Last fall, we began work on the second big component in the evolution of our game; Homes. We wanted everyone to have their own private space in MilMo, a place to withdraw for relaxation or chatting after a hard day's work adventuring. A place for designing and building - and showing stuff to your friends!
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| Concepts of furniture |
From the very beginning we've had super grandiose plans for this feature set, but we didn't want to get stuck in pre-production for ages, so we decided to develop a minimum core feature set and get it in the hands of you players by really early 2011. This seemed like a big challenge, but we decided nothing was impossible.
Speaking as a game designer I was both petrified and thrilled by the gameplay challenges. How do you distinguish between the actions of sitting in a chair and moving it, without adding new buttons to the control scheme? How the heck do you move a window from one wall to another - in multiplayer - without pausing the game or showing editing gizmos? How to let players place small objects without adding complexity to the interface? We looked at several games with furnishing features. Some used intensely mouse-driven interfaces. Others had great gamepad driven furnishing gameplay. I decided to go with a light, context sensitive mouse editing mode and avoid forcing the user to learn new buttons.
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| Move it! |
As development unfolded our Homes feature suddenly seemed to take on a life of its own and everything fell into place nicely. Sometimes MilMo just tells us how it wants to work, and we obey :)
After a fairly short development span - and a super-human effort by our lead gameplay programmer - we released the Homes feature earlier this week. The feature set is far from complete, but we've had tremendous fun playing around with it at the office and we hope you will find it as entertaining as we do!
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| What will your home look like? |
Well, you can design your dream Home by choosing from a great number of cool objects such as floors, windows, wallpapers, tables, sofas, chairs, beds and other furniture. You can place decorations such as clocks, paintings, lamps, curtains and carpets. Also, don't forget to check out our über cool music players. The juke box and the 80's ghetto blaster can play 6 unique songs each, adding that special touch to your Home. Pretty much all of the items come in all the different colors you like. Once your Home is complete you can trade Home Keys with your friends. This will let you visit them whenever you like, or throw a party at your own place. The possibilities are endless and there is a lot of fun to be had!
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| Classy, isn't it? |
So what's next for Homes?
I also want to take this opportunity to introduce MilMo's new, epic Adventure: Air World.
Our company has a real head start when it comes to 3D browser gaming (a field of business that will become increasingly crowded, mark my words). This is a lead that we intend to keep. That's why we sometimes stop and reassess how we think about making games. Heading into the new year we decided, for various reasons, that we wanted to reboot the MilMo level design process and art direction.
As the level design team began building the new world, I established 6 requirements for them:
1. Shorter level load times
2. Better looking visuals (though using a lot less memory)
3. More fun gameplay (but no time from the gameplay coders)
4. More keyboard friendly areas
5. Faster development times (so we can release levels more often)
6. Improved rendering performance
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| The brand new adventure Air World |
Some of these requirements tend to work against each other by nature. It is hard to improve rendering performance and load times while making the visuals look better et cetera. Doing everything at once is really hard. But our level designers came through and surprised me when they delivered on each bullet point above. Compared to our previous levels, the Air World maps load and render a lot faster and are more fun to play. We can make more of them in a shorter amount time than before and they look gorgeous! The level design team rose to the challenge by inventing a couple of brilliant new technical art workflows in the process. These workflows are now being investigated and adapted by our character art team with great enthusiasm.
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| Concepts for Air World |
The scenario for Air World originated in a simple idea by our concept artist: What if Atlantis - the ancient and technologically advanced civilization - hadn't sunken into the ocean, but rather broken up through some sort of gravitational reactor meltdown, and started floating ever upwards into the air? Along with some Aztec, Mayan and Greek influences this idea really got our artists and designers - and our brilliant writer - excited, and the result is an awesome journey into a strange and wonderful sky kingdom.
Well, you may have guessed it by now - I'm proud of the Junebud Crew! I'm also overjoyed with this MilMo release and I wish you all a lot of fun with Homes and Air World,
As for the third big, huge and forthcoming gameplay element of MilMo, I will have to get back to you on that one ...
Cheers
/Calle
Today's post is made by Calle Lundgren, Game Director at Junebud. Calle has been making games for everything from the C64 to the PS3. He has also had time to help found a successful band and to start up Junebud! He has a hand in everything that goes on at the company - especially MilMo. 
Hey,
ReplyDeleteI had already imagined more options for the houses and good you did too :D! Also being able to have some sort of cabinet where you could store your weapons or any items you find in-game would be really cool as well. Say you would be able to store the golden chalice on a pedestal in your room would be cool as well. Also being able to collect some special items in-game you could place in your house would be great!
You've done a great job with Air World. I recognised the Aztec & Mayan influence straight away ;), I wouldn't call it greek though :P.
Updates keep succeeding each other faster and faster, so you guys are doing great and can't wait to see what will come next (though don't forget to perefect the old worlds ;)).
Greetz,
Gielo