer's Conference with our trusty travelling laptop demo of Atriarch in hand. One of my favorite moments was when a former publisher representative who had considered Atriarch in the early days said she is really excited to see Atriarch still moving forward. Over all the years she has evaluated games, she still has not yet seen anything like Atriarch and wish we would hurry up so she could play it!

So what is new on our traveling demo booth (aka: laptop) at GDC this year? Actually several cool things. From a demo perspective the best change is in the world building tool. Creatures, buildings, items, and such, used to be imported through a tedious command line. Now we import content with a click of the mouse. Deciding on a whim that the Tyrusin Pallidrost Arena is suddenly going to drown in a sea of adventuring Lokai no longer results in carpal tunnel. It made for showing off the variations in Atriarch a lot easier and faster.

January 2008

Now at the start of 2008, internal testing of Atriarch is going very well. In the spirit of the upcoming Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, our Features & FAQ Engine page has been updated with links to the latest free software and open source code that is used by the World Fusion® Engine and development team.

Gearheads like our Eshlar Guide here will appreciate that Atriarch is one of the very few massive games that runs natively on open operating systems such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, as well as in 64-bit mode on these platforms! When launched, Atriarch will be released simultaneously for open operating systems along with the proprietary operating systems: Windows, et. al.

If you would like to make an appointment to meet at GDC for an in-person chat or demo of Atriarch, email Serafina at (spechan@yahoo.com)!