Introducing The Singular: Chaos Gate

well. the day is finally here. i’d like to officially welcome all of you (and your friends. and their friends. yeah — pretty much anyone who might be interested….) to the public alpha of:

The Singular: Chaos Gate

it’s what’s been taking up all of my free time and depriving me of sleep since about last october.

“Chaos Gate” being the fancy, fantasy story tie-in, of course. (these days, you just aren’t cool unless you’ve got a title-dangler like that) like i’ve said before, if this one goes well, there’s a vampire one, a sci-fi one and even a pirate one around the corner. It’s built to be pretty genre agnostic. The sweet arena fighting championship game we are thinking of beyond those, tho, is going to require a whole new engine. heh.

we as a team are pretty happy with the way things are progressing.

i’ll tell you what, tho, it sure is nice implementing new features once the core engine is in place. for example, we just dropped in professions on friday. the modular design just let us plop the functionality right in.

there IS one thing i’m not tremendously excited about yet. tho, i still think it’s the right decision to do a public alpha already just to make sure we’re on the right game design track. what am i not happy with? character planning and goals aren’t up to snuff yet. folks don’t really have any easily discernable direction to build their characters yet.

we’re going to have about 3 (or even more, really) tiers of skills inside the trees. not all of them will ramp up that high, but we’ll for sure give the players plenty to build to. right now, i think, the only one that qualifies is the crafting line. Mundane, Masterwork, Magical. sort of a chaining prereq thing.

it’ll get there, tho. with things like our spirit timers, riposte, disguise, fast healing, typed locations, etc. it should be cool. and, as i said, we’ve got a solid base to work from. we just are at the point where we need a critical mass of folks playing to see where to tweak things. we still have a lot of things to do from style sheets to automatically updating the ui to fleshing out some world events, but, it’s shaping up great.

so, yeah, we’re really happy with where it is right now. god knows we’ve put enough effort into it so far. heh. i mean, the world timer is already in the 12k range. and, for most of it’s life, it was incrementing turns every half hour. (it started with 1 back in october of last year)

so, give it a try. then, let us know what you guys think.

maybe i’m just crazy when i get excited about making a specific magic item for me, then customizing a specific skill to use it so that the history the other guy sees is all pimped out — all stuff any character can do.

damn, but i think that’s cool.

m3mnoch.

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