Archive for the ‘Trash from the Past’ Category

I thought I’d showcase some of the stuff I used to work on.

 

Age of Mythology is the first game that really got me hooked on programming, I enjoyed making random maps in a text editor, the code was simple but still formatted much like any other programming language, but it allowed me to quickly see results from my work..

 

Here are some of the maps I made, though there are several others.

 

This map was entitled “Gold Rush”, for those who have played Age of Empires II, they may remember the popular map where you would fight over the gold in the middle, with this map I tried to recreate the classic gameplay of it. Players were also given a free monument from the start.

 

Next came “Black Forest”, another recreation of a classic Age of Empires II map, except I added a feature to the map that allowed it to pick a random style each time you generated the map, it would make one of several black forest variations, including Classic, Desert, Snow, Erebus, and several others.

 

Here is another nice one, The “Carribean”, a chain of white sanded islands with ghost ships, undead pirates, and sea snakes who attack you if you go near the rocky islands. Each player would have their own small island, but everyone wants the large center island filled with riches!.

 

This one was appropriately called “Ring Lords”, it is indeed a pun on Lord Of the Rings. At any rate, players were all on the same large ring which surrounded the small island in the middle, protected by a small stretch of water that separated it from the mainland. This map was very good, and players would fight over the riches in the middle, often defending it well. I still remember the time I had to defeat an enemy that took the entire mainland, while I was left with my base on the island.

 

Another good map, “Dunes” was a large open desert with sweeping hills, scarce wood, and deadly mummies that protected all the gold. Gifted with free farms and two lighthouses, players had large spaces to work with between the cliffs dotted around the map.

 

I added several nice features to my maps, making each one unique. All of the maps also featured real-time lighting, where the lighting would change as the time rolled on, surprisingly this wasn’t used in most other maps.

 

For some of my maps I had to change the AI to recognize that my maps had water in them, otherwise the AI would never attack, this work especially well in the Carribean, where they would assault you on a regular basis.

 

Well, this concludes the showcasing of my Age of Mythology maps, if anybody wants them they can feel free to ask.

 

More Trash from the Past still to come..

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Hello minions!

Today, in the first proper ‘Trash from the Past’ insight, we will look at something called “ShadowMoon”. This was a strategy game we were planning back in 2001. We went so far as to develop 250+ fully skinned and animated units, 50+ buildings, HUD, and even began sounds. Unfortunately, we didn’t have an engine or anything. We just made all this stuff, with basically no direction. So, from about mid 2001, to early 2002, we made all this content for ShadowMoon. So without further ado, here is a look at some of the stuff:

Important note: The screenshots were made in Photoshop, in an attempt to make what would look like a screenshot. We took shots of the units and objects from the angles, and then pasted them over a mock terrain and added some FX:

The alien race, the Gronkyt’s, take on the medieval Ancients:


The mysterious Dark Hunters battle it out with the Pirates:

In the game, players could choose one of six races. There were three futuristic, and three ancient factions:

UHA: A race of humans from the future, possessing advanced technology.
Jorgon: An advanced alien race of robotic and organic structure.
Gronkyt: The old squishy aliens, which came in large numbers.
Ancients: Medieval humans possessing rudimentary magical abilities.
Pirates: Vicious sea-faring pirates with a taste for crude implants.
Dark Hunters: A race of forest dwelling creatures with strong magical abilities.

The brutal Gronkyt’s try to fight off an attack from the UHA:


A skirmish erupts between the robotic Jorgon and the Dark Hunters:


The noble Ancients encounter a force of barbaric Pirates:


A detachment of UHA troops tries to get the better of a force of Dark Hunters:

So that’s it for the first of the series. Keep checking in for more insight into our past efforts, including more on ShadowMoon.

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Greetings mortals!

So now that we have a nice shiny blog, I got to thinking; what about some of our old stuff? We’ve been making mods and even games *shudders*, since the mid-to-late 90′s. So in this particular line of news, we shall dig into our; Trash from the Past!

We will be updating this series with various bits of useless information on our old, often really old, works of… art.

So stay tuned for more from the RuneStorm archives.

Oh, and by the way. The above image was actually going to be used for piles of trash in the trunks of the cars from The Crucible’s RoadRage gametype. Sadly this sainted idea never made it into the final release, but there you are.

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