Thallium Developer Blog

Alt's Developer Blog #15

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:33:43 +0000

Welcome again to another Alt's Development Blog post!

Thallium development steams on, though painfully slow. I hate the fact that I can't seem to concentrate on it, but I'm doing my best. Gravity (the human, not the force) and I have had many discussions at length about different aspects of the game recently, and things are moving forward. Yesterday, I finished up the basic code for the Hardware system and started heavily into the Software side of things. The code repository stands at revision 56 - so you can see there is progress. It's not vaporware, I promise!

One of the reasons the development is going to take so much time is the complexity of it. Well, at least part of it. Some things from DK3 have been drastically simplified while others have had their feature sets either expanded greatly or completely rewritten from scratch. This isn't to say that it'll be unrecognizable, however. A lot of the concepts and terms from DK3 will be carried over (yes, making Thallium at least a spiritual successor to DK3).

So, I again ask for your continued patience as we progress forward into what I believe will be an incredibly fun game. I cannot wait to show you folks what we've come up with, so I share your desire to see something. Soldier on, my good friends.

Stay tuned,
- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #14

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:43:12 +0000

Welcome to Alt's Developer Blog ~~#13~~ #14.

I know this post is catastrophically late, but that's how things go sometimes. No excuses, just info for you today.

Thallium development has been slow - but it has been there. We finalized the game design a while back and have now started work on the database schema. This shouldn't take too long, and then we'll be off to the races for actual code development.

Alt's Developer Blog #12

Thu, 22 May 2008 13:33:34 +0000

Welcome again to a terrifically late Developer Blog post!

Since it's been so long since I posted, I wanted to actually apologize for the delay this time around. I've had a rough few months and I'm finally starting to see things smooth out. I won't bore you with the details.

So, moving on. A few blogs ago, I mentioned that the core game design was finished. Well...kinda. You see, this is how game development happens. It's not a set-in-stone process where you know exactly where you're going when you start out, and exactly how you're going to get there. New ideas are constantly added and old ideas are constantly removed. The other night, Gravity and I committed to sitting down and talking about Thallium for a night. During that conversation, we looked at the hacking system first. We knew we had a working system, but not necessarily any immediate goals. In DK3, of course, you hacked to get nodes and cash. Since Tl doesn't have any nodes (ooo...spoiler?), we needed something else. We looked inward, towards the game world and the actual nature of hacking itself. Why does someone hack a computer? What purpose can it serve? We took those questions and came up with answers. Yes, answers - plural. Now, hacking won't entail "cash, nodes or both" as a decision, but rather be a dynamic path a hacker takes when they attempt to hack a system. You may not even know what your goals are until you're halfway through a hack. You may have an idea up front, but once you're in the fight you find yourself having to change plans. It's pretty exciting.

After that was ironed out, Gravity came up with an idea regarding software. I had originally tried to redirect new features and ideas, due to the game core being "finished". But this idea, I could not ignore. Needless to say, it completely turned software on its head. As with the hacking design, the new idea behind software makes it tremendously flexible and assists directly with the design of PYO. When I started detailing it in the dev wiki, I kept getting smacked upside the head with the same thought, over and over: "Wow, this is powerful...". I kept having ideas of things that enterprising players could do with it, and it was great. I definitely thing we'll move forward with it and see how it ends up.

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #11

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:30:53 +0000

Hello again, everyone.

This week's dev blog will cover a bit of the past few week's work. From the beginning of talking about developing a new game, we knew that we needed to put a lot of effort into the foundation of the game and the system it ran on. By system, I mean both hardware and software. Where the old Jaian system used to all run on one server, now we have five or so. Our hosting environment is much more stable and flexible and offers us more tools than we had before.

On the software side, we wanted to build a single-signon system for the periodicgames.com domain that would allow users to create one account and log into each and every one of our applications without a separate registration. Gravity took the reins on this one and roped in a very sweet SDK that allowed him to develop a stand-alone single-signon system with the existing forums userbase.

Details, of course due to security, are secret; but I can tell you that it kicks ass and is extremely secure. Using this authentication provider will allow us to develop in any language we want, but still do single-signon with the forums user accounts. While nothing is "unbreakable", let's just say that breaking this system would be "unfeasible".

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #10

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:49:16 +0000

Hello all, and welcome again to another very late Dev Blog.

I know it's been a while since I posted, but my age-old arch nemesis, Real Life™ has stepped in again and kicked me in the butt. I moved, then got really sick. Now, everything is starting to get back to normal - finally. And with that, I bring you an update on Thallium.

We've tried to lock ourselves down and get the game design finalized, but we all have such incredibly conflicting schedules that it's been very difficult. Throw into the mix my move and illness, and we've had to chat as much as we can piecemeal, here and there. But, we have progressed. Today, I rapped the gavel and declared the game core design as finished.

We have a tremendous amount of detail left to work out, but at least we know how the game itself will work from start to finish. This is a pretty big step for us, but it did bring up a few things that will probably make the game a bit more complex to develop than we originally thought. Bad for us, good for the players. When we started, we were doing it wrong, basically. We were trying to design a game. Turns out, what we needed to do - and have now done - is create a game system instead. And now, we've done that.

So, to sum up, we've made a pretty big step. Doing so allowed us to see just how friggin' big the staircase is - but we'll get there.

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #9

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:12:08 +0000

Because I'm in the process of moving, Thallium development is on a temporary hiatus. We'll return to normal operation next week, most likely.

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #8

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:27:46 +0000

Hello again, and welcome to another Alt's Developer Blog!

This week brings my sincere hopes that you all had a wonderful holiday season filled with family, presents, beer - whatever makes you happy. Amazingly, these last few weeks have seen a dramatic push forward in the planning for Thallium. The new internal wiki we started has really helped me to collate my thoughts. The new hacking system is almost finished. A few more coats of polish and an on-paper run-through should button it up. The importance of this step cannot be overstated. Once the hacking system is finalized, everything else will start to fall into place behind it. I learned quickly that all other parts of the game really depended on how the hacking system was designed. Since this will be a hacking game, every feature in the game either feeds from or supports the hacking part. As the hacking became more flexible and robust, it really took a lot of things we had designed for Beryllium and Tellurium and tossed them out the window. Out with the old - in with the new, right? On the one hand, that's painful to see a lot of work get discarded. On the other, however, now we're constantly realizing that the new system gives us opportunities to do just about anything we want. The previous designs were limited - this one is not.

Yesterday, I took a break from concept planning and started thinking about the design of the code base. While possibly premature, it was a nice diversion. I haven't talked much about the implementation of the code; most of my blogs have been about the game itself. For Thallium, I believe we'll be going with the brand-spanking-new .NET Framework 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 is an extremely powerful IDE and will increase the speed of development a hundred-fold over what we saw with DK3. The framework also offers us a tremendous amount of flexibility in how we develop. Before, I was the sole developer. DK3 was 99.9% written by me - with a few modifications and fixes by Gravity. VBScript running on the ASP platform was convoluted and hideous - but it worked. It was not, even in the slighted, object-oriented. Procedural code FTW, eh? Not really, no. I loved it at the time, but that's because I had no idea just how good things could be. This time, with the flexibility of .NET, my knowledge of VB and Gravity's knowledge of C-based languages can actually be used together. This could prove to be useful, if necessary.

We also have one pretty big thing under wraps for the code, but I can't reveal what that is yet - it's still very much in its infancy.

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #7

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:43:54 +0000

...a really slow freight train, but steaming along regardless.

This week has proven to be quite productive in the Thallium world. The hacking system is about 90% ironed out (gasp!). Trust me, I'm as shocked as you are. We buckled down and really nailed it. One idea after another kept rolling in, and soon we had a working prototype. The system (as it stands now - everything is subject to change) is very robust and extremely flexible. But, at the same time, it's super simple to grasp. Unlike DK3, this will actually make sense. Yay!

I've also spent a little time taking our disconnected documentation and putting it into a development wiki. No, it's not public and no, you can't have access. Sorry. This method should allow us to grasp the disturbing amount of documentation I've put together on this project. Once the game goes public, much of that content can and will roll into a public wiki - saving us a bit of time.

For a bit of perspective...

Some of you may be wondering why it's taking so long to develop this thing. Yes, we whipped DK3 out in just over a year. Well, frankly, it shows. DK3 - while fun and feature-complete - is not a "well" designed game. Much of it was created as it was being programmed. We wanted to play it so bad, we just couldn't wait until it was done. That's where the hard part comes in with Thallium. As the game sits now, I'd rather play it while getting a root canal than play DK3 while in bed with Jessica Biel. We're that excited about it. But, to make sure we don't have another DK3 fiasco, we're doing Thallium right. This means the game will be just about perfect before anyone even sees it. DK3 was rushed - again, because we wanted to share it so badly with everyone - so it was failing in a lot of areas. Thallium is, and will not be, rushed. DK3 used the first system we developed for hacking (a basic extension of the DK2.4 formula). Thallium's current hacking design is - and I'm just guessing here - about the fifth iteration. And I don't mean "improved" upon. I mean, complete forklift out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new. Totally new systems that don't even resemble each other have been swapped out many times. We've gone from an extension of the DK3 system through several others that implemented some of the requests we've had from players in the past: multiple firewalls, more strategic elements, more customization, more options. We've gone to hyper-realistic ways of depicting hacking that involved actual code breaking. Turned out to be too geeky. We visited methods that had the domain split up into layers that each had to be hacked in turn - which was interested, but far too complicated. In short (too late), we really have been trying everything we can think of.

For the current version (again, subject to change), we've gone back to the roots of why we're doing this in the first place. I grabbed material from pen-and-paper roleplaying books that depicted hacking. I looked at how other successful online hacking games did it. That's when we realized it had to be simple. Anything too complex would drive casual players away. But, it had to be more robust than DK3's system. I can't give details (of course), but rest assured - it's sweet.

Stay tuned,

- Alt

Alt's Developer Blog #6

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:26:57 +0000

Hello, and welcome again to another late Developer Blog. Real Life™ has again jumped in and kicked me in the shins, so I've not had a ton of time to sit down and write something. Just as I broke away to write this, in fact, I was trying to pound out the Thallium hacking system in my head.

As I've mentioned before, we want to take Thallium to a new level with regards to hacking. What we have done, instead, is completely rewrite the DK concept to conform to a new hacking model.

In comparison, DK3 looks like the Fisher-Price version.

I so wish I could reveal everything to you folks, but I promised myself I wouldn't. So, I'll try to give you an idea of what we're thinking, without revealing any details. In DK3, you had this mysterious "domain" that just kinda existed out there and people could beat on it. The term "loosely based on reality" probably doesn't even quite hold up for that one. We know that it's weak, and we intend to change that. I didn't think, going into the Thallium project, that so much of the game would hinge on getting the hacking system right. I always liked DK for the community, the multiplayer aspect and the constant management and tweaking of your 'deck and domain. The hacking seemed (and was, frankly) just tacked on with some chicken wire. With this, it was clear that we really needed to come up with a hacking system that knocked the ball out of the park.

First, a disclaimer. I've always told myself to avoid playing other multiplayer hacking games. I do this for plausible deniability. I can't be accused of stealing ideas if I didn't know they were there in the first place. I avoided Uplink and Slavehack - despite several people telling me to try it out to get ideas. I finally broke down and tried it. It was fun, for a few minutes - but it lacked any real staying-power, in my opinion. I did like the Hollywood-style hacking though. Slavehack, despite the "community" it had, was a great idea - just missing a bit of implementation and polish. Taking these experiences, I headed into the old skool. I checked out the Cyberpunk 2020 PnP RPG rules on hacking and fell in love. It mirrored a lot of my original vision of what DK was going to be. Their system is very simplified, however, to cope with the necessity of having to write things down and figure things out in your head. It's also missing a lot of detail, as that's left up to the game referee.

Our current version of the very-much-work-in-progress hacking system borrows heavily from the CP2020 version. Before any programming starts, however, it will look much different I'm sure. Moving away from a flat, lifeless model to a robust, choice-driven model will make hacking in Thallium an entirely new experience. You'll have decisions to make constantly, and often quickly. You'll have infinite strategies both on the offensive and defensive fronts. You will become more attached to your specific hardware and software, always tweaking to squeeze as much ability as you can.

I can't wait.

Stay tuned,
- Alt

Alt's "Mini" Developer Blog #5.5

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:10:21 +0000

Don't have a lot to share right now (hence the lack of updates). I can say that Grav and I have been working quite a bit on the concepts for the new hacking system. In the process of doing that, we're seeing a possible paradigm shift in the game. As it sits now, the end result of Thallium will not resemble DK. Pretty much at all.