Took this post from the official Afterworld forum. As for it looked Afterworld had almost ended this post seems very promissing. Enjoy reading all! You can find the original post here. Good news, everyone! But first, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anti A. Danilevski (yes, Anti is a real name) and I'm a game producer and game designer. I'm working in gamedev since 1995, as a game designer since 2000, as producer from 2008-2009. I've been working on russian titles, some of them were successful and in top popular, some weren't so good. Anyways, I've been invited to AfterWorld project as a consultant and to help AfterWorld survive. Our first meeting with Victor occured about 2 months ago and I had some time to think and explore the game before I made decision. I'm glad to inform you that I have accepted their invitation and I will try to push the development forward. During the last month I've been looking for candies money and, today, I'm happy to share the really good news: I managed to raise about $100k for the next stage of development. From november to december we will form a new company and do paperwork. From 15th january we will begin fullpower development. Still, we won't have a big team, but it will be enough to finish the evolution from the old game and old engine to Torque3D. What should you expect in the future: not much until March. We will be working on a server-side technology - server clusterizatoin - and, finally, we will finish seamless and continios world. After this, we will be able to spawn thousands of creatures and our servers won't lag/slowdown. Clusterization will also allow us to maintain more players, dynamically splitting servers to the small virtual parts when it is necessary, and each part will be handled by it's own server. Second very important, difficult thing is a streaming (client side). Thanks to it, we will be able to load huge files and other data in background - you won't even notice it. No more lags or freezes because you went somewhere and now need to wait until it's all downloads and unpacks. In combo with clusterization, those two systems will let us turn game into a smooth and stable, endless universe that can handle thousands of players. Those two things were (and still are) the most difficult obstacles that team have to solve before moving forward. Clusterization and streaming will be coded at in parallel, by our old team members and will be released at the same time (spring). But still, we plan to make the game a bit more interesting and good looking while our coders are working on low-level systems. First, we will implement new, beautiful characters. We have them already, we only need to finish animations and add them to the game. I can't say when it will happens because it will require some attention of our coders. But we will try to do it as soon as possible. Next, we will go through gameplay and starting locations, filling them with monsters and NPC's, buildings and other objects to make game more fun. We know that world seems a bit dead now, and we want to bring life to it. Also, we plan to tune controls a bit more, making it smoother and easier to understand for newbies. What will we do next, when money will finish? We will try to raise more funds on Kickstarter. We have a lot of devoted players who (we are sure) will support us. AfterWorld will bring attention of press and big gaming portals, because story of the game development is unique - I, personally, do not know any other game that started on enthusiasm, been developed for 7 (!!!) years just by a few developers, became home for so many players, almost died... but still fighting - and I'm sure will win, with our help. As soon as we finish low-level mechanics, we will be ready to go for Steam Greenlight. Steam will definitely bring new blood (a lot of it, actually) to the game. And, of course, if we will show good results this summer (from business point of view, of course), I'm sure I'll be able to find more money to hire more coders, artists and to begin PR, bringing new players and filling AfterWorld with life, buzz and firing! Stay tuned, ask your questions and greet the upcoming AfterWorld: Rebirth! And a small bonus: new quarantine zone and new character that we are working on (no visual effects on, though - screenshot from the engine). Hope you like it!
Hmm, does remind me a bit of the way Mindark communicates. Well EU has been developed for 10 years with just a few coders and the Humble Creator :D Serious note tho, seems promising, clear vision, not promising to bring instant perfection, etc. Guess we shall see next summer how things progress.
