Timeframe: circa 2007 – 2010
Position: Team Lead, Lead Engineer
Technologies: Torque3D, Torque2D, SQL, MySQL, C++, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Elbow Grease
Status: Demo was shopped around various publishers, never picked up.
The Story:
The story of Epic Frontiers is indeed epic! An MMORPG demo that myself and several other plucky artists and developers attempted to bring to life over a few years in the late 2000’s, Epic Frontiers was a space-opera themed MMORPG that allowed for all of the usual gameplay and customization, and then some. Conversational AI with NPCs who could remember individual players and roughly how their last conversations went. Procedural quest systems that also interfaced with the conversational AI. Improvised weapons and crafting systems that allowed for recipes to be created using substandard or superior components. Coop skills.
Torque3D by GarageGames made this task a lot easier, but alas, MMOs are hard to make by small teams, and a lot harder to make back then, with no budget.
However, we did get three zones running, slightly populated with a few mobs, multiplayer, persistent, and with some crafting, combat, and conversational features running. It was a feat, looked amazing- thanks to the artists- and attracted a bit of attention, in addition to giving a number of us experience enough to go on into the games industry.
With the rise of my development contracting, and the team moving on, development was halted, but Epic Frontiers was a massive moon-shot style project that tested everyone’s skills and leveled us all up. If I had the budget for it, I’d do it again, no question, no regrets.
Afterwards, I reused the Epic Frontiers theme for a roguelike experiment, and the conversational AI was spun out into a conversational AI product that very nearly made it into the Unity store.
