March 6, 2010
Dog of Prey development for iPhone is going fine. First stage in January was to contact back all previous developers / artists in order to see which assets can be reused and which one have to be redone. Almost 60% of original assets will be reused after some lifting for mobile platform and also new T3D engine.
February was spent on the setup of our development platform and project platform. I can only recommend Feng Office as a project management website; this is one of the best one I’m using for around one year now. We also acquired license for iTGE 3D which is a port of TGE (Torque Game Engine) for iPhone. I have to say that this is still a beta release and we already faced many issues with this engine but it helps us to stay in the Torque family engine and using our extensive experience on those engines, we are confortable to think we can have something correct soon.
Saying that, we came up with a simulator for Torque Game Engine, allowing our artists to use TGE editors but with direct feedback for a mobile platform. This helps us tremendously in order to speed up our art workflow. As illustrated by following screenshot, this specific engine release offers a specific view for your iPhone game while allowing you to access all editors in large window. Some profiling tools will be added for the developers and artists in order to optimize coding and asset creation.
Saying that, you are starting to see some screenshots of Dog of Prey for iPhone. Work is now to have a quick running build without all features but main functions in order to iterate among artists and testers and also start in parallel all the process of code optimization for mobile platform which will take quite a time.
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January 3, 2010
Our latest news was about a game we did with a small group of friends back in 2002 named Dog of Prey and showing some capabilities of the first Torque game engine. We have a good news for our fan base, we decided to release for 2010 a new Dog of Prey for both PC/Mac and mobile platforms. This new release will be focused on two of the four modes available in the 2002 beta release, and will have easier, meaning more arcade feeling, command mechanism for the planes. The two playing modes will be DogFight and Racing, and will be available either in Solo play or Multi play (4 players maximum on mobile systems). This new release will bring also some improvements with faster loading times, bonus to uncover, ladder system…
On the PC/Mac release, you will find a graphically improved game using T3D game engine with new cartoon rendering. For the mobile release, we will publish a dedicated release for IPhone using GarageGames IPhone 3D engine. An Android release is also scheduled but for end of the year, as we will have to port a lot of code as we are currently developing our own 3D engine for it.
Both release will not be free, and thus it might happens that some models available in the beta release will not be in those release as we did not succeed to contact some of our old team members to ask them rights to publish the game with their models. For some models / maps, our new artists will redo some of them in order to still have old feeling of your super-deformed F9 dodging those rocks during the jigsaw race.
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August 28, 2009
For all the fan of our first title Dog of Prey, we found back on our disk the original beta release back from 2002 made by our dedicated and crazy team of that time. You will find a nice but difficult to handle dogfight game taking place in cartoon environment.
This beta release is working on both Windows and Linux system and has up to ten planes to choose from, four different maps and multiplay support. Do not forget to look in the Docs folder in order to get a glimpse on how to control your plane and all the different power-ups (up to 10).
Enjoy it as much as we did to make it. A new release is scheduled for Dog of Prey, and will come back on T3D soon or later.
Last but not least, you can download the self-extracted archive here Dog of Prey (2724).
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August 16, 2009
In Darkhand Studio, we keep a list of all the project ideas we have into a simple slideshow presentation. This document helps us to keep track of our ideas and then based on it we start or not some new projects. Here is the latest release of this slideshow document, waiting your comments about it.
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July 18, 2009
Following T3D release, we will no longer support our TGEA Web Plugin, TGEA IE Plugin (1313). Indeed, T3D is offering a more stable Web plugin than ours, which was since beginning experimental one and not a profesionnal one. On the other hand, we are currently working on some T3D extension in order to add missing features inside T3D Web plugin such as on-demand data loading, quick game access and so on. You can follow current development of this extension on our TorqueLab website.
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July 18, 2009
Today we just released a public announcement regarding three extensions which are currently under design and development for T3D. We are planning to make available those three extensions end 2009 – beginning 2010 on our website. These extensions will extend some T3D features and add support also of new features such as Tactical Game add-on, multi-server support and data streaming support. As you may understand such projects are taking most of our time, and thus we are still looking for helps from T3D developpers that will like to help us on those projects. If you are interesting, leave a comment inside this message and we will contact you soon.
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July 4, 2009
Our servers were down last two days because of repetitive DoS attacks on our main server. Main effect was an impossibility to access all our current webpages. It has been repaired today and new security rules have been set-up in order to limit such DoS attacks effectiveness. You may issue some problems due to our current security settings, if any leave a comment in this message.
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June 21, 2009
Darkhand Studio is aiming to be in GDC China this year in order to attend some of the lectures / key speakers and also to do some promotion of Pelorea: Tactical War.
We hope to see some of you, and if all our plans go well; we will be able to distribute some free release of Pelorea: Tactical War during the conference and some coupon for player account which will be usable on our server website. Stay tuned.
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June 20, 2009
TorqueLab project website is just opened and reachable at the following url www.torquelab.com. This project is to present tutorials, resources and also an integrated development interface for Torque coders and artists. It will also present some of our latest development which we will release for the community.
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June 18, 2009
Extended Pylos is a new casual game created by Darkhand Studio and available for free for download – Extended Pylos (301) – through our website. Extended Pylos is inspired from the famous boardgame Pylos (Gigamic Games) which confronts two player placing balls on a pyramid, where the first one to place all his balls on the pyramid lost the game. Extended Pylos (ExPylos) adds some new rules with special balls which can be used to remove some balls on the pyramid or change their colors; thus adding more challenge. Moreover ExPylos adds a multiplayer mode where all scores are kept on our server to save your best highscores. Current available release includes one versus one mode with classic game rules. To have more information on the game, and its gameplay you can head to the Extended Pylos website.
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