Alpha Test: www.imperialages.net

Report bugs: www.imperialages.com/forums

Latest announcements: www.imperialages.com/blog

Well, it’s been a pretty cool ride so far. 38 players registered in these first 12 hours of the alpha test, with an average of 50-60 page views each.

First thing that made us laugh our ass off, we opened registrations and the server was sending the wrong activation links. Talk about irony. Worked perfectly for us, so no idea what the problem is yet. We took the activation out for now, so people could register.

The game is in speed round mode right now, which means that everything happens 33 times faster then normal. So you’ll see more resources coming your way then what the sidebar is reporting, buildings and units are trained very fast, and all attacks take 1 minute to reach the enemy.

Until I finish the tutorial, you can download the xls files (need Excel) for the building tree and the game units, with costs, attack, defense values, and so on.

Here are the download links (left click to download):

Download Game Building Tree – Excel File

Download Units Details – Excel File

If you don’t have Microsoft Office and Excel, you can download a free Excel Viewer here.

Most reported problems so far:

  • login/registration pages don’t display right on Linux
  • some people have problems using Opera because it uses the cache, and doesn’t always take the latest version of the images from the server
  • messages page is not done yet, so it gives an error and everyone thinks its a bug. Nope, it’s just missing.
  • spelling errors. We’ll fix them in the next few days, because it bothers people, though it’s the smallest of our problems right now.
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It’s buggy, not finished, but since we delayed it enough already, it’s launched!

www.imperialages.net is the location of the alpha test for Imperial Ages

Please keep in mind that this is a test and there is a lot of small and big stuff that needs adjusted, repaired or added. Use the Imperial Ages Forums or the Report a bug feature in the game to report any bugs, ask questions or give some extra ideas of what you’d like to see.

You can contact me at alex@imperialages.com with any questions.

Right now you can mostly do buildings and troops. All the buildings take about 5 minutes to complete for each level, because the times aren’t done yet.

Enjoy, and please let us know what you think and what you’d like improved in the game for the final version. This is the reason of the alpha test after all. Knowing what you like and what you don’t, finding all the bugs, correcting grammatical errors that we might’ve overlooked.

Update:

If you have problems with the account activation, please leave a comment below with the username and we’ll activate it manually. It seems that there is a problem but we can’t replicate it yet.

We took out the mail activation until we can fix it.

Also, the login/registration looks horrible on Linux. Hopefully we’ll fix it in the next few days.

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Some updates on the game:

The graphic is 95% complete. This means that we have all the buildings necessary for the game, the resource map, walls, troops icons, buttons(most of them), etc.
The village zone was a bit difficult to design and implement and most of the delays came from here. The guy we hired to design the resource zone had a few headaches until he managed to create the zones just as I wanted. Basically the resource page delayed us almost 2 weeks. Another week and a half was needed to design all the buildings necessary in the game. Again, the designer had a hard time pleasing me but in the end the buildings came out looking really nice.

Most of the pages of the game are complete and only need a few modifications like colors, alignments, font size, grammatical errors, mostly minor changes. We still need to implement some ideas and some features of the game, the most important one being the VIP feature. The forum needs a few modifications as well. I managed to complete the forum theme so that both the game and the forum have similar colors. There are a few images to create like a few buttons and icons but again nothing spectacular or time consuming.

The alliance is far from over and this complicates the things a little bit. It should be done by the time we officially launch the game but our main concern is that we won`t have enough time to test it. There are a lot of small things that needs to be done in the next weeks, but at least now we have a version for testing purposes. YES, for the past 2 days we’ve been testing a version of the game to see if the most important things in the game(trades, attacks, resources gathering) are working as they should. This means that in a few days ( the date depends on many factors like the number of really annoying bugs we find), we`ll launch the official alpha test.

We are happy to see that after months of work we finally have something that looks like a game and not like a bad joke. The next blog update will probably be with the announcement of the launch date.

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The game should be up and running either tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. We’ll play with it for a few days to take out the more obvious bugs and we’ll launch the open alpha test a few days after that (21-24 September). Sorry for the delay, couldn’t be avoided.

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Graphics

We got a designer working on the resource/village area and on the buildings. He’s working in 3D and so far we like how it turns out. Obviously, the buildings will be very small in the game, but I thought you’d appreciate the large version in detail. Here’s the Barracks building as a small preview.

barracks

The test version

Probably a few days after the designer finishes the village graphics we’ll launch the open test game. That would mean 10 days from now or maybe 2 weeks. It will be a bug hunting version, so don’t expect a fully working game. I’m secretly hoping that we’ll finish with the test in 3-4 weeks so we can launch officially in October, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Forums

Mars is working on modifying a free VBulletin template to look the same as the game when it comes to colors and buttons and he’s almost done. Just a bit more work on some buttons but it’s 99% done. Here’s a preview of the forums in case anyone is interested to see how they’ll look like.

imperial-ages-forums

For Totte

Don’t know if you saw my reply in the Contact page while we had the old theme so I thought I’d post here. That free WoW theme we tried was legal as far as I know, because they were using graphics given by WoW creators for fan sites. Still, it didn’t worked well having a theme from another game for our blog, so I changed it. Unfortunately this theme doesn’t show comments on pages, just on articles, so I don’t know if you saw my reply there before we changed it. So, I replied here.

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Alex /

Hi guys. The intro story of the game is somewhat finished and was done by a friend of ours that has better english skills then us .Some minor tweaks will be made in the next few days to make it a bit more readable (adding a few more commas where they’re needed and other minor tweaking). If you got some time to read and the mood for it, I’d appreciate an opinion on the story below :

 

 

Prologue

The world has changed. Under the heavy hand of history, land is changing its shape, people are changing their thoughts and words are changing their meanings. An older concept is being brought back to life: power – the measure of all things.

The same reason and force that once made people unite – creating tribes at first, large armies later – is now tearing families apart. Power makes a man gain a class, a place in existence’s vast memory; this is the best way for winning an identity.

For people are the weakest, when the illusion of power becomes their psychosis and the imaginary becomes their first nature. They become vampires – not the legendary ones – seeking a blood that gains the view of each one’s desire and they would joyfully give their lives for that purpose. In the altar in which Evil had made its moves onward world domination through swords and fire, there are also named the humans chosen to make this possible.

The Ancient Stones speak in great silence of an alliance of brave men, Fate of the Rose, ruled by four brothers that, hundreds of years ago, kept the flag of freedom against obedience to the tyrants of the world, the emperors of the Dark Empire. The alliance was flawless, for the spiritual dimension of its leaders were all the pieces needed for a glorious omnipresence: the Trader – well developed capacity of weighting not only goods, but also situations and a precise sense of numbers; the Priest – strong in his beliefs, caretaker of the beliefs of people seeking advice and direction; the Warrior – courageous and very skillful in battle, he enclosed within himself the knowledge of weapons; the last one is the Barbarian – resembling in some ways the Warrior, he was endowed with great physical strength and great impact over the enemies, due to his numerous armies, attacking with rage and lust for glory. These were the four element of a powerful mechanism that stood in chaos and anarchy’s way for years.

In their last great victory against human evil, they heard of a relic with great power, the Scepter of Ur, an artifact that could unite and disunite humans under a sole commandment. Right before the alliance got to the last bastion of the Dark Empire, one of the Dark Lords displaced the Scepter in four pieces and buried them in four corners of the world. Assuming that the destruction of this instrument will guard peace and freedom, the four brothers departed, one in each corner of the four.

After finding them, one after another, the brave knights succumbed to the desire of being for themselves rulers of the peace and freedom they desired. They have settled in each corner they looked for the components of the scepter and gave birth, from their own inner spark, on the one hand, to four great kingdoms: The Papal State, The Hanseatic League, Valachia and the Mongol Empire and, on the other hand, to an irreversible separation between them.

Old family ties are forgotten, ideas and feelings are put behind and the Four are now in quest for ultimate power but, unlike other times, for their own. Because none of them wanted to unite their kingdoms by will, a war is now imminent. The only good thing – but an expensive one – the war and the wish for more ever brought is evolution. Civilizations were forged and conquered inside war rooms, a certain kind of competition developed between opposite sides, making them climb higher on the scale of human life complexity. As time passes, the four kingdoms get bigger, stronger, they develop new standards of living and fighting and they permanently search for more.

The Scepter of Ur cannot be assembled, since none of the four leaders would give up his piece. But it has been heard of other relics which, found and put together, would give great mystical power to the bearer. Alas, no matter of how great that power can be or get, it does not last forever. And everyone seems to know that, because their kingdoms are getting prepared for war.

As this story is about to end and as reality is about to be unleashed to decide upon the fate of its participants, these words are mystified and enwrapped in an aura of auspicious times. The Ancient Stones are still the ones to observe and memorize the events to come…

Thus, the hunt for power begins!

 

PS: anyone got talent in voice acting or a nice voice like Leonidas from the movie 300? There are no money involved unfortunately, only our gratitude and a free VIP account for life. We’re thinking of an audio intro to the game in addition to the text, so that’s why I’m asking.

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Alex /

And now, just to be on the safe side and to make sure Raywall and Mars don’t strangle me, two of the four most valuable members of our team are on vacation, and working on the game.

Mars is on a 1 week vacation, with 1 extra week when we launch the game. Raywall is on a 2 week vacation and no idea if he’ll manage to get 1 more for the official launch.

What we’re working on:

– me (Alex) – so far this week, I did the look for the Alliance, Statistics and Messages pages, together with the secondary tabs that belong to them. Mars will translate the design I made in Excel into actual html pages for Raywall and Tony to make into ASP. Uff. What’s next for me: report pages, user profile, alliance admin area, and more.

– Mars – finished the html versions of the buildings that are in the game. Tomorrow he will probably translate to html the pages I did in Excel so far. Also, the buildings of the game are all on his shoulders. No pressure…

– Raywall is working on the final touches of the battle system right now, and he’s not very happy about it. Tough! What can I say :D. No idea on what he’ll be working on after he finishes the battle system. I don’t have the guts to ask him either. He’s pretty grumpy and barely containing his enthusiasm on working on something else after he finishes this.

– Tony, well no idea. He’s doing remote connecting at work, or something like that, and having lag on Yahoo Messenger, so it’s a pain in the ass to talk to him (because of the lag). As far as I know he’s working on the html pages that Mars made, that will be translated into ASP in the next few weeks. I’ll try getting more info in the days to come.

All this being said, from what I talked with Raywall today, he’s more inclined to call the public version of the game an alpha, rather then a beta version. Just to make sure people understand that when we go public, it will be the first time we see the game in action with a large number of players. That means some bugs in the game that we didn’t find in our internal testing and a lot of features missing. They will all be in the game in the first 2-3 months though (Raywall said so :D … sort off).

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ia-overview.JPG

Well, the graphics of the game are almost finished. In the past 3 weeks I had to modify a certain template to match our own needs for space and look. Although it was a really nice template, it was more suitable for a flash page than for a strategy game. I had to make the look simpler and a bit brighter and at the same time I needed a lot of space which I didn’t have in the original design.

Now, i`m pleased with the look and the space we have and I’m continuing to work on finishing all the pages(alliance, market, etc) so that the programmers will know exactly what to do. This week i`ll probably finish the general look and starting next week i`ll do the hardest thing – the village. A good thing will be the fact that i have the next week free, so i`ll be able to put all my effort into the game. That`s a plus. I`m not sure if i`ll be able to finish all the work but at least i`ll be a few steps closer.

More info soon.

7 Comments

Alex/

For those that don’t know, we’re a team of 4 working in our spare time on this game. None of us is a true designer, and after 6 weeks where we couldn’t get the graphics done with the designers we contacted, we decided to buy a template to modify ourselves, according to our needs, because this delayed us quite a bit. That was done, we bought this template. The reason we bought it was mainly the  freakin knight from the top, that we loved. Just woke up and found a comment together with a link pointing to the original source that the original designer used. Yeah, he stole an image from Guildwars and used it on the template that we bought in the end.

Needles to say, we’ll take that knight out of our template, but this pisses me off as hell, because he was the main reason we bought the template in the first place. We’ll need to buy an image from iStockPhoto, or whatever its name is, and modify it for our design. The open alpha test would’ve been launched by now if the graphics were done on time.

As for the comment that let us know, I’d just like to point out that design has nothing to do with how the game works. As I said, none of us knows graphics well enough. We’ll take out that knight because it’s only normal we do that, but we’ll continue to use the rest of the template. When we’ll afford a very good designer we’ll change the look of the game.

The good part, at least we found out about the knight image now, while we’re still working on modifying the template for what we need.

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If you look to the top of this blog, you can see how the top of the game graphics will look like. Well, most of it anyway. Different font for the name and other changes plus a lighter color for the website then what you can see now.

Also, I noticed we have some visitors coming back and checking for new articles. I suggest subscribing by RSS or email (both options in the right sidebar), and you’ll be notified when there are new articles on the blog. Just to spare you the time of checking the blog, since we’re sometimes updating at longer intervals :).

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