Category Archives: iLom

Lords of Midnight – Update

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I thought I’d better post here, because it seems it’s been a while!

I know many people might be thinking that this project is going the way of all the others… vapourware, and to be truthful there is always the chance of that. I do find it very hard to get the work done in the evenings, when I have so much going on. And we’ve had such a good summer, in the scheme of things, that I’ve found it very hard to do any coding in the evenings.

The last few months has seen me going through a merry go round of my work contracts, and in particular I’ve been working silly hours.

I also had a lot of problems with Marmalade, the SDK I’m using to give me the cross platform. They have only recently been resolved.

Anyway, enough of the excuses, other than to say that 6 months has disappeared and the project hasn’t moved on a great deal!

The intention is to fire up the quatro, and make a real push to get work done started again from Jan. I’ll also try and keep the blog up to date.

I noticed that man people have visited and will have seen no movement for a while… 🙁 sorry about that!

So, watch this space…

Lords of Midnight – iOS

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Thought I’d post an update for LOM. I realise that it’s been over 2 months since I last had anything to say on the subject.

Firstly, it’s been a busy few months for both Mike and myself. Mine work related and Mike’s more personal. That combined with a little bit of sidetracking on Eye of the Moon.

Two of the issues with this project is time and getting it right. Neither of us are working on project full time and it’s very easy to lose a week before you know it, just because you were overly tired or didn’t feel like sitting in front of a computer. I’m sure that winter is the best time to do development and not in the summer.

The getting it right aspect is about thinking about the project more than actually doing it. Over the last 2 months I’ve been going round in circles about the graphics of the game. I’ve been thinking about a number of different approaches that we have considered for the look and feel, and the way the user interface will work.

The original LOM had a very distinctive look and feel. Simple, but very affective. Somehow with the very powerful modern technology, we have to achieve the same result. I sat down recently and gave some thoughts to the way LOM was going to look, and was not happy. I’ve had firm ideas about the direction of the graphics for a long time. Mike brought new ideas to the party when we start discussing the new game. And in general we had a consensus about the way forward. But then I started to doubt… I kept thinking about Jaws. Jaws works because the brilliant robotic sharks that Spielberg was going to show off all over the place, didn’t work. In the end he had to work around them, utilising them sparingly. The end result, much more suspense to the film.

For LOM, the shark was the graphics. Mike wrung an awful lot from the spectrum, but in the end, the setting of the story was defined by the minimalist graphics – a world full of white snow! So, as you start to up the quality of the graphics you are moving further into working shark territory. LOM was stylistic and I feel it has to remain so. Simple and stylistic.

I discussed this with a few people and then went back to Mike in order to tell him that I thought we were the wrong people to be thinking about the graphics. And that if we continued down the path we were following, I felt we were going to make a mistake. Mike agreed.

So, last week I had a meeting with an artist. Fergus McNeil ( some of you may remember his 8 bit days with Delta4 ) and asked him to take over artistic control of the project. I’ll keep you posted with anything I can on the visuals.

In the mean time. Tonight I am back at the computer – coding!

Eye of the Moon

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I had a great day today. Work has been slow on iLom – basically because April had too many bank holidays, and with one thing or another, all these long weekends have messed my month up. I should be getting back to work in earnest in the next few days.

However, Mike and I recently found ourselves talking about that project that one does not speak about… Eye of the Moon. For those of you reading this because you are interested in all things Midnight, then you know exactly what I am talking about. For those of you who have no interest at all in Midnight, lets just say that EotM is the legendary missing sequel to all the other Midnight games.

Mike explained that he’d been thinking about EotM a lot lately. I guess it’s only natural as we stir up things with iLOM and go over old ground discussing other things Midnight. He said that he’d go a few things in his head for the story. Then today he surprised me with a design document for the game, complete with story overview.

It’s a ten page document, and very detailed. I like it – I like it a lot. It now changes the focus of the development of LOM. I think we are going to push out LOM and then jump straight to EotM, with DDR and CITADEL following as additions to the canon.

I’ll be working with Mike on the concept and fleshing the details out as we develop LOM. But I can already tell from the amount of info that Mike has generated in the last few days since we started talking EotM, that he is mentally very committed to this.

I can’t share much right now, however to snippets that give nothing away, that are of interested…

Those of you who remember EotM law; EotM was going to take place in the Bloodmarch and have 12 regions. Bloodmarch and these regions were eventually used in Citadel. That base concept remains, but those lands are now west of Midnight…. one of those is currently called “VARANGOR” another is “ISHERIL”

Mike Singleton wrote:
The map. I have deliberately broken up the overall map into Midnight-sized chunks. As much as anything this is to serve as a reminder to myself that each chunk should be as detailed and varied and hand-crafted as the original Midnight map itself. If this is not done, bigger quickly becomes worse and monotonous rather than better.

Mike Singleton wrote:
The idea is to make this last game of the series a truly grand finale, with new landscape and gameplay features, new enemies and new friends, but also the potential of Midnight being assaulted by all its old enemies too. And at the same time the land of Midnight itself returns firmly to the gameplay, which is fitting for the end of the saga, not to mention satisfying for old fans.