Etostone composing the Final Promise soundtrack
Posted: August 25th, 2011 | Author:
abresas | 1 Comment »
We are excited to announce that Pavlos Etostone, the successful musician from Thessaloniki, is composing the soundtrack for Final Promise.
If this is the first time you hear about Etostone, it’s certainly not the first time you hear about his songs. He has composed numerous songs of various genres like trance, house, pop, instrumental, and many have become great successes in Greece, such as “Σε θέλω πιο sexy” and “Κοίτα με”. Discover his music on deezer and his personal website.
There has already been significant work and the soundtrack is progressing well. We’re also working hard in incorporating it into the game and building a fully immersive multimedia experience. We understand that as much fun as a game can be from a gameplay perspective, creating a truly exceptional game requires a soundtrack to accompany the player throughout her adventures.
The first version of the game soundtrack will be available in-game on our next private release coming up this autumn to about 200 players — stay tuned!
On open source
Posted: June 30th, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | Discuss »
As a company backed by a team with a strong background in software development using open source and free software and open standards, we value and support openness in every possible way. We believe open standards are what helps technology move forwards, and we believe it’s every developer’s duty to be of support, if not part of, the ever-growing community of the craftsmen who build these standards and this sort of software. Free software is software that has four different freedoms: The freedom to use it for your chosen purpose; the freedom to look at the program’s internals and understand how it works; the freedom to copy it and share it; and the freedom to modify it to do something different than originally intended. We understand that these freedoms are essential for the progress of the software world.
The open source technologies we use internally are many, and range from Debian Linux, the operating system supporting our game servers, to vim, the program that most of us use to edit code, to git for version control (that is, keeping a history of how our game software looked like at any point in time and being able to restore it) and many, many others. All the programming languages we use are also open standards and we prefer software libre implementations: Javascript, the language of the open web; node.js with the V8 compiler to power our servers; short parts of PHP and Prolog, two programming languages to do various “scripting tasks”, and so forth.
Our business strategy is focused in a big way on open standards. We’re betting on the success of WebGL, and building a 3D MMORPG game based on WebGL, using old known technologies ported to the web, and reinventing many of them to work on a platform as accessible as the modern browser. This step is one that we can take as a small start-up, and while it’s a risk, it’s a risk we’re willing to take, because we believe we’re doing the right thing for the open web, and we’re convinced for its future success. We also are contributing to the WebGL community and giving back in many ways we can, the same way the WebGL community is supporting us by providing the open standard, the open source implementations, and extensive free examples, tutorials, and books on all subjects related to WebGL.
As a team, we have put forth a set of five goals that are particularly important for the community. We consider these goals an integral part of our advancement, as they go hand-in-hand with building a successful product.
1) Promoting open standards
We are thriving to promote the open web by popularizing standards such as WebGL and HTML5 and increase user awareness. We think it is a crucial part for users to be aware of what open standards are, why they are good, and how to use them. Users are the force that drives the browser market forwards, and helping them understand is essentially helping the open web itself. Many of the publications concerning WebGL, HTML5, open video and audio formats, and so forth are very technical and not targeted to end-users; we want everyone to be able to understand what this is about, because it doesn’t just concern developers, but also users and gamers. We’ve already posted about what WebGL is and what it can do, and we want to keep doing so, in language every end-user can understand.
2) Documentation
We plan to write and publish documentation that assists developers in using these standards in a better way. Many standards in their early stages are adopted slowly, because the resources available for them are limited. Contributions to mailing lists, writing tutorials or books, or technical blog posts are all part of this effort. We want everyone who wants to develop for the open web to be able to do so. We are certain that wider developer adoption will help us too, as it will make these standards more widely adopted and available. In that direction, Petros Aggelatos, our lead graphics engine developer is planning to start a technical blog the next couple of days, concerning how traditional real-time rendering techniques are reinvented for the web using WebGL, and posting there regularly as we progress in building our graphics engine.
3) Evaluation and metrics
We’re already evaluating free software that can be used to build real-time massively multiplayer online games for the web in a fast, scalable way, and we want to publish our results when they are polished and useful. We construct useful metrics that allow people to evaluate the software for themselves. Software in this category may include node.js and V8 (software used to power our game servers) as well as various WebSocket implementations such as socket.io (software used to make low-latency responsive games that work in real-time). We want people to be able to answer simple questions such as: Does it really scale? Can it really work very, very fast? What kind of server would one need for this? This can be done by making available benchmarks, testcases, and stress tests that we use ourselves to evaluate these pieces of software (these tests are basically code that checks how well these tools work under normal and heavy usage and in usual but also edge cases). It can also be done by publishing our benchmark results in the form of graphs and data available for everyone to download.
4) Open source contributions
It is essential to contribute in existing free and open source software technologies related to what we’re building. This includes reporting bugs, writing and publishing patches for known bugs, or developing desired features for existing software. This also includes collaborating and being in touch with the original developers through mailing lists and the overall community. Part of this involves investing some of our developers’ time in free and open source tools other than our own that they want to contribute to, which will be useful for us. As part of our management ideology, we allow developers to choose a lot of what they do, and want to make sure they have fun doing so; there isn’t anything more enjoyable than contributing to an open source project. These improvements will in the end help us as a team, as we’re heavily relying on open source software, and its robustness, security, speed, and features improvements are crucial for our success. It’s also the least we can do as a ‘thank you‘ to everyone who is involved in building the standards and software we use for our own needs.
5) Make things open source
Last, but most importantly, we understand the quote developers often say: “Talk is cheap, show me the code.” We will make publicly available parts of our own technologies as free and open source software, in a way that encourages community collaboration in a “bazaar” fashion where everybody can express their opinion and contribute. We’d want to let everyone build their own software using our work as a foundation. This way, our software will go through a very healthy peer review process, ensuring there are fewer bugs and most importantly fewer security issues, and we believe people will be happy to help us improve our features as well. In addition, the work we’re doing will hopefully be useful for others working in the same area as we are.
By making these five points our goals from an openness perspective, we believe we can improve our product in a healthy, organic way, through the support and contribution of the community in many aspects. Aleksis Brezas, our lead software architect, has a broad experience working with open source software and developing as a member of open source teams, and is a passionate supporter of everything along the lines of software libre. He will be coordinating this effort and making sure we stay on track.
As a first step in this direction, I am happy to announce that we are planning to make our graphics engine and parts of our whole game engine open source. Our game engine, FinalEngine, is the technology that powers everything you see in our game, from the detailed beautiful 3D graphics and animations, to the natural physics, and the fast network responsiveness. We’ve already made this announcement and commitment in two open source software conferences where Petros and I gave talks about what we’re building: The FOSSCOMM conference in Patras and the OpenFest conference in Piraeus earlier this year. We believe publishing these technologies will let people build incredible things, and we’re looking forward to seeing what’s possible. We’re still working hard in developing a version of FinalEngine which will be stable enough to use by developers outside our team, as for the time it remains buggy and unpolished. We’re hoping to soon be able to illustrate what’s possible with it and make a first version public on github.
Having made those points, we’re looking for feedback and your opinion regarding these ideas. Do you think we can help the community this way? What other things do you think we should do?
Game designer needed
Posted: June 22nd, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | Discuss »
We’re looking for a bright and talented game designer and writer to join us full-time here in Athens, Greece and help us develop the gameplay and story part of Final Promise. Duties include general game design, rules systems, play balance, interface design, 2D concept art, story, quest design, dialogue writing, creative writing, and working with developers and artists alike on a daily basis.
A pen: Photo by The Travelling Bum
Requirements:
- Professional level of English writing
- Good 2D drawing skills in any medium.
- Experience in developing quests, character classes, battle rules, skill systems, etc.
- A deep understanding of what makes a game fun
- Good understanding of what style of writing works best for making video games
- Being able to work independently with minimum supervision, self-motivated
- Being able to work with a wide spectrum of professionals in various fields
- Great team-player attitude
- Excellent verbal communication skills
- Passionately loves playing video games
- Able to work within tight deadlines
Pluses:
- Having worked on at least one shipped game title
- Experience in playing as a game master in pen and paper games such as Dungeons & Dragons
- Successfully published written work; book, theater, film, television, interactive publishing
- Native English speaker
- Good illustration skills in Photoshop, Illustrator or other software
- Understanding of the concept of sandbox RPG games as well as casual gaming
- Having played a large number of titles including RPG, sandbox, action, platform, simulation and casual games
- Understanding of UI/UX and interface design
- Strong foundation in the traditional arts & design
Working with us will give you the satisfaction of being part of a small team of bright and young people who are absolutely passionate about what they do. You’ll have the chance to have a huge impact in a game, where you will be able to take important decisions regarding the game style and story, and enjoy seeing your own ideas being applied fully. You will also develop experience in working with artists, programmers and entrepreneurs, and understand their point of view and the broad skillset required to build a full video game.
You’ll have the chance to work using technologies that are innovative and will be the future of video games, which big companies are not using yet, such as WebGL and more. We’re proud that we’re developing a big game with a small number of people and limited costs, in a way only a disruptive start-up can; you’ll experience working for a small start-up and see how everyone can have a big impact when small passionate teams come together.
If that sounds like a team you’d want to be part of, drop us a few lines about yourself at join@kamibu.com along with your CV and some samples of your writing and concept art works. We’d love to hear from you.
Platform Preview
Posted: June 17th, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | Discuss »
I’m happy to announce that on June 1st, we invited about 10 users to test our early game platform engine on a “Platform Preview” release. The Platform Preview is essentially a way to test our compatibility across various hardware and system configurations, including various graphic cards from different vendors and operating systems.
The Platform Preview is a multiplayer game platform that allows players to explore a small world of a neighborhood of about 600 buildings, which is modeled after the center of Athens, Greece. Most of the buildings are automatically generated using procedural generation methods. This means that they are built by algorithms (that is, computer programs) which take decisions on how the buildings will look like based on prespecified rules defined by our artists. Nevertheless, certain buildings have been designed by hand, and you will notice them stand out because of their detail and uniqueness. They are the central buildings of Athens, such as the parliament building.
It also includes basic player-to-player interaction such as chatting. You’ll see other players moving around the world as you explore it. You’ll notice this happens in real time; we’ve tried to eliminate latency through a real-time server which uses WebSockets to exchange data between players. WebSockets is a new way for web applications to communicate over the network which makes things blazingly fast if used correctly.
On this preview release, we’ve also included a basic Artificial Intelligence (AI) system, and you will see about 3 or 4 computer-controlled characters interact with you. You will be able to chat with them and they can possibly assign you to do some simple things, which involves interaction with other characters and exchange of inventory items. As we’re currently working on developing our AI system further, it is very possible that for a large part of the day (or even for several consecutive days), these characters will be offline and unavailable while we’re fine-tuning them.
We’re working with a system designed to scale to a large number of players. We’ve tried to make the game modules completely separate (something us programmers call ‘loosely coupled’) in a way that allows us to run different parts of the game on different servers, allowing players to interact in one big world, without noticing what’s happening behind the scenes. We want all players to share a big persistent universe without separating them by server. As we’re changing things in the world, certain game features may stop working or be unavailable sometimes — we ask for your patience. We think that part of the fun of being an alpha tester is to see an ever-evolving world, which is sometimes incomplete or buggy in peculiar ways; not even the basic rules of physics we take for granted may work!
All this is running on our custom 3D graphics engine for WebGL, which is part of our Javascript game engine that also includes a first version of our physics engine. FinalEngine, the game engine that powers everything you see and don’t see in the game, still in its early stages, is one of the technologies we’re most proud of. We are hoping to be able to make more announcements regarding it soon, especially as it becomes more mature as time goes by. We’re hoping to be able to give back to the WebGL and overall community in any way we can.
We’re happy to say that we’ve received generally positive criticism on this pre-release, especially regarding the web-based 3D experience which is new for everyone in our audience. We have received very useful feedback so far, and a good sum of bug reports, something that is helping us work on developing our software further. Dear alpha testers, we know it’s far from perfect, and we’re glad you’re making this clear to us through all the feedback mechanisms available. Thank you for everything you’ve been doing for us so far! And we’d like to ask you to keep the feedback coming using our Get Satisfaction web site and the game forum.
Thanks to everyone who is taking part in this release. Know that we’ll be giving out more alpha invitations soon, so if you want one, let us know.
Our game is now “Final Promise”
Posted: June 4th, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | Discuss »
We’ve been using the name “Virtual Life” as a codename for our game for some time. We’ve now settled on the actual name, “Final Promise”.
Our game will run at finalpromise.com/. If you’re interested in getting an early invite for it, go there and register with your e-mail address now
Cloth, water, and other cool demos
Posted: April 27th, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | Discuss »
We’ve been busy building the technology of our game. We’d like to show you some of the things that are possible, and the quality of graphics to expect. All the following demos are just websites using Javascript and WebGL; no flash, or Java, or Unity, or other plugins are utilized.
These demos should run on the latest Google Chrome or Firefox on any operating system. If they don’t work, make sure your browser is up-to-date, your graphics card drivers are installed and updated, and that you’re not running them on ancient hardware configurations.
Physical cloth simulation by Petros Aggelatos
View the demo
Here’s a screencast of it, in case it is not compatible with your hardware:
View the screencast
Water simulation by me
View the demo
Phong-shaded teapot by Petros Aggelatos
View the demo
Bump-mapped endless tunnel by me
View the demo
These demos were built using our own WebGL graphics engine which we’ve been building to support the game we’re developing. Regarding the availability of the engine as an open platform, we’re going to follow up with more information soon. We hope you enjoy our demos, and I’d like to remind you that all constructive feedback is very welcome.
Photos From Thessaloniki
Posted: April 4th, 2011 | Author:
Andreas Lostromos | Discuss »
The team gathered in Thessaloniki to work together for one week.
-
- Dionysis on the train
-
- The team @ Abresas’ House
-
- The team @ Abresas’ House
-
- The team @ Abresas’ Dad’s House
-
- The team @ Abresas’ Dad’s House
Virtual Life and the Openfund
Posted: February 2nd, 2011 | Author:
niklarin | Discuss »
We are happy to announce that we have reached an agreement with the Openfund for our seed funding and we are advancing with our incorporation, so its safe to say that we are not a project anymore, but a company.
First things first, if it wasn’t for Start-Up Weekend Athens and our good performance there that got us the second place, we would not be applying for this round of Openfund for funding because we simply weren’t ready. We just had an idea and a theoretical choice of several revenue models and concepts to follow for our game. No real market research, no thorough competition comparisons to define our possible target market and we were far from being sure what our product will even be. But the team was there, everybody was really excited about making a video game, I was really excited about creating a virtual economy (something that I was researching for a while for a project of my own before I joined the team) and the Openfund executives and advisors we met at the SWA were really excited about our potential. We said we will simply make a 2D demo of a game in HTML5 during the weekend and get ready a business presentation that could possibly fit any browser based game, since we had many doubts about our final product and the business side while we didn’t want to reveal our major innovating points in public. I personally didn’t sleep from Friday to Saturday while putting together our business model that could be later advanced and added to our eventual business plan. The devs were coding like 24/7 and Dio was coordinating everything while our only real breaks were for delicious Domino’s Pizza. We got the second place there without revealing any secrets about our project but by showing that we can deliver something huge based on our great vision.
The second place got us an automatic qualification to the second round of Openfund selection and we had 15 days to submit a business plan draft so we got hands down for some serious work to meet the deadline. About then we decided to make the game in full 3D using WebGL and chose the concept and genre of a Dark Urban MMORPG. We chose to focus on our in-game virtual marketplace for the first major revenue stream to achieve sustainability before we run out of the seed funding money. The presentation went well as we were really confident about what we want to build and how we plan to monetize it, while the teams CVs and great spirit were a bonus for Openfund executives who seemed to like our progress and had shown some trust in us. They chose us for the final selection on January 8th when we had to submit a proper business plan and pitch to our potential investors, advisors and the other teams aiming to get funded during a full day event.
This meant one thing: HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!
The development team began working on a proof of concept version of our game coordinated by Dio, while he was also working with me on our business plan. What holidays? Coding is more fun!!! 3 weeks later and after endless hours of research, coding, writing and testing each others theories about everything related to our project, we had a 40 pages business plan and a little neighborhood of a primitive 3D city with skeletons wandering around under the moonlight for anybody who had chrome10 or firefox4 installed. The final presentation was hilarious, as Dio was comparing the 3 major console companies and while he had mentioned Sony and Nintendo he forgot the name of the third… This made the crowd at the Microsoft Innovation Center burst into laughter and the rest of our presentation went smoothly as we revealed the 2 major selling points and our full business model with the marketing methods we are intending to use. The fact that we have a solid, young and ambitious team and already recruited Andreas (meletis3d) as our designer, that we made it clear we are doing this game anyway and if the investors are interested they can buy a ride with us, got everybody pretty excited. The initial twitter comments were very encouraging and after a nice dinner, Openfund executives informed us that we are selected to receive seed funding but we had to keep quiet about it for some time, so I am announcing it now that you can call us Kamibu Limited.
Our incubation with Openfund has already began and we are having weekly meetings with the Openfund executives that are supporting us from the beginning of this adventure, with a schedule to keep us busy and focused at what we are doing best, from the moment we applied through the Start-Up Weekend Athens. We have already arranged meetings with some of the advisors concerning legal and accounting subjects, and we have been granted office space at the Microsoft Hellas Headquarters on behalf of Openfund.
That said, we would like to thank the Openfund for this great opportunity with the high risks we are bringing with us and we will proceed to become their greatest investment choice.
The team behind the curtain
Posted: January 19th, 2011 | Author:
dionyziz | 1 Comment »
For some time, I’ve wanted to present the team behind Final Promise. We’re a software company, and so our schedule is driven a lot by technology. Reasonably, our team consists mainly of software engineers. Software engineers and business people alike, everyone is truly a brilliant person in his own right, with complementary abilities overall. I consider my team the most important asset in realizing our vision. The team behind this project consists of five people: Dionysis, Petros, Alex, Andreas and George. Everyone is young in age, and passionate about their work, with a lot of desire to work on world-changing products that satisfy real needs for real people.