Author: Chris Wild

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Lords of Midnight – 1 Year Update

Ok, so I never thought I’d be writing this post. To be honest, I thought I’d be done by now.

It’s 12 months since I first had a discussion about releasing Lords of Midnight for the iPhone and iPad with Mike Singleton. At lot has happened in that year, but unfortunately not a lot on the project.

The delay in what should be a simple project, comes purely down to lack of time. I lost a lot of steam over last year for a number of reasons. There were both technical and personal reasons from my side and Mike had his own health issues that needed dealing with. Between the two of us, the project just fell by the wayside. However, we’ve discussed this at length since the turn of the year, and the next few months should hopefully see a big turn around.

Let me first bring you up to date on what has happened.

The full TME engine was ported to the Airplay ( now Marmalade ) SDK. This allows for the engine to run and target many mobile platforms. Various different libraries were developed to allow much of the UI to happen. And most of the screens that LOM requires have been produced.

The game is fully playable. And I had indeed played much of it on my iPad.

The process now is tying up all the little things required while playing the game, adding a few new features, and then the presentation. The later being no a small issue.

So hopefully, what that means is, there is no reason why the game shouldn’t happen. Everything is in place. It’s just a matter of joining all the dots.

One of the things that I played around a lot with toward the end of last year, was the panoramic view, and scrolling it around with your fingers. Trying to get the process looking and working nice was a challenge. But I think I have a good, if not perfect implementation.

Over the last few nights I’ve been working on the in game map. That should be finished in a functional way by the end of this week. The map auto maps. It works by considering all the locations in your view and then deciding how much you know about that location. So for example, that tower in the distance that you can see, will be added to the map, although you won’t know the name until you are one location away, but that lake sat in the middle of the forest, won’t be. Enemies that you have seen are also placed on the map, for a while. For example, if any one of your lords sees an army in the distance, the army is placed on the map. But they only remain there while one of your lords can see them. After a number of days passing without your lords seeing the army, they are removed from the map.

Currently you can scroll around the map. But I need to put all the niceties that will make the map fully functional.

More soon…

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Lords of Midnight – Update

I thought I’d better post here, because it seems it’s been a while!

I know many people might be thinking that this project is going the way of all the others… vapourware, and to be truthful there is always the chance of that. I do find it very hard to get the work done in the evenings, when I have so much going on. And we’ve had such a good summer, in the scheme of things, that I’ve found it very hard to do any coding in the evenings.

The last few months has seen me going through a merry go round of my work contracts, and in particular I’ve been working silly hours.

I also had a lot of problems with Marmalade, the SDK I’m using to give me the cross platform. They have only recently been resolved.

Anyway, enough of the excuses, other than to say that 6 months has disappeared and the project hasn’t moved on a great deal!

The intention is to fire up the quatro, and make a real push to get work done started again from Jan. I’ll also try and keep the blog up to date.

I noticed that man people have visited and will have seen no movement for a while… 🙁 sorry about that!

So, watch this space…

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Lords of Midnight – iOS

Thought I’d post an update for LOM. I realise that it’s been over 2 months since I last had anything to say on the subject.

Firstly, it’s been a busy few months for both Mike and myself. Mine work related and Mike’s more personal. That combined with a little bit of sidetracking on Eye of the Moon.

Two of the issues with this project is time and getting it right. Neither of us are working on project full time and it’s very easy to lose a week before you know it, just because you were overly tired or didn’t feel like sitting in front of a computer. I’m sure that winter is the best time to do development and not in the summer.

The getting it right aspect is about thinking about the project more than actually doing it. Over the last 2 months I’ve been going round in circles about the graphics of the game. I’ve been thinking about a number of different approaches that we have considered for the look and feel, and the way the user interface will work.

The original LOM had a very distinctive look and feel. Simple, but very affective. Somehow with the very powerful modern technology, we have to achieve the same result. I sat down recently and gave some thoughts to the way LOM was going to look, and was not happy. I’ve had firm ideas about the direction of the graphics for a long time. Mike brought new ideas to the party when we start discussing the new game. And in general we had a consensus about the way forward. But then I started to doubt… I kept thinking about Jaws. Jaws works because the brilliant robotic sharks that Spielberg was going to show off all over the place, didn’t work. In the end he had to work around them, utilising them sparingly. The end result, much more suspense to the film.

For LOM, the shark was the graphics. Mike wrung an awful lot from the spectrum, but in the end, the setting of the story was defined by the minimalist graphics – a world full of white snow! So, as you start to up the quality of the graphics you are moving further into working shark territory. LOM was stylistic and I feel it has to remain so. Simple and stylistic.

I discussed this with a few people and then went back to Mike in order to tell him that I thought we were the wrong people to be thinking about the graphics. And that if we continued down the path we were following, I felt we were going to make a mistake. Mike agreed.

So, last week I had a meeting with an artist. Fergus McNeil ( some of you may remember his 8 bit days with Delta4 ) and asked him to take over artistic control of the project. I’ll keep you posted with anything I can on the visuals.

In the mean time. Tonight I am back at the computer – coding!

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Directors Cut

Directors cuts are slightly controversial, I am aware of this as I embark on the IOS version of Lords of Midnight. Although not a Directors Cut per sae, the involvement of Mike makes it sit somewhere between remake and directors cut.

There are many films that have received the Directors Cut treatment, some successfully, some not so. You have to ask, why the need to revisit the film. The integrity of the new release is brought into question; if the Director did not like the version put out at the original release, then why did they allow it be released? If they had no control over that aspect, then why now, other than for additional profit, are the studio allowing the film to be changed. That said, at least most Directors can retain some integrity, as they usually don’t have the rights for the Final Cut Privilege especially early in their career.

In books, we have the Authors Revised Edition. Again I wonder how an author can not release a book that is true to their original vision. I do however know that sometimes, again especially in the early stages of an authors career, the author does not have as much control as they would like, and indeed the editor may assert more of their vision.

I use Katharine Kerr’s Darkspell as a case in point. Her editor insisted at the time that parts of the story be changed so much, that it materially altered the overall intended message of the book. Kit was all to eager to put it right as soon as she had chance.
With Stephen King’s first book in the Dark Tower series ‘The Gunslinger’ it also makes sense that he would want to revisit the book and put right issues as the series expanded.

This brings me finally to music – why would a musician release a Directors Cut album that covers songs from not one previously released albums, but two? I understand doing some form of Uncut version where songs are stripped back to just the singer and some acoustic instruments, or even dramatically different versions that are almost covers in their own tight, but to release new tinkered versions of songs that you had full artistic control over at the time?

So, I bought Kate Bush’s Directors Cut with much trepidation – and I have to say, it’s awful.
She has taken a group of songs from two albums, placed them together out of context on a single album, reworked them in some mysterious way, for no obvious reason, and ultimately destroyed them.

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Eye of the Moon

I had a great day today. Work has been slow on iLom – basically because April had too many bank holidays, and with one thing or another, all these long weekends have messed my month up. I should be getting back to work in earnest in the next few days.

However, Mike and I recently found ourselves talking about that project that one does not speak about… Eye of the Moon. For those of you reading this because you are interested in all things Midnight, then you know exactly what I am talking about. For those of you who have no interest at all in Midnight, lets just say that EotM is the legendary missing sequel to all the other Midnight games.

Mike explained that he’d been thinking about EotM a lot lately. I guess it’s only natural as we stir up things with iLOM and go over old ground discussing other things Midnight. He said that he’d go a few things in his head for the story. Then today he surprised me with a design document for the game, complete with story overview.

It’s a ten page document, and very detailed. I like it – I like it a lot. It now changes the focus of the development of LOM. I think we are going to push out LOM and then jump straight to EotM, with DDR and CITADEL following as additions to the canon.

I’ll be working with Mike on the concept and fleshing the details out as we develop LOM. But I can already tell from the amount of info that Mike has generated in the last few days since we started talking EotM, that he is mentally very committed to this.

I can’t share much right now, however to snippets that give nothing away, that are of interested…

Those of you who remember EotM law; EotM was going to take place in the Bloodmarch and have 12 regions. Bloodmarch and these regions were eventually used in Citadel. That base concept remains, but those lands are now west of Midnight…. one of those is currently called “VARANGOR” another is “ISHERIL”

Mike Singleton wrote:
The map. I have deliberately broken up the overall map into Midnight-sized chunks. As much as anything this is to serve as a reminder to myself that each chunk should be as detailed and varied and hand-crafted as the original Midnight map itself. If this is not done, bigger quickly becomes worse and monotonous rather than better.

Mike Singleton wrote:
The idea is to make this last game of the series a truly grand finale, with new landscape and gameplay features, new enemies and new friends, but also the potential of Midnight being assaulted by all its old enemies too. And at the same time the land of Midnight itself returns firmly to the gameplay, which is fitting for the end of the saga, not to mention satisfying for old fans.

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