What a week…

First off, GDC was completely awesome. Thousands of game developers milling about a huge convention center and among them some of the biggest names out there. And little-ole-me in the Garage Games booth showing off the feature technology of Epic Frontiers. Of course, the fact that I was showing off features with programmer and stock art and the fact that I received, in the middle of a sea of bling and eye-candy, kudos from those who had seen it, says a lot about our confidence in our features.

Interrogative isn’t just a feature: It’s a system. And Epic Frontiers isn’t just an MMORPG: It’s a world.

There are differences. A feature is a single piece of tech that is easily separated from the whole and dropped into many other applications as many pieces of reusable code are wont to do. An MMORPG ranges from Atlantica Online and World of Warcraft to Fusion Fall and Maple Story.

Epic Frontiers uses Interrogative’s functionality as an extension to an underlying philosophy of interaction between the player and the world. It’s just the manifestation of that philosophy in the context of Player-NPC conversation. In the context of combat, our action system is exposed in a more raw form, but not much different in the way that Interrogative works, and they share several base functions with each other as well as with the crafting, AI, and soft skill system. It’s a system…

So in Epic Frontiers if, as a player, you would like to talk to an NPC, you affect the state of things. And if you fight, you have an affect, too. Soft skills are no different, and crafting is no different from that. NPCs have access to the same functions, so that as we upgrade the AI over the life of the game, they can better play the game against (or with) you. And the world will have access to the information in order to be affected by it, while also affecting you and the NPC alike. It’s a world…

Epic Frontiers is not going to be a sandbox game. Others can work on those, and while they have their merits, we prefer to provide a loose yet powerful set of rules for our world. Interrogative is just a symptom of the disease that Epic Frontiers is infected with. There are other symptoms as well, and they will be getting shown as they are developed, though to whet everyone’s appetite, we’re going to be seeing a demo of some cooperative gameplay mechanics probably by IMGDC in 2.5 weeks. The main functionality is close to being done, and it should work just as we intend it to.

But enough talk, I’ve been away from coding and scripting for a week, and now it’s time to get back to doing just that so I can post some more gameplay demos for you…