The Long Journey: "Savage Angel" Anry Narleyn

     Time runs fast and life passes through bringing new thoughts and changing views. Something that was interesting some time ago became forgotten. The mind craves for new ideas, realized in games, but there are really not so much places where they can be found. It's pity. Another year and other "new" games are out - new graphics, physics, some realism. But there are no new ideas in all these shooters, RPGs and RTS and I'm asking myself the same question - are they all really new? I'm getting a demo of certain new game, installing it onto my computer, trying to play and I'm getting bored in few hours. Time after time the story is the same.

     Not so long ago I saw some great games. Quite simple, without these overdone graphic effects and animations, quests and pre-scribed storylines. Their inner systems allow player to create his own worlds and his own stories, bounded only by his imagination and certain laws. One of them allow player to create something great, others also allows communications between multiple players, offering imposible and unique stories each time when player starts new game. Playing such games is not boring for me, and while I'm playing such games I'm thinking about what can I create. These thoughts are accumulating in my mind, are maturing and becoming finished conceptions.

     It impels me to create something new by my own hands and my own mind. So it was great for me to have Jod as my partner, because when we have first told our ideas to each other, we have saw that we have similar view of games, and we decided to realize our ideas learning, thinking and walking among this road. Let us see what we will achieve.

     Below you can read some information on my game developing background if someone interested.

     I had decided to log my experience that I get by developing and designing games and performing some experiments so I had created this blog. At the moment I'm working at two projects, which are the Andoran: Prologue, well-known add-on for The Elder Scrolls game; and the Shquarkz project that is organic nanocosmic multiplayer game.

     When I was a schoolboy I learned BASIC programming language (on really ancient computers), wrote some simple programs, drew pictures and even created simple games. At that moment I had not my own computer.

Screenshot from the TES3: Morrowind game.

In 2002 The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind was released. I saw this game in the first time 17 May 2003, when I was in the 10 grade, and I was really impressed with its huge world, rich features, interesting gameplay and quests. Also I was absorbed with its Construction Set. I tried to create my own world, locations and gameplay elements. I started to learn 3ds max to be able to create new 3d models and animations. Then I got access to the Internet. There I saw the Russian TES community and entered one of the modders team that worked on the Kagrenak's Sons mod. We had released the demo version of the mod and then it was closed. So I started my own project called the Battles of the Legionnaire. My team made a great progress, there were cool locations and quests but we could not finished it, because of TES4: Oblivion release.

There are some screenshots from the old (2005) and new (2011) versions of the Battles of the Legionnaire mod.

2005


Solitude castle.	Barrel of honey tavern in Solitude.	Battle at the Northern Fort.	Solitude street.

2011


Sun rises above the Red Mountain.	Ascadian isles.	Duke Vedam Dren's office.

Next page in my history is the Russian TES4: Skyrim mod with its truely rich history of useless arguments and revolutions. Between the argues in the team I learned C# and C++ programming languages including such libraries as XNA, DirectX API, OGRE and PhysX.
When we had all troubles settled down and when we had screened all the problem members we received an invite from the Vikart, the leader of the Andoran team. Some time ago we had talk about amalgamation of our two teams to work together first on the Andoran project and then on our Skyrim project. But as you can see, Bethesda Softworks had been developed TES5: Skyrim since TES4: Oblivion release date. So our Skyrim's design groundwork, sketches and artwork were used in the Andoran. Here are some of them.