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.
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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.
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Imperial Wars has been offered in nomination for the GAMA Academy
of Adventure Gaming, Arst & Sciences, Origins Award
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Imperial Wars has been offered in nomination for an Award for the
IGDA Choice "Innovative Spotlight" Award.
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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.
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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....
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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. |