Remember I am always willing to hear constructive feedback, but not rude comments. I have allowed comments on this post only.

It shows the players levels in 3 categories.

1. Faith

2. Health

3. Energy/Power

Also a horizontal Compass for navigating.

Originally I had a more complex HUD, but the gamers who reviewed it found it distracting. So many other info fields/icons have been moved to the inventory screen. So this simplified HUD is what should work for everyone.

www.tribulationknights.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Christian Video Game Tribulation Knights™ to be released Q2 2010

The open world game can be played in both the first and third person point of view. The player must use non-lethal weapons in the course of completing missions. This makes the game much harder than typical action games.

ST. LOUIS, MO Dec 28, 2009 –
Tribulation Knights™ is a video game for the PC, the first installment is to be released in Q2 of 2010.

It was written, produced, and developed by John Nelson. It is an entirely indie effort to develop a game for gamers who may or may not be religious. The story line is based on Biblical interpretations of the book of Revelations.

What Technology is being used?
The game series is being developed using the Torque Game Engines from Garage Games.
The first installment is using TGEA, and the following installments are using the new T3D engine.
The Bullet Physics engine is being used, along with the FMOD Ex sound system which is a revolutionary audio engine.

Gameplay
The open world game can be played in both the first and third person point of view. The player must use non-lethal weapons in the course of completing missions. This makes the game much harder than typical action games. The player is tasked with obtaining food, medical supplies, salvageable materials, and enemy intelligence. In addition there are missions to rescue rebel citizens from thugs, and Enforcers. Maintaining a level of faith is necessary since the events
of these apocalyptic times can be dishearting. This requires the player to find a house of worship to bring the faith levels up after spending time engaging the enemy.

What is the story plot of the game?
The plot of the game is that in the not too distant future a variety of disasters hit at the same time throwing the planet into turmoil. Millions of people are dead in only a short time.
A deadly virus kills quickly as the economies of all countries fail in days, famine hits leaving everyone starving in weeks.
Now chaos rules as people fight to live and survive.

A single politician and his allies gain control of the world, and recruit everyone who will join them to restore order. He promises food and shelter, and protection, so many abandon their allegiance to their countries and join. They will be fed, and taken care of, but they will be required to be chipped.
This is the integration of a bio adhering technology that permanently modifies a person.
At that point they are forever tracked, monitored, and controlled.
Their Brain functions actually change along with their DNA, and it is irreversible.
These converts are no longer the people they once were.
The process will only work on willing subjects.

Those people who refuse to become a member of this new society fighting to control everything, are labeled rebels. The rebel citizens are not allowed to buy, or sell food, own a home, or receive the protection of the new police force, only known as Enforcers.
A secret group of extraordinary people who recruit the best agents send them out to help people. They are known as Knights.
These Knights must gather intelligence, retrieve supplies, and protect the innocent.
The code of the Knights forbids them from killing, but they do have a variety of technological devices to defend themselves with.
In the game they interview refugees who all have different opinions about what is happening to the world. Some believe it was the rapture that took so many people away, others believe it was a coordinated attack by a organization with the goal of world domination.
The knights move in the shadows of alley ways in the cities, they are in the country side protecting farms from plunder, and they are taking refugees to safe zones where they can be free people for as long as they can.

The life of a Knight is not long, but it will be a glorious life spent in the service of God, country, and in service to those around them.

Release Date:
A Q2 2010 release date has been announced. The exact day will be posted in the near future.

About Atomic Design Laboratory:
The interactive entertainment developer Atomic Design Laboratory is a startup founded by John Nelson. The company is located in the Midwest United States in the St. Louis metropolitan area.

Email contact: jnelson@atomicdesignlab.com

Website:
http://www.tribulationknights.com

###

It was written, produced, and developed by John Nelson. It is an entirely indie effort to develop a game for gamers who may or may not be religious.

What Technology is being used?
The game series is being developed using the Torque Game Engines from Garage Games.
The first installment is using TGEA, and the following installments are using the new T3D engine.
The Bullet Physics engine is being used, along with the FMOD Ex sound system which is a revolutionary audio engine.

What is the story plot of the game?
The plot of the game is that in the not too distant future a variety of disasters hit at the same time throwing the planet into turmoil.
Millions of people are dead in only a short time.
A deadly virus kills quickly as the economies of all countries fail in days, famine hits leaving everyone starving in weeks.
Now chaos rules as people fight to live and survive.
A single politician and his allies gain control of the world, and recruit everyone who will join them to restore order.
He promises food and shelter, and protection, so many abandon their allegiance to their countries and join.
They will be feed, and taken care of, but they will be required to be chipped.
This is the integration of a bio adhering technology that permanently modifies a person.
At that point they are forever tracked, monitored, and controlled.
Their Brain functions actually change along with their DNA, and it is irreversible.
These converts are no longer the people they once were.
The process will only work on willing subjects.

Those people who refuse to become a member of this new society fighting to control everything, are labeled rebels.
The rebel citizens are not allowed to buy, or sell food, own a home, or receive the protection of the new police force, only known as Enforcers.
A secret group of extraordinary people who recruit the best agents send them out to help people. They are known as Knights.
These Knights must gather intelligence, retrieve supplies, and protect the innocent.
The code of the Knights forbids them from killing, but they do have a variety of technological devices to defend themselves with.
In the game they interview refugees who all have different opinions about what is happening to the world.
Some believe it was the rapture that took so many people away, others believe it was a coordinated attack by a organization with the goal of world domination.
The knights move in the shadows of alleyway in the cities, they are in the country side protecting food stores, and they are taking refugees to safe zones where they can be free people for as long as they can.

The life of a Knight is not long, but it will be a glorious life spent in the service of God, country, and in service to those around them.

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

– John 3:16 (KJV)

]]> http://tribulationknights.com/archives/95/feed 0 http://tribulationknights.com/archives/88 http://tribulationknights.com/archives/88#comments Sat, 26 Dec 2009 21:46:51 +0000 Producer http://tribulationknights.com/?p=88 I have been hard at work on Chapter One after taking a break for a while.

Now looking at everything with fresh eyes, work is progressing quickly toward a release of the first chapter. All work on the other chapters will cease until the first is released.

Here is a sneak peak of the food store in Bunker town. Since food is in short supply, food is the number one item for all consumers! Funny how starvation changes peoples priorities. Keeping up with the Jones is not as important as feeding what family you have left.

The future is not as fun and shiny as we would like. Read Revelations and find out for yourself.

Bunker Town store selling food

I have started porting all the code and models over to the new  T3D 1.0.1 engine. The rendering looks fantastic, and to prove it here is a snapshot with several evil Enforcers. The environment was created by a 3rd party, and it looks great. These new environments will make the natural environments look realistic. The new T3D engine does a nice job of rendering and it can be seen when you compare what everything looked like only a few months ago.

Once the porting is complete, we should be able to release a technical demo.

It will be used for testers to check the frame rates and rendering abilityof the game  on their home computers, and send that information back to me.

Click on the image below to see it full size.

The Tribulation Knight’s game technology rendering can be photo-realistic if so desired. The new Torque 3D renderer, includes per-pixel dynamic lighting, normal and parallax occlusion mapping, and much more. Lighting can support hundreds of lights and global real-time dynamic shadowing on every object.

I have to tear myself away from it so I can finish the current Tribulation Knights.

TK Models in T3D Engine

The image above demonstrates the high quality of the rendering capabilities of the new engine. I recreated the terrain from chapter one, in the T3D engine in only minutes.

A level building comparison:

The roads I built in chapter one using the TGEA 1.1.7 engine took me a long time because of the pain to line up the road pieces.  Even then I had to tweak the terrain so that the road would look correct when laying on the surface. Time it took, at least 4 Hours.

In T3D I have the capability to lay down roads, or paths using a spline technique. After adding them I can go back and tweak the path, and alignment. Time it took, only 30 minutes.

An indie developer has to watch the bottom line on every purchase, and I admit I did debated over this decision. The discount I received for being an early adopter,  and a existing TGEA licensee helped me with the cost. The actual results I receieved when using each beta interation has proved to me that it was worth the investment of my money and time. I am so excited about using it on Tribulation Knights, but at the time of writing this it is only up to Beta version 4. Only once it has reached a full release version will I consider jumping to it. The reason why is that I have to convert my code to each version of the code, and that takes time. Each change and modification would need to be moved from a previous version to a new version of the code. That takes a lot of time, troubleshooting, and bug fixes. I want to avoid that and wait for the full release. Once that happens, expect to see more screenshots and videos of TK conversion tests.

Go over to the Garage Games website and check out the engine for yourself.

http://www.garagegames.com

Since the first unamed engine technology I used in Tribulation Knights was terribly behind in development, it was impacting the completion of my game.

So I switched engine technologies to the Garage Games “TGEA” Torque Game Engine Advanced.

This is a difficult thing to do in the middle of an active project! It has cost me a lot of time and money to do so. The models had to be converted to another model type. Many textures had to be modified. Scripts had to be written in a new language that I did now at the time. The overall look of the game changed with a new rendering system. Then that engine changed as new versions were developed. Bugs would be fixed, and new ones would be discovered. 3rd party code was licensed and then programmed into the new engine and game code base. Slowly but surely the game foundation was strong and the development of the fun stuff could continue. Tribulation Knights was a massive game that became too big. So I decided to break it up into episodes. This reduced the size of the download considerably. Breaking the game up into chunks made it easier to focus only on a particular location and characters, which is easier for me since I had massive maps all in development at the same time. The game is coming together finally, and I am not as overwhelmed with the new scope. I hope anyone reading this will be pleased with the new look of the game as compared to the original 2007-2008 version. This new 2008-2009 version is really a new take on my original story.

I hope you enjoy reading my development blog as I work on completing TK Episode 1, and move on to the other episodes already partially completed and awaiting completion.