Hit the jump for some pictures!

This is what Akarra looked like back then (screenshot from pre-release 3, May 2002):

This is what Akarra looked like at the end of 2003:

Here’s a pic of thewreck and Kinten  from the summer of 2006:

… and a picture of me and thewreck:

You can read more about Whispers in Akarra in its blog category!

/ jeb_

PS: There are still some active shards where you can play Akarra! Check out www.akarra.com.  /Kinten

When Quake 3 Arena was released, almost ten years ago, I was still playing QuakeWorld with my clan “Underscore.” I didn’t really like Q3A, I thought it was slow and the player movement was bulky. I started working on a mod to get some more QW-like flow, which I called “QWFix.” It was a fun experiment, but I had some severe bugs which made it unplayable for some people (Q3A’s movement code was FPS dependant, a fact that caused some controversy when people discovered the “125 FPS sweet spot” a year later or so).

My dedication to the mod led me to another project called Challenge Pro Mode. It was a mod intended to be used by professional Q3A players and was created by a group of people from the Challenge Network (all sites in the network are now either porn sites or spyware search engines). I joined the team as a programmer, and worked mainly on improving the HUD and adding customizable player colors (a feature that seems to be default in the latest patch of Q3A). I also enjoyed making maps to test some ideas.

One of the maps I made was called “Realm of Steel Rats.” I made it during two weeks more or less spending every wake moment in front of the computer. I got severe pains in my shoulder and missed an exam due to that, but it was clearly worth it. The map turned out really well and is still played actively to this day! The map has received a face-lift by Swelt (sorry, but I do not know who that is), so the official version is now called “CPM4a.” You find both the original and the new version at Challenge-TV.

Now… the reason why I’m writing this tl;dr post is because there are a few things I recall that I thought about when I designed the map. These ideas are mainly focused on deathmatch maps, a game mode that has fallen out of fashion over the years, but may still be applicable to other design areas:

• Imbalance means Interesting – Maps should have one good and one not so good area. Making all areas too balanced will make gameplay “unstable.” Put several important items relatively close to each other, but it must be possible to break the siege.
• Symmetry for teh Loes – Simply avoid symmetry, it’s uninteresting. These days most people are making teamplay maps (CTF, King of the Hill etc), which makes it more important to have balanced maps. To make these maps more varied, rotated symmetry is better than mirrored symmetry.
• Important Stuff should be Easy to Get – Place important items, such as powerups, in hot-spot areas that are easy to get to. It allows for much more intense battles. I really don’t like it when people places the Quad or Battlesuit out of reach, such as down in water pools or high up on a pillar etc.

So… I guess the final punch line of this blog post is that I was happy to see that people were still playing my map! I especially enjoyed the description of the new CPM4a map:

CPM4a – Realm of Steel Rats – CPM TDM map Khaile’s original CPM4 ranks amongst the most played custom teamplay maps ever. Popular in both vQ3 and Challenge ProMode, the Realm of Steel Rats has been used in competitions the world over and hosted countless classic showdowns. This CPM4a remix by swelt replaces the shiny sci-fi texture set with a dirtier industrial set, bringing the visual look of the map bang up to date.

/jeb

EDIT: In case you’re wondering why it says “Khaile’s original CPM4,” it’s because “Khaile” was my old nick before I grew tired of people calling me “Kylie”

It all stared a time long ago, in the age of the Amstrad. His father had just sold the tape-version in favor of a diskette version! Oh the joy of basic 1.0 – Many text adventures and fake operating systems later thewreck felt ready to take on his first sprites – and on what system you ask?

On the Atari of course! This is where he made his first acquaintance with Clickteam through their game making environment STOS. It came complete with a lovely scripting language and a sprite editor! In it he made many feeble attempts including the legendary ninja game where the shuriken was on the same sprite as the character (what was he thinking really?)…

With years he grew wiser and 8 years old he now moved on to the amazing PC with its super quick – yes you know it – Quick Basic! The colorful random lines applications were numerous – and to this day he continuous to blame the movie Real Genius for it. A couple of Pong clones, yet another fake operating system and a couple of viruses to harass his brother he was now finally ready for the turning point of his career; K&P.

Thewreck can still remember the days… The good old Klik&Play days when dodgy physics and clip-art graphics was all you needed to have a fun game. It was simpler times, times when conversations such as these did not seem odd:

X – “Do you want to play with me after school?”

thewreck – “Do you have a computer?”

X – “No”

thewreck – “Then no.”

It was also at this point in time that he developed his life-long skill of never completing a single game – the alluring “new” button was far sexier than the “open” button it had seemed. To thewreck’s dismay, very few games remain from this time. About half of them are missing in action since the “I MUST install Descent and I need 35mb of space!” incident. The other half is simply missing – God knows where. He takes comfort in that they will forever seem more wonderful in his head than they would ever have done in reality.

After an age of fun, The Games Factory appeared on the scene. It was revolutionary. I mean – SCROLLING! You could make scrolling games! And INI FILES! You could save game data on the hard drive!!!11. It was also around this time that he, forcefully learned to sprite. To this he owed two dudes both named Jakob who electrocuted him each time he reached for the infamous library graphics. This produced classics such as: (Following games are Windows only!) “Bilen som Hoppar” (The Car that Jumps, Warning: Contains pixel nudity!), “Superman“, “No Way Out 1″, “No Way Out 2” (with lots of stolen graphics from a very famous K&P game, and a Chainsaw!), “Mage Batle“, “Bowman“, “Jippis” (a gruesome street kicking ass game) and “Orc” (platform rpg) among others. Thewreck takes no responsibility for understanding how to play these games.

This was a time of learning – a time of getting to know the medium. He learned many valuable lessons such as keeping the amount of buttons to a minimum, giving proper feedback, informing the player of what to do and drawing less naked angels in favor of proper characters. In retrospect, its easy to tell which things thewreck liked to focus on. Presentation and Explanation surely were not among them. But all that was about to change when MultiMedia Fusion entered the house!… Or was it?

Sites like the Vitalize Arcade (now called V-Cade) and the Daily Click were providing a showroom for everyones creations. Thewreck started to get involved with game creation teams online and spent a good bit of time in the #k&p channel on IRC. He ventured into terra incognita by making networked multiplayer games and also got his first contact with Jens by hopping on the “Whispers in Akarra” project. This was the beginning of a great age, but it is also where this part of the story ends. To give you a glimpse of the coming story, here follows a sneak preview:

/thewreck

Dawn of Daria is a dear project to us, and it’s interesting to see how it has affected Oxeye Game Studio and the development of our games. This story goes back to 2001, when I was living in Stockholm and working for Oblivion Entertainment…

In September 2001 I began writing down the first ideas for a game that would become “Whispers in Akarra.” If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a 2D online role-playing game with simple (but charming!) graphics. Akarra.net is being built to act as a portal for everything Akarra-related.

In any case, this game would – like many projects do – grow, peak and decline. The most talented team members of Akarra, thewreck and Kinten, wanted to make their own game when Akarra failed. They had access to the game’s source code and began working on Dawn of Daria. With this they became – regardless if they liked it or not – the inofficial sequel to Akarra. The community was quite active for a year or so.

Some time later I decided to allow people to use the Akarra server and game tools, and a number of shards were started. This spawned an interesting time of intrigues and conflict, which wasn’t exactly helped by the fact that I later sold the source code to one of these projects. During this time Dawn of Daria also became an Oxeye Game Studio project. There were many reasons for this, but thewreck was already an Oxeye member and I wanted to help developing Daria, so it felt natural.

I will write some articles about these projects and the people behind them. Since I haven’t met most of these people in real life, the information I have about them is based on hearsay and rumours, so please let me know when I’m mis-informed on a subject. Click on the timeline to the right to view the timeline in full scale. Who said time is a straight line?

/jeb