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[Alex Norton]

Hello all! We're back and have come a VERY long way with the project!

To fill you in, in case you haven't heard of it before, Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox has been in development now for three years and is a grid-based first person RPG (like Might & Magic, Wizardry, Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder back in days long gone) however, Malevolence brings this gameplay style into a more modern setting with better graphics, high quality sound and music and one very unique feature that sets it apart from other games...

The entire in-game world is procedurally generated and infinite, including all items, quests, weapons, armour, spells, dungeons, towns, even dialogue. Not only is it infinite, but it's persistent, and persistent across everyone's PC. You can travel a billion miles, find a particular place and share its location with a friend and they will be able to find it, also.

While not a multiplayer title, there are online components such as item sharing, location claiming and more. We're about to go live with our beta and once it's out there, regular updates will keep more features coming.

So, without further ado, here are some screenshots of the game:









And I'm fairly sure TigSource doesn't allow YouTube embedding, but here are some great YouTube links:







Let's Play Video 2
Let's Play Video 3
Art Showcase
Music Showcase

If you're interested, you can read and see more about the game at our Official Site, or join the growing community on our Forum.

In the meantime, if you could take the time to give us your vote on our Steam Greenlight page, that would also be much appreciated!

Thanks for taking the time to check us out!

[baconman]

Heard of it about a week back, through various sources, and I've been following what I can of it since then. It's great to see that it'll have a DevLog here, because it's the kind of development that eventually I'd like to branch into; just on less of a turn-based level, and by mix-matching different playstyles and settings/themes with.

A ways down the road from my current short- and long-term projects, but I'm very interested in what ways you formulate stuff like your characters, dialogue, and dungeons/quests. My present schema is by making variations of character archetypes that are influenced by fighter games' fighting styles, MegaMan Robot Masters, and popular gaming protagonists. Also, rather than typical biomes, I was going to seed a variety of popular game settings; from ancient ruins to haunted mansions/castles to alien spaceships and undersea palaces.

I'd love to see what makes this click, and to contribute to it as well. b Best of fortune to you.

[jamesprimate]

 

wow, this looks incredible. really looking forward to watching this develop!

[kamac]

We know eachother from thegamecreators' forums already  .

I check your game's blog every day  :toastR:. There's some interesting things you write there.
 Also, your game inspired me to do this (Read: Start learning world generation). Thanks for that.

Besides, your game's looking very nicely and I think you should put it up on steam when it's ready.

[sept]

I am digging that Diablo font for the UI.

[agersant]

I thought the UI and Diablo font looked very amateur-ish but the whole thing is very impressive overall. Good job so far !

[Alex Norton]

Thanks for the feedback guys! Unfortunately the font (not the Diablo font, but similar) is only temporary until we get the offical game font made. Everything you see is still quite heavily in development!

@kamac - hey man! Long time no talk!

[Alex Norton]

Just put up a new blog post, for anyone interested.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/malevolence-the-sword-of-ahkranox/news/yours-is-the-world-and-everything-in-it

I'm gearing up to do a big Q&A post soon, so if anyone has any questions they'd like me to answer on it, let me know!

[JigxorAndy]

This looks gorgeous! It's got a real spooky atmosphere in the video in all the darkness. For the combat, it would be cool if the camera shook when you got hit by a monster, and maybe when you hit them too! Keep it up!

[Alex Norton]

Yeah, we thought so too! It's been added in since that video was recorded. We really need to record some new videos!

Thank you for the praise 

[Alex Norton]

Over the past week we've been fielding questions from the public about the game, the team and our thoughts on certain game topics. Today we've compiled them all into one big Q&A post. Here it is for your reading enjoyment!

http://swordofahkranox.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/your-answers.html

[Alex Norton]

Just in case you missed the blog post, I thought I might point this out here.

This is a top-down large map view of a small section of Malevolence's in-game world:



See that inland sea?



That sea, my friends, is roughly the size of the entire in-game world of Skyrim. Mmmhmm. We're not lying. And remember, this image is only showing a small fraction of Malevolence's in-game world of Ahkranox. The game world is INFINITE. It goes on forever.

Just so you know...

[Franklin's Ghost]

That's sounding really impressive. Will be keeping my eye on this project.

[ZAHZERA]

This game looks so rad can't wait til it's released.

[Alex Norton]

Thanks for the praise guys. Going to be doing a solid week of 3D asset creation over the upcoming Easter break (I've taken a week off from my day job) so hopefully I'll have some sweet overworld gameplay footage to show you all.

[BlueSweatshirt]

So, how does this game manage to sustain an infinite world scope? Do you escape the computational limits a game like Minecraft faces by localizing the world around the player and dynamically loading/unloading parts of the world as the player roams about? But surely that would come with theoretical computational limits too, unless you were to forsake storing data like whether a player opened a chest in a dungeon and such.

[Netsu]

So, how does this game manage to sustain an infinite world scope? Do you escape the computational limits a game like Minecraft faces by localizing the world around the player and dynamically loading/unloading parts of the world as the player roams about? But surely that would come with theoretical computational limits too, unless you were to forsake storing data like whether a player opened a chest in a dungeon and such.

I once planned to do a truly infinite world. You can divide the world into fragments, each of them would have it's local coordinate system stored in your favourite data type. But the fragment offset would be remembered in bignum data type, which puts no theoretical limit on the number of fragments (which could work like chunks in Minecraft, but could be much, much bigger).
The world would be generated procedurally but deterministically, and you would never store the world data (except for the players surroundings), you would only store CHANGES that were made to the deterministic shape of the world. As those would always be finite there is no theoretical limit to the size of the world and the only practical limit is how much the player wants to change the world. But I doubts this limit would be a problem with today's hardware.

Wow... quite a shameless offtopic I pulled off here 

[Alex Norton]

So, how does this game manage to sustain an infinite world scope? Do you escape the computational limits a game like Minecraft faces by localizing the world around the player and dynamically loading/unloading parts of the world as the player roams about? But surely that would come with theoretical computational limits too, unless you were to forsake storing data like whether a player opened a chest in a dungeon and such.

Actually, we had problems with it at first, and we had planned to make the game just be really REALLY big (like Minecraft or Daggerfall) but ended up stumbling onto the solution by accident.

We only generate the world around the player at any given time using our custom procedural algorithms using their X, Y and Z co-ordinates in the world (so as to make sure the world stays persistent) but we then add a fourth dimension - a time coefficient. That way certain elements of the world change with the flow of time, but none of it needs to be kept up with in memory as it is generated by the algorithm like everything else.

There IS a certain amount that is cached (recently explored locations, chest contents, etc) however, as time passes and distance is gained between the player and the item in question, it resets back to an "unused" state, and is thus forgotten about until it is re-generated by the algorithms, but this time with a new time coefficient to make it a little different.

With this method, we can travel infinite distances and only ever have to maintain a cache database that is around 200MB at any given time.

Does that make sense? Sorry, I'm kind of bad at explaining what goes on in my head...

We have it all working in simulations. Currently we're just going through and making a game out of it haha

[BlueSweatshirt]

No, that made perfect sense.  (and was very close to what I was thinking)

The idea of limited caching is pretty cool. I guess that's also sort of a natural way to make content(like chest contents) repopulate over time.

Also the idea of time! Do you plan on holding time on a server, so that everyone gets the same generated world and the world is constantly changing for everyone, or will it be local relative to when the player started the game?

[Alex Norton]

At the moment, relative to the player, but storing it on a server wouldn't be a bad idea... Be a bit of a pain to maintain though lol