InstantAction Blog

Lore: Switchblade

 

The guys over at the Lore blog have posted some in-game images of the new Switchblade MAV.  If you haven't had a chance to check it out yet you might want to.  The new MAV will be faster and stealthier.  It also sounds like they'll be showing off some new stuff this week of the Abolisher.  I've included a single image of the Switchblade for your enjoyment.

-Dr Wiley

Official Lore Dev Blog

Jetsum's creation

Not all Lore fans may know of the Official Developer Blog.  The Lore dev blog is the place to go for all your Lore updates.  You can get information about stuff that's in the works, fan images, updates, new MAVs, free stuff, tutorial videos, all the goods really.

So if you have been wondering where you can get all your Lore updates look no further than the Official Lore: Aftermath Developer Blog.

Free Lore MAV Lab

The MAV Lab will be having a free trial soon.  You'll get 3 days to check it out and if you like what you've seen can purchase the content and save your MAVs forever.  Now we will begin the convenient image walkthrough that I've created.

It looks like text but it's a button


Click trial and unlock


Enter the MAV Lab


Try to make something more bad ass than this FISHMAV

You've now got your 3 day trial of the Lore: Aftermath MAV Lab.  Get in there, get your guns and MAVs equipped and ready for combat, then tear it up on the battlefield. 

-Dr Wiley

Lore: Aftermath Competition?

Looking to get yourself involved in some Lore Tournaments and Competition?  Head on over to the forums to discuss some ideas for upcoming Monthly Tournaments, Grudge Matches, or perhaps even an offline ladder system. 

Talk with the developers and other Lore fans from the community to get something together and start some firendly, or perhaps unfriendly, competition.

In addition to this information I've attached the new Lore: Aftermath trailer to this blog post in case you missed it on the InstantAction home page.  Let me know what you think in the comments.

-Dr Wiley

March MYOG Blog: Developing Lore: Aftermath

Welcome to the second edition of the Make Your Own Games blog.  As requested from last month's blog, this month I showcase how an InstantAction game was made.  Logan Foster of Max Gaming Technologies was nice enough to spare me some time for a developer interview.  Read below on how they made your favorite Mech Simulator game, and if you have more suggestions for next month's blog, post in the comments!

Lore: Aftermath is the return of the classic Mech Simulator game, where you pilot a massive 50 foot tall Mech.

What makes Lore: Aftermath unique?

One of the things that we think people are going like and find unique about Lore: Aftermath is its classic mech combat and gameplay, which we really haven't seen on the market in years. It's not just some guy with a gun blitzing around the mission, bunny hopping and shooting everything in sight. We are talking about massive weapons of war unleashing hell onto its targets. Taking this all a step further, you do more than just choose a bunch of preconfigured player classes - a Mechanized Assault Vehicle (MAV) can be customized by the player to suit their style of play, down to their base chassis, weapons, engines and armor.  Then to top all of this customization off, we allow the player to apply various decals and paint their MAV a custom color they have chosen, thus giving the player a true sense of ownership and uniqueness to who they are on the battlefield.

Where did your inspiration come from?

Max Gaming was originally founded back in 1998 by Adrian Wright to run leagues for Mechwarrior gamers.  Pretty much everyone at the company is a fan in one way or another of big giant robots, so it's pretty obvious why one of our niches would be making Mech-based games. In fact, Lore: Aftermath is essentially a sequel to the very first game that we ever did as an indie team called Lore: Invasion. Invasion wasn't a horrible game, but since it was our very first game, there were a lot of things that we liked from a concept standpoint that we never really felt we nailed 100%.  So when it came time to make Lore: Aftermath, we pulled what we felt was good from Invasion, redid everything from the ground up, and then loaded it with a ton of other awesome things that we felt would make it a bigger and better Mech game.

Pretty much everyone at Max Gaming is a fan of big giant robots.

What was your development process like?

I am not aware of us actually having any sort of particular method that we worked from. For the most part it was free-for-all. We didn't have a big 200+ page design document; we just came into it all with a simple two-page concept. From there we took a bit of time to review Lore: Invasion and a few other mech games to get an overall idea of what type of game we thought the market would enjoy. 

 

After that we spent a lot of time just thinking about the core elements of the game. A lot of our initial efforts were put towards the MAV - how it would look, how it should operate and move, how many weapons and equipment it should hold and how to customize it. From there we moved onto some rapid prototyping with some quick and dirty sample models and a mission.  Prototyping ensured that we maximized the time we spent on making the game fun to play, as opposed to what a lot of indie teams will do - producing a lot of cool-looking content and then trying to make it all fit together like a 5000-piece puzzle with no reference picture (which I should note was the route we had gone down with Lore: Invasion.  We have since learned our lesson).


The blue mechs and chromatic colored box guns were amongst the first mech prototypes.

What was your game team like?

Lore: Aftermath was developed primarily from December 2007 to roughly May 2008. The team was actually relatively small, just five guys (Adrian Wright, Tim Newell, Matt Mitman and myself) and our summer intern (Devin). Tim, Adrian and Devin are based out of our offices in Ohio.  Matt works remotely from his home in North Carolina.  I work remotely out of my home in Alberta, Canada.

 

To help communicate and keep ourselves organized, we used a lot of Skype and IRC to stay in contact. I am sure we are probably classified as Skype abusers.  We will connect in the morning and leave the Skype chat going all day long. Other programs that we use to work together and collaborate include Google Talk and Google Docs, and we have our own bug tracking and SVN servers setup that we utilize daily to stay on top of things.

 

Most of our initial design work was done collaborating in Google Docs, talking about how thing would work and technical limitations we would have to overcome. As we progressed into the game's development, we slowly moved to utilizing our bug tracker more and more to not just track issues, but to track tweaks and ideas to make the game better. This all helped us keep track of what we should do day to day.

Why did you use Torque to create the game?

First and foremost is what the engine offers you. Torque has a great price point, which makes it pretty easy for even a hobbyist to get into and start working with it.  It also includes all the source code (vitally important), a robust set of features and a pretty soft set of publishing restrictions. All of these are major wins.

 

The second reason is that Max Gaming has been using Torque-based products to make games since TGE was first released. We have developed and shipped over 10 titles for ourselves or various clients with it, and as such we felt that we had a pretty solid understanding of the engine. While we did for a small time consider using another engine, GarageGames gave us some special advanced access to what became TGEA 1.8, which helped tip the scale. Using an engine you are familiar with is very important when you are on a limited budget, and when that engine can give you access to almost all of the features you need right out of the box, that's even better.

Lore: Aftermath Updates

Today we rolled out a new release and within that release were some updates to Lore.

So let's jump right in.  Straight from the developers.

Lore: Aftermath

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Death Animations! No longer will your opponent simply blast themselves into bits when they are destroyed, now you can savor your victory over another MAV pilot a little longer as you watch them crash to the Earth and then burn up into a glorious ball of power critical mass destruction :)

New cockpit for the Malice. We updated it so that it better suited the way the Malice cockpit would look.

and the following bug fixes:

• Tower buildings now have doors to them.
• We tweaked the settings that save your customized MAVs to your save slots. Unfortunately this means that you will need to recreate all your saved MAVs. This should be the only time we ever do this and we greatly apoligize for the inconvenience.
• The powerplant now overloads (as opposed to the direct center of the MAV). Also the critical overload upon death will now follow the MAV as it dies or moves.
• Recentering your torso will now take the shortest path.
• Pressing ESC while in an in-game chat window will now properly close that chat window.
• Foot puff effects are now seen on all clients and not just the host machine.
• Only 1 player may now use a repair bay at a time.
• Fixed a bug where players were able to use a repair bay at the mid-point base on Artic Battlefield even if their team no longer controls the base.
• Fixed a bug where players were able to capture the mid-point base even after death on Artic Battlefield.
• You are no longer able to spawn at the mid-point base on Artic Battlefield if your team loses control of the mid-point base while your spawn screen was up.
• When a weapon is destroy, your reload bars no longer reset.
• When you suicide you can still control the MAV up until you explode (previously you lost control when you suicided). This should help you better target enemy MAVs while trying to do a Kamikazi run.

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Lore on IRC

In addition to all these updates they've got information about a Lore IRC Server.  Now you can jump in and chat with the Devs about the game as well as other players.  The channel is set up on irc.quakenet.org(#lore_aftermath).  So hop on in and get to the chatting.

Lore Blog

Finally, you should head on over to http://loreblog.instantaction.com/ and follow up with posts from the developers.  If you haven't found that blog yet, head on over there and get your updates.

-Dr Wiley

Huge Lore Update!

Straight from the Lore: Aftermath developers we've got a large list of updates.  Below you'll find the more notable points found within the latest release.  Follow this link to see more of the updates.

New Network Settings! We have done some impressive overhauls to the network settings which should allow for a much smoother and more playable game when more than 5 players are connected. These changes should allow almost anyone to host 8 players as well as make the game appear to play smoother for people on slower connections.

"Battlefield X" Mission. A new mission is available (under a temporary name). This new arctic themed map is team deathmatch based, on top of this the map also features a central base that a team may capture and use as a new spawn location or to repair/rearm. Be careful though as a powerful new base defence turret has been deployed to this map as well. Note: The name will be changed in the next release to reflect our "name the map" contest currently taking place on the forums.

Tone Mapping & Contrast Shader. We have added a new post-process shader to the game which will help improve the overall look and quality of the missions. You should notice a much richer environment now.

Health Percentages. We have updated the MAV health displays on the HUD (for yourself and your target) to display a health % for the legs and main body (as opposed to colors to indicate health).

Smoother Movement. All movement jitters when you moved the torso and the legs should now be resolved.

Once again, to view more of the updates use this link, CLICK HERE!

-Dr Wiley

Lore: Will You Play With Me?

For kicks we enjoy making videos based around games that you can find on InstantAction.  This time we decided to take on Lore: Aftermath.  Watch and enjoy.

LORE - Will You Play With Me? from InstantAction on Vimeo.
I think we may take a stab at Ace of Aces next.
For our take of Office Space check out InstantAction on Vimeo.
-Dr Wiley

Lore Name The Map Contest

That's right, we've got some images from the new map that is coming to Lore.  However, that map does not yet have a name.  That's where you come in.  

Take a look at the screens of the new map.  Read the description of the map, and come up with an awesome name.  

Head to the forums and post your best name or names for the new map.  We'll be accepting submissions for 2 weeks, that's until Feb. 12th.  At that time we'll grab the top 10 or so names and begin the voting round, which will also last for 2 weeks.  

PRIZE!  Besides using your name for the map, the winner will also receive access to the Lore MAVLab.  If it happens that the winner already has the MAVLab we will find another prize to award the winner.  

So check out the images and description below, and get naming.

"The battle continues deep in the Artic tundra where fields of snow and ice stretch on as far as the eye can see. Here in these barren lands, two factions have setup fortifications as they dig in for what will be a long and hard fought battle for control of the sector. Victory will only be achieved by annihilating your opponents and to help you do this capture of the strategic 'Forward Base', located between the two factions, will bring its various weapons, repair facilities and deployment options to your side!"

Remember to post your name suggestions in the forums.

-Dr Wiley

Lore - Training and More

The Lore developers are on the ball.  Announcing Training Days and Thursdays with the Developers. 

Training Days - The Lore Ambassador Corp. has graciously allotted time in their busy schedules to help out those that are new to the game.  See below for scheduled training times and the host you should join:

Mondays:  time: 7 to 8 pm EST
          host: tehpita

Tuesdays: time: 3 to 4 pm EST
          host: QRF_GRIZZLY
          time: 7 to 8 pm EST
          host: tehpita

Wednesday: time: 3 to 4 pm EST
           host: QRF_GRIZZLY

Saturday/Sunday: time: 10am to 11am EST
           host: rgoose

In addition, if you find one of these guys, don't hesitate to ask them for help in Lore:

Gheist
esd-MGT
pbgslingshot
AngryCanuck

Thank these guys for helping out and donating their time.

Thursdays with the Devs - You may see Lore developers on InstantAction from time to time.  But now they've dedicated Thursdays at 6pm EST to playing against everyone else.  So if you see any of the following developers, feel free to jump in their party or send them an invite to yours (hint: add them to your friends list).  There's nothing more satisfying than beating someone at their own game.

awrightmgt
timmgt
logancdn
Chemeleon

Thanks Lore devs for setting this all up!

-Dr Wiley