It’s a dark, gloomy night, and more unsettling secrets are escaping the confines of Rooks Keep.

Perhaps you thought Rooks Keep was just Chess with some fancy moving pieces and gore?
Well, we’re pleased to squash those fears (or dreams) and introduce the other side of Rooks Keep, the fighting game! It will indeed feature an expansive, interactive combat mode, where players will take direct control of the pieces and fight in pitched battles for victory.


In a variety of game-modes players can battle through fights with interactive combat, using quick and slow attacks, parrying, dodging and counter-attacks to out-maneuver the enemy. Players will be able to engage in this fighting game during standard Chess, or simply play with traditional rules. The attacker will still have an advantage, but a skilled fighter may actually fight back against the attacker and if victorious, the opposition loses their piece.

Rooks Keep will offer a selection of game-modes, including, Arena, Chess and Tournament modes to test your fighting prowess and more. We’ll be sure to detail the various modes in due course.

So there it is! And just to be clear, Rooks Keep will feature traditional Chess, various fighting game modes, Chess with fighting and more. It’s more of a strategy/fighting game hybrid inspired by Chess and set in gothic universe.

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..

Its 3:30 AM in the cold dark night and like any mad indie developer (or mad scientist), instead of sleeping, I’m hard at work on some diabolical creation.

This time, I’m crafting the grotesque creatures that hail from the darker recesses of Rooks Keep.
In Rooks Keep players will get a selection of chess sets to play as.
While our previous set of characters were all a bit cleaner and outfitted with metal suits of armor, these beasts have a different style. Their bulky bodies are bulging with muscle and while some of them use only their natural claws or blades. They all wear minimal armor and what litte equipment they do have is crude and worn.
If you stretch your mind a bit, you might notice that the monsters of Quake 1 lent an inspirational hand to their design.

BE WARNED: What you are about to see includes graphic representation of endevours not entirely finished, one might even call them work-in-progress…

Knight
This friendly customer is going to be the Knight for the beasts side. It will joyfully hack its oppoents with two big sharp implements.

As you can see it doesn’t have textures yet and the materials are not the most fancy. This is the high-detail sculpted mesh with about 8 million polygons. As you can see I’ve been having lots of fun with muscles and trying to get a reasonable skin on him.
We’ll be sure to post some updated shots when SB gets to work on the textures.

Here are some shots showing the early construction of the mesh. Now you can see how I used box modelling and took it from that initial, basic “box chicken” to the snarling beast at the end. I then stuck a piece of armor on top and moved on to the high detail work.



To get it to this stage took about 5 hours.
Here is a shot of the state it was in just before sculpting.

I did the armore and it’s straps in high detail and prepared the rest of the mesh for scuplting by applying smoothing. I also cut some extra loops into the teeth and spike to retain their shape when smoothed.

Ogre / Rook
And then there’s the next one! Right now, I am working on the brutish ogre that will be the Rook on the beasts side!
He’s not done yet. I am in the middle of sculpting my way through the various pieces.


As you can see I’m getting lots of practice on muscles. Its tough, but its getting easier. I think I am getting better at them with each mesh. What makes them even more fun is that there are slight differences on every reference I’ve got.

And for good measure, here are some earlier shots.

That is the LD mesh and the other is the other is the partial HD mesh just before going to sculpting. Notice how the hard ‘mechanic’ style parts have been detailed out while the organic pieces are just smoothed out.

Ok, enough for now. When I’ve finished this little bugger, I’ll fire off arender or two and post those along with some shots of the initial progression.

Here are some boring facts about the User Interfaces(UI’s) that have been made for our projects, It’s long, but worth a read!..

We’ll start with the UI that was made for The Crucible’s TC version for UT3, during the time of the MSUC, although I made others before that.

The whole UI was redesigned and remade about 3 times before finally looking like that. Every window that the game needed was made several times, and because of some limitations in the UT3 UI editor, scenes had to be remade even more times when they were renamed.

Next came the UI for The Crucible’s UDK version, although this version was never released, I did make an entirely new UI for it, with a grey and red color scheme, it was styled similar to the above image, but was once again quite different. Here you can see the options menu, these generally made use of my complex and easy to use auto settings generation panel, made my work much easier when it was finished.

This UI also featured a handy tool tip which would appear when you hovered over things, simple function, but actually quite difficult to make..

Then as we started developing stuff using the UDK, we discovered that future UDK updates would no longer feature the UT3 UI editor, and would instead be using Adobe Flash alone. At this point it became obvious that I had to learn that if we wanted to have any kind of a UI in our games…

So I spent months learning Flash, and I was able to make some nice stuff with it, but it was a lot harder to work with, especially the communication between the game and your UI, seeing as how the system is separate.

I began creating the UI for Rook’s Keep using flash, but halfway through I was struck by an idea, and desperate to not use flash I decided to pursue it.

I began creating a 3D UI, one that could render meshes, particles, materials, and just about everything you would find in the actual game. Needless to say, this was no easy task, and there are reasons why nobody else has ever tried to make such a thing, but I aimed to be the first.

I succeeded, up to a point, It could render all the things I wanted it to, I had overcome all of the expected problems in some way or another, and it was going very well…

It was my hope that Rook’s Keep would be a Pilot for my nice UI, and that it would give Rook’s Keep something unique in the gaming world, something that would set it apart, but this was not to be…

Once it came time to actually design a UI for Rook’s Keep, my UI was still difficult to work with, because its so complicated to get it to work, its complicated to make things with it. It would also require much more content than originally planned for Rook’s Keep, and even then, its a bit of a gamble..

So instead Rook’s Keep will be using a simple 2D UI system that DarkCarnivore was experimenting with at the time, and my UI is now somewhat abandoned by me..

However I did plan for my UI to ultimately be licensed out to the UDK community, so long as they credit us for its use. But before it can do that, I have to make and in-game editor for it, and it needs a good cleanup, as well as some additional features.

So maybe one day I’ll finish it, and we’ll have a decent UI that we can work with on the UDK…

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.

A great way to start off a blog is with a good, meaty story. Well, how’s this for meaty; Rooks Keep gore!

Chess is a nice clean polite sort of thing, so natrually Rooks Keep, a game mostly about Chess, is brutally violent and completely drenched in blood and viscera.

So thats what I’ve been working on lately. I’m creating a set of decent preliminary gore effects and doing some crazy code shit to get them into the game and appearing in the right ways.
In Rooks Keep, we are using various types of gore effects. We’ve got particle effects, gib meshes, decals on surfaces and material effects on the characters (chess pieces). Each of these works differently, but they all work together to satisfy your gruesome appetites.
One difficulty when working on gore for this game is that there are severl different characters and they all have different weapons and attack styles. The pawn stabs his enemies with a spear, the rook smashes them with a hammer and the knight hacks away with a big old sword. There are also different death styles which every character needs to support such as decapitation, being stabbed and the horrific ‘bursting’.
Another major factor is that there is the possibility of custom chess sets which could have new types of blood. This means all these effects need to be organized and the code has to figure out what effects to play based on how that particular piece got attacked and killed. What we have now is register on each character that holds effects and has to choose the best effect to play based on the attack type. This system is still developing and changing as we add more effects.
With registration and selection sorted out on the code side, we also have to actually create all the effects for these different attack and death styles.

I’ll start with the particles. In Rooks Keep’s gore, their uses include:
-Blood splashes when weapons hit pieces
-Bleeding from injuries
-Blood dripping from weapons
-Slash blood sprays that result from slash weapons such as swords
-Gruesome decapitation sprays
-Gib drip trails
-Horrible explosive bursting

They can even be used for other less obvious effects. When combined with a depth masking technique implemented in the material, they can be used for efficient decals!

Sometimes to achieve some effects, particle systems are manipulated by code to produce dynamic results that fit the situation at that moment.
One example is with slash weapons where we make blood look like it was flicked by the swinging blade. The code determines the direction the weapon is swinging for the attack and then modifies the velocity of the particles to make the blood spray flick off in the same direction the weapon swings.

Well, that’s a start on the gore. Later on, I’ll cover more details and other aspects such as gibs and material effects.
As a matter of interest, do you think all this work necessary? Would you perhaps rather they had wooden swords and just lay down until the end of the match?

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.

At last, here it is in all its glory: the RuneStorm blog!
But be warned, it’s not just any blog, no it’s a blood-red blog! There was nothing we could do about this because the coloring is just a reflection of the inevitable blood thirsty nature and killer instinct of this evil blog. It’s a vicious beast I tell you!
So, watch out for it, because it will be on the prowl hunting for any interesting stories that can be strained from the RuneStorm development machine.

At the mercy of time, we’ll be posting updates and all kinds of interesting info here about our projects and about RS in general.

Here is one breaking story right now for a start: RuneStorm finally has a blog!
It’s the promise of more frequent updates from us, so keep your eyes peeled for the vicious blood-red RS blog.