Imperial Wars
IWars home page graphic Imperial Wars Server Status
About Imperial Wars

© Intelligent Life Games 2002 - 2008
All rights reserved
All art & graphics protected under US copyright laws.
Imperial Wars® & Intelligent Life Games® are Registered Trademarks.

from the Galactic Effectuators at ILG

Intelligent Life, developer and online publisher of Imperial Wars will try to keep you up to date on our development plans on this page.

New Imperial Wars Gameserver real-time Status IWe've added a new Imperial Wars Real-time Server Status Report both here and in the forums. To check current status click on SERVER STATUS in the menu above.
Imperial Wars has been offered in nomination for the GAMA Academy of Adventure Gaming, Arst & Sciences, Origins Award
Imperial Wars has been offered in nomination for an Award for the IGDA Choice "Innovative Spotlight" Award.
Intelligent Life Games has been offered in nomination for the IGDA Choice "Rookie Studio " Award.
One of ILG's founders, Larry Dunlap, has been invited to be a panalist in "How to Break Into the Game Industry" Conference and Resume Workshop at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles. This program is presented by The Game Initiative.
Founder Larry Dunlap has been invited to be a panelist on Persistent State Worlds at Digital Hollywood.
Darn! Dev team has moved the launch back due to some billing programming and 3rd party vendor issues. Most testing has been completed and we expect to open the doors very soon.
Larry joined the panel on the future of Persistent World gaming hosted by Jessica Mulligan at E3. There were many spirited opinions expressed between Larry, who represented the Episodic Metagame, a finitely persistent world model and Mark Jacobs and Brad McQuaid, DAoC and EQ respectively, and Phillip Rosedale, whose 3D environment Second Life launches in the summer. The audience was eager to ask questions and it was a lively debate.
Melissa Hooven was our model for the Imperial Raider! She agreed to go to E3 with us and walk the show with Scott, Laurie, Bruce and Larry. She was a big hit, getting Nick Nolte's attention, several of the soldiers from America's Army and appearing on the" Jimmy Kimmel Live" television show! She is very charismatic and charming and made a wonderful spokesperson for IWars.
ILG announces it's Launch Date of April 19, the Monday following the close of E3. There will be special offers for Charter Citizens and players who join games over the few weeks prior to launch.
Mike (Lead Programmer) and Cindy Kienenberger, along with the rest of the ILG team welcomed our newest member to the team David Matthew Kienenberger who was born on March 2.
Larry Dunlap has been invited to join an illustrious panel of online game luminaries at the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Exposition) in Los Angeles on Persistent State Games: The Future. The panel will include Mark Jacobs of Mythic Entertainment (Dark Age of Camelot), Philip Rosedale (Second Life) and Brian McQuaid (EverQuest). The panel will be moderated by Jessica Mulligan, ILG Advisor and Executive Producer of Asheron's Call 1 &2 for Turbine.
One of the ILG founders and IWars author/designer, Larry Dunlap, will be speaking during the 2003 Game Developers Conference at the MUD-Dev Conference. The MUD-Dev is a loose association of designers, developers and artists that include the current MUD (Multi-User Dungeons) as well as their MMGO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) children. This is the MUD-Dev's first annual event and features speakers from every major online game as well as several prominent MUD developers. His presentation can be found at MUD-Dev Presentation.
February 28, Open Beta testing begins!
ILG welcomes SCOTT MILLER of UnknownPlayer.com to the post of PR and Marketing Manager. Scott is well known in the online game community and has run one of the most important game fan sites on the Internet. Scott will bring the Imperial Wars story to the web's news networks.
Imperial Wars will begin sending out its newsletter this month. We are looking for a new name for the newsletter. Please be sure to register for Charter Citizenship, if you haven't yet, so that you will receive the newsletter.
December 17, Closed beta testing with 50 of the IWars Community's best and most active members begins. We hope to open the beta within the next 60 days.
Thursday Night Chats at the IRC Imperial Senate! Starting September 19, we are hosting chats with the team and Charter Citizens and other guests. Click here to go directly to the room or to get the connection information for a dedicated server.
IRC Imperial Senate is now open! We have installed our room bot Emberella who keeps the channel open and welcomes all visitors. Soulreaper us the main #iwars room moderator and can be found there at any odd moment. We have installed our own java chat applet. It can be reached at Imperial Senate.
We welcome Colin Murcray to the community staff. Colin is an RPG game designer who originally playtested Imperial Wars when it was just a baby. He is one of the "immortals" of the U101 test game concluded last year. He will be senior editor of the upcoming newsletter and a contributor to the forums.
We are particularly pleased and honored to announce and welcome online game guru JESSICA MULLIGAN to ILG's advisory board. Jessica is one of the true pioneers and shining lights in the online game industry. You can read her column by clicking -> Biting The Hand, a regular read for online game aficionados. Catch more about Jessica on the site's main page.

A new and welcome addition to the IWars team is Janene Sikkink. Janene is administrating the Web Forums and taking on added Community responsibilities. She is not only an inveterate gamer but a web programmer and a veteran of the very first ever Imperial Wars game played online. She is also the owner of Alaskan Web pages.

The Imperial Web Forums are open! Charter Citizens can now signup for the test games. We have not officially announced when we will begin the games, but our goal is early in the 4th quarter of 2002.

Mike K put the beginning of the production environment online. The database and all of it's controls have been rewritten as we prepare for massive player play. In the next weeks, maybe even days, we'll have a play environment for the team, in the production environment.

We welcome Michael Fawcett to the team. Michael's background in graphics programming will help us improve the looks and animation of the client. Mike will concentrate on client-side programming and we're excited to have him working with us.

Evan Cofsky, The UnixMan has joined us to build and administrate the production game site. With the generous help of strategic partner Webcountry (www.webcountry.net), and Phil Shapiro, our web sponsor, we've put up our first game server and we will begin testing within the next few weeks.

Well, its almost GDC time so we'll be off to see old friends again. Looking forward to the prospect. We are wondering who will be a major influence on us this year. It could continue to be the Sims Online which will revolutionize online play. Or will it be Ralph Koster and Rich Vogel's work on StarWarsGalaxies.? Or somebody else altogether.

We are recording tutorials for Move 1 and Move 2. These are 8 to 9 minute streaming videos accessible from the online help system. We are also hoping to get the intro movie up and running in the Movie section of the New Stuff. We are using Real, so you will need the basic Real Player 8 to see these movies. There is a link at the Movie section if you need it.

We have been joined by Nicholas Palmer, who is developing the Imperial Wars sound track. Many thanks to Annika Christ who did the original prototype theme. Nicholas brings tremendous orchestration to the game and captures the emotions of the game with his themes. Nicholas will have a page in the New Stuff section so come visit him there and hear his genius.

Several of us made it to E3 and it was great to see many friends that we don't unusually get to see until then. It was great to see, Aaron and his encouragement means a lot to us. The best thing was seeing the Sims Online preview. Thanks Gordon, and thanks to Will. Sims Online is truly a breakthrough Internet game and will change the landscape forever. It not only caters to the game online game junkies but also to the casual gamer. Once again, Will Wright has captured the essence of the human imagination. Can't help but take our hats off to him. The appeal of Imperial Wars is not meant to be near so broad but we feel out approach is at least as innovative and we think Will will agree when he comes to visit.

We promised screen-shots and so far you haven't seen any. We will fix that very soon. Coming up in New Stuff, so stay tuned....


Hoping to get a facelift for the site this month. We'll let you know... This would also include an attempt to create our Imperial Wars community here. Message boards and notes from the designer's, artist's, and programmer's notebooks. A chance for you to tell us what you think. Do you like where we're going? Just running short of hands at the moment.

[So short that we're going to do something a little different. Instead of a total facelift which we all know it needs, we are just going to tack on a new section called "New Stuff", where we will try to continually add things to it. We may suffer from organization in this space but the number of people visiting us here is completely amazing and we feel we have to let you into our process somehow.]

Closed beta is just around the corner. A limited number of people, among them notable game designers, authors, and experienced gamers have agreed to take Imperial Wars out for a test run. The development team is pruning itself ragged but we're trying to have the beta up and running by E3 in Los Angeles. The big issues are the automated turn processes on the server and the anonymous email server, besides the obvious finishing screen and last minute bug catches. The private closed beta will include no team members or direct relatives, and depending upon its success will determine the time we need before public beta. Considering the audience, they'll probably beat us up pretty bad, but that's all the better for you!

A milestone reached. The first "playable" version of Imperial Wars prototype was produced this week. There is still much work to be done hooking up all the GUI and graphics but the underlying mechanics are there. Unit testing will be underway shortly. The beta testers (closed) are chomping at the bit.

Prototype development is underway. The first screens are being worked on and soon we will display them here so you can see them. Bruce Dean, Art Director and Art Lead, Mike Kienenberger, Prototype Programmer and Larry Dunlap, Lead Designer are working on a 2D version that will make it possible to play the game. This is still a prototype so don't get too excited. The wonderful 3D graphics, animation, and AI programming that we have designed will certainly enhance Imperial Wars but we want to get this game ready to play now. We think you will see that Imperial Wars is a special experience soon.

It's Computer Game Developer time again, Y2001. What a great inspiration. We took photos but everybody else has got 'em too, and GDC's photos are a lot better so here's there site if you want to see the photos. GDC 2001 Photos.

Last year it was Peter Molyneux who has inspired us to think deeply into how we look into our new universe and now Black & White has finally made it to the retail shelves. The team has not had the time to look at it yet! Making games takes too much time! This year it was Will Wright and his terrific keynote talk, his inspiring message that the games that need to be made are the ones the designer and team believe in, not the ones the publisher wants to make. Too many publishers are looking backwards, hoping to make another of the games that have already been made. But games take so long to make, that they are out of date by the time they are ready to be seen. The best games are those being made for the future and that offer something new. Yes.

For continued encouragement and being just about the best people in the game business, thanks to Gordon Walton, Mike and Robin McShaffry, Mary Margaret Ipser, Aaron Cammarata, Tony Evans, Raph Koster, and the amazingly talented people we met at GDC. We look forward to seeing you at E3.