It’s been a long journey for Harmonia (formally Shining MUD), but the project now has its very own Kickstarter! From the Harmonia Homepage:
Harmonia is now on Kickstarter! It’s been a long time coming, but we’re proud to announce that our fund-raising campaign has finally begun! If you’d like to see us finish this game, you can support us by donating or by simply spreading the word. Fund-raising ends on Sep. 8th, 2012.
There’s a wealth of information on the Kickstarter page, including a video overview of the project, screenshots galore and playable demos for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you haven’t tried it since the last demo, you might find things have changed considerably ;)
Harmonia has come a very long way in the last few months, so show some support for Synival and his team :)
Harmonia Kickstarter
Synival has been hard at work on Harmonia (previously Tales of Harmonia/ShiningMUD), an online game inspired by the Shining series of games. What started as Shining MUD (way back in 2005) is now blossoming into something beautiful.
As you can see the old ASCII interface is gone, and a new 3D one has taken its place. There are videos of the map editor, forest exploration and lots of screenshots showing the different visual modes (including one for ASCII fans).
Synival is also preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support development of the game and lots of new features, so stay tuned for information on that!
Project Page: Tales of Harmonia
Synival, the author of Shining MUD, got in touch to let me know that the project is now known as Tales of Harmonia:
Progress has been slow and steady, but productive. The to-do list is overwhelming, and new items are being added faster than I can check them off, but production is in full swing.
The project also has its own site, where you can get updates on development, browse screenshots and get instructions for playing: Tales of Harmonia.
Reddit user SimonLB posted some information (and lots of screenshots) about their Shining Force III inspired MUD.
This is Shining MUD, a project I’ve been working on for several years as a hobby project. It is currently in the Alpha stages, but mostly feature-complete. It is based on the Shining Force series for Genesis/Saturn, although it’s more like an RTS than a turn-based strategy game.
There’s lots more information in the reddit topic, and plenty of screenshots in the imgur.com gallery. It’s always a nice surprise to see new projects, so check out the topic and give some feedback :)
Source: Shining MUD – a huge project in the works for at least 5 years.
It’s been a while since the last dev diary, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Lots of things have changed, but there’s not really much to show. At the moment I’m writing a pretty hefty set of articles on the technical side of the game. There’s a lot of notes to go through so I’m not really sure when it will be ready, but it seemed like a waste to do so much work behind the scenes without sharing it.
The biggest change was the switch to a kernel based engine. It’s added a bit of overhead, and it’s probably over-engineering things, but it makes adding new functionality to the main loop a lot easier. Services can be added and removed dynamically, and can either be called every loop (like the screen renderer) or just sit in the background (like the resource database).
Once example of how useful this can be is with the debug listener. A DebugListener service object can be created and added, and it watches for changes to certain directories. Once a change is detected, it send an event so the resource manager can reload things. Because it’s added dynamically, it can be left out of non-debug releases, or even added via the debug console during runtime.
