PROGRESS REPORTS

This document reports regulary on the status of the project. It does so in reversed chronological order: recent reports first.

12 January 2004
The symposium has been cancelled. It was taking too much time and causing too much stress. We need to focus on "8" and change the world by deeds rather than words. :)
23 October 2003
"Demo 1: The Formal Dining Room" is ready now. We are inviting people to request download instructions from a password protected directory via email so as to be able to follow up and get reactions.
We have succeeded in making the game feel a lot more solid for this demo but there are still quite a few things that need work. In terms of visual style, we have reached near perfection, despite having had to compromise a little on polygon count here and there after initially finishing the demo. Still the demo requires quite a serious PC to run. We are going to look into ways of improving performance on lower specced systems.
7 October 2003
We have decided to produce two or more small and very polished demos rather than one big one full of bugs that would take an hour to get a feel for.
6 May 2003
Presentation of the game engine at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
As we have more or less completed the design of the engine and the interface, we want to try and get some fresh feedback on it before putting in the final geometry.
The latter will be done with the aid of Chung Ho Kan, whom we were able to hire for 6 months thanks to a research position offered by the Jan Van Eyck Academy.
February 2003
The Jan van Eyck Academy has accepted to support our project until May 2004. We will use the time after the release of the demo (October 2003) to organise a symposium on game design. The Academy has also given us the opportunity to hire a third member for our team for six months.
Meanwhile the walkthrough engine has been finished and we have started building the actual game while at the same time upgrading both geometry and textures. The result of some simple additions was so stunning that we are now motivated more than ever to work "in layers". This means gradually making the whole environment look and feel better. The reason for this is that we might run out of time if we focus on room per room. And the effect of a simple upgrade is often much greater than the effects of endless tinkering.
January 2003
We have made some rough calculations as to how much time would be required to produce all the assets for the game demo. As a result of this we have realized that it will be impossible to finish the game demo within the quality standards that we have set by May 2003, as scheduled. We have also realised that it is very difficult to schedule a project like this. Some things take much longer than expected and others are done quickly. The schedule also causes unproductive stress.
Nevertheless, we have made a new schedule, mainly so that we have prototypes, beta's and demo's ready in times that are approproiate for feedback (avoiding holiday seasons). You can find it here.
9 October 2002
Presentation of the first prototype of the game at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Read the text here.
This prototype is not for public release but for testing certain basic concepts. If you would like to test it, please email us at alphatest[at]tale-of-tales.com.
September 2002
Steve Dietz of the Walker Art Center has nominated Auriea for a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship ($35,000). We will propose to use this money to start the production of the actual game in June 2003.
2 September 2002
Thanks to the Jan Van Eyck Academy we were able to attend the European Game Developers Conference in London. Here's a review of it.
9 August 2002
We had the pleasure of working with Motek in Amsterdam for the motion captures of Martha, a little girl of 5 years old, who will be providing the motions of our main game character. We were told that it was a first for the company to capture a child so young and thus a very interesting challenge for their team. The captures were done via an optical method involving 8 video cameras and relective balls velcroed to her leotard. She had a little trouble sticking with the program but we couldn't blame her with all those people staring and her father telling her what to do all day. Motek has done the motion captures for PC game "The City Of Lost Children", one of the few other games that features a child as the main character. They have been very supportive of our game idea and the captures we received from them are quite a beautiful thing to see. (Photos of Capture Day.)
21 June 2002
We are in the middle of making the website. We want to launch it on Michaël's birthday (28 June 1968). It's a big step for us. It signifies publicly the major shift that our little design company has made. We have been working on entropy8zuper.org for the past three years. Now tale-of-tales.com will take priority but it will not replace entropy8zuper.org. We consider the latter as our home and it will continue to be the center of our hybrid personal-design activities online.
Tale-of-tales.com, on the other hand, is our baby. It is its own thing, it does not represent us nor does it need to suffer from our singlemindedness. We want what's best for our baby. And that includes letting it do concessions for the sake of appealing to a broader audience, eg.
The aim of the website is to make future buyers and potential investors warm for the game. And to spread the word about it in order to make the task, at the start of phase 2 of the project (production and publication), of appealing to investors and/or publishers a little lighter.
We are using the design of the website as a means to investigate the atmosphere and visual appearance of the game.
June 2002 (written: 21 June 2002)
A good two months into the offical project. And it feels like a lifetime. We have done so much work. And yet, when somebody asks is if he can see something, there is nothing to show. Most of the work has been thinking and writing the scenario. And learning and experimenting with the new software (Maya and Quest3D).
Auriea has started to make sketches for the characters. Michael has programmed the backbone of the game engine. We are on schedule, except for the storyboard. We are not going to take the two months it would probably take to make a full storyboard. Instead we are going to develop the storyboard as we proceed in the project, making mini-storyboards for seperate scenes. This fits the idea of making the demo room per room. We have made a storyboard for the introsequence of the game.
The "3D map" of the palace is almost finished. This is a stylized 3D model of the palace made for the purpose of designing the structure of the game world. It will serve as a guide when designing individual rooms and it is the reference for the positions of objects in the virtual space. (As you know, gameplay will consist of taking the main character from room to room. For reasons of performance the whole palace will never be in the computer's memory at any one time. Yet all the position matrices of the objects and characters in the world will be "real". Imagine an empty and endless space with objects floating in it; as the main character floats through this space, rooms appear around her and disappear where she is not.)
Based on this 3D map, a 2D map has been made as well. This map contains all rooms and walls and doors and also the positions of important objects, characters and scenes.
The full design of the game is done apart from some (or actually lots and lots! ;) ) of details. We are doing this with a hypertext application called Storyspace. The Storyspace document has become a database that contains every bit of information about the game. We have converted this Storyspace document to a website. This website contains over 900 pages.
1 April 2002 (written: 21 June 2002)
The Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. has accepted our research proposal. This means that they will fund the project and that they expect our presence in the school. The latter has forced us to extend our original schedule by three months, to allow for presentations and travel. This is altogether not a bad thing: the presentations will force us to keep evaluating the project and the contact with other people in the school may prove to be very helpful.
Jan van Eyck was the first to agree to sponsor us. Through them, the Flemish government also pitches in a bit. And unrelated, VIZO will sponsor some costs in the context of their Prototype Development program.
The Rockefeller Foundation (USA) and the Edith Russ Site for Media Art (DE) have refused us.
The acquired funding only covers 60% of the required budget. If we cannot find more funding from third parties, we will need to do some design jobs. This will eat up some of our time and may influence the length of the project.
Despite of the shortage, we have decided to go ahead and start the project officially. We will just try to make ends meet as we go along. The idea is to stay alive until May 2003 and then start a company with new money from investors or the bank.
February 2001 - April 2002 (written: 21 June 2002)
In the "ideas" folder on Emmanuelle, our trusty file server, there is a document called "game.txt", dated 15 February 2001.
On the same server, a "game" folder was created on 11 June 2001.
A first sketch on paper is dated 18 June 2001.

It is interesting to see how little our ideas have changed despite of the enormous amounts of work that we have done since then. It is simply shocking to realize that it takes so much work to realize an idea. And it is satisfying to know that we have succeeded in doing all that work. This is going to be a great game!...