Darkhand Studio

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.

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.

Extended Pylos is a new casual game created by Darkhand Studio and available for free for download – Extended Pylos (538) – 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.

TGEA Web Plugin is an experimental development done by Darkand Studio to demonstrate capabilities of TGEA through web-browser. The current plugin – TGEA IE Plugin (2172) – is capable of:

- encryption of game assets and game scripts code
- game library with on-demand download of game assets
- multiple game access inside one plugin

After downloading the plugin, please follow the instruction page on how to install it and on how to allow our website in order to have access of the demonstration available here which regroups four different demonstration of the plugin.