Dark Ages III status
In the beginning, there was QBASIC. A nice little language, but no good games for it. That is, until Mike Hoopman created Dark Ages I: The Continents. DAI had a complete storyline, decent capabilities, and a devoted fanbase. Then Mike made Dark Ages II: Engel, the long-awaited sequel, continuing the adventures of the fantasy world. When work on DAII was nearing completion, Mike announced that he would leave further Dark Ages games to the fans. I have taken on the task of creating DA3, and it is here that I will post information about its progress.
Right now, I have 3 notebooks and a few dozen other scraps of paper, full of material that will be mashed together to form the lore and background story of the world. I have determined that the time for the story will be very soon after Dark Ages II. Indeed, many of the landmarks from Dark Ages II will be of use in this latest tale. This is different from what I had previously planned, which involved a large new area. Since my previous plot didn't work well with the established history, it has been set aside and rewritten.
Here's what information is public so far:
(May 15th, 2007)
- The third demo has been released! This still does NOT have the latest version of X-Script in it, so the scripts are still ugly. It now has the tiles from DA2, though, so it looks much better. It also has the final music in it, so it sounds great! Note that to run the demo, just like the others, you'll need Java 1.5 or higher, and the location of the java executable must be in your PATH environment variable.
(April 5th, 2007)
- The second demo has been released! This does NOT have the latest version of X-Script in it, so the scripts are still ugly. It does have pictures, though, and most of the display code is complete. Note that to run the demo, you'll need Java 1.5 or higher, and the location of the java executable must be in your PATH environment variable.
(February 11th, 2007)
- The engine will be written in Java, and will be entirely object-oriented.
- The first demo has been released! This is just proof of concept and a starting point. Note that to run it, you'll need Java 1.5 or higher, and the location of the java executable must be in your PATH environment variable. Also, keep in mind that this has a crappy interface, and just about everything else for that matter. Thanks to the object-oriented nature of Java, it's easy to fix little things like that.
(June 21st, 2006)
- The scripting language will be X-Script.
(June 5th, 2006)
- At least one town from DAII will be destroyed.
- A large new area will be found, east of the main continent from DAII.
- Engel's still causing problems.
- The story will start ~4 generations after DAII ends.
- There are devices that allow non-mages to do "magical" things.
- The game will support a simple Turing-complete (hopefully) scripting language.
- There will be easter eggs.
Dark Knight Software, the home of the original Dark Ages games.
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