Survivors of Ragnarök - A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away...

We hope everyone has been enjoying our latest build and all the goodies that came bundled with it. New mob types and new features are always welcomed additions to a game very much in pre-alpha.

Next week, October 5th, we will be technically celebrating a whole years worth of development. I say technically because we did not publicly go live with the project until November 19th. Much of the month of October was devoted to a lot of pre-production work that birthed a wonderful 19 page document that anyone of our wonderful parents have access too.

In the month of October we will be having some pretty witty articles on the history of SoR, French Rice Games, and your obnoxiously wonderful developers. We will also be giving away tons of free things not only to celebrate this event but also thank you guys for all the support you've given us. We can't express how grateful we are to you guys and all the support you've given us. You make Code Monkeys, Bards, and Ninjas so humble and proud to have such a fantastic community like you guys.

Along with Alpha 12, next week we want to do a strictly community centered news post. You guys are free to ask everything and anything. This can be directed to Garrett, Kabraxis, myself, or the company as a whole. Hell it can even be directed to Loki himself if you wish.

  


Also what many of you may not know but when your wonderful artist Tastyrice (who is currently talking to himself in third person right now) is not doing silly pixel art of Loki actually really is the company ninja. He (likes to talk in third person apparently) is part of a tricking group known as the Muggle Slayers.

MuggleSlayers.com

What is ticking you ask? Well that's what Wikipedia is for.

Tricking (short for martial arts tricking) is the informal name of a type of physical activity derived from the martial arts that includes techniques found in gymnastics, B-boying, and similar disciplines. Examples of incorporated techniques include the 540 kick from Taekwondo, the butterfly twist from Wushu, and the double leg from Capoeira. The sport aims to create an "aesthetic blend of flips, kicks, and twists." Tricking differs from similar arts in that expression and exploration are more heavily favored. An individual who practices tricking is typically referred to as a "trickster" or "tricker".

In short think of it as the bastard child of Freerunning/Parkour and Martial Arts.

And no we are not kidding. His (he really needs to stop talking in third person) Muggle Slayer Profile.

GenelJumalon

Along with a neat little video of the Muggle Slayers latest adventures.



So what does this have to pertain to anything your wondering? Well next weekend Genel (thaaat's me) will be attending a Tricker Gathering in Orlando. Leaving Garrett and Kabraxis to be without an artist for 3 days. What we were thinking if enough people were interested was streaming this event live for you guys to check out.

Livestream.com/FrenchRiceGames

Before we conclude this post we would like to share a Public Service Announcement from the Foundation Against Piggy-Abuse, or F.A.P. for short.




Help fight against mistreated pigs and piggy abuse by adopting a pig today. There are plenty of pigs that still need a loving home. More importantly there are plenty of children that need a pig to love.



Be a parent. Adopt a pig today.

As always don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Desura, IndieDB, Blogger, and Steam! You can now subscribe to our Pixel Pushers Podcast on iTunes!

Survivors of Ragnarök - Now With Naked Mobs! (Alpha 11)

Cool thing about code, trying to explain how something works versus making it work in code are COMPLETELY different. We were able to push out a pretty decent update for you guys with new mobs, new features, bug fixes, and some awesome goodies for those who have pre-ordered.

We are still in need of implementing task canceling; which logically would seem to be a pretty easy task but when it comes to computer logic isn't so much; and clean up the way the new multi-select UI works. But hey, that's what patches and updates are for.





-Added New mob "Chicken Shaman"
-Added New mob "Sheep"z
-Added New mob "Naked Sheep"
-Added Zombie chickens to Survival mode.
-Added New item "Wool"
-Added New UI element "The Actionbar"
-Changed Right clicking to destroy a block or attack a creature now opens up a menu that allows you to choose what objective you want.
-We actually tested this build and fixed another memory leak.



*For parents of piggies or space marines* (or both)
-Bestiary; for all your monster compendium needs.
-Original Art inspired by Limbo
-Dwarven Parenting Comics (Yes I realized it is misspelled as 'Dawrven' Parenting in the actual files)
-Activity Zones Design Doc

What should be exciting news for everyone (or maybe just us) is that aggressive mobs will be implemented next update! All manner of Orcs, Goblins, Skellies, and Zombies can and will be a very real threat to your beloved chick-er... dwarfs. And all the fun that dying entails; losing for example (which might I add is ALWAYS fun).


Speaking of fun, we had two fantastic interviews with James Attards from Indie Game Magazine and Pride St. Clair over at PikiGeek! Well to be fair we can't attest if it was enjoyable for them but we certainly had a good time. We would highly suggest you guys check out the interview which we conveniently added a link below. However if you want to check out the IndieGameMagazine interview you will need to be a subscriber, which I would urge everyone to do and support the fantastic staff and writers over at IndieGameMagazine.

http://geek.pikimal.com/2011/09/21/indiescriminate-survivors-of-ragnarok-interview/

http://www.indiegamemag.com/

Here are some great highlights from the interview.

PikiGeek: What drove you to pursue a career in game design?
FrenchRiceGames: We all played Call of Duty 4 on our Xbox and have since played every Call of Duty since then. We have played almost six whole games since we started. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops are our top four games of all time.For all those wonderful Chicken Edition folks Alpha 10 (the one without the wonderful memory leak) should be up for you guys to test.

IndieGameMgazine:How many people are actually working on Survivors of Ragnarok?

FrenchRiceGames:There are three people actively working on Survivors of Ragnarok. We have a fantastic code monkey we found deep in the Amazon rainforest, we named him Garrett. Ugurcan Orcun, our incredibly talented bard. We unfortunately found him in a Turkish pub singing songs about elves. We fixed that problem fairly quickly. Finally we have myself, Genel Jumalon. By day I do all the artwork for the game, and by night I am the company Ninja.

Finally of course, it wouldn't be new build without ending the news post with good old Dwarven Parenting.


We still have plenty of pigs that need adopting so now would be great time to adopt one and check out Alpha 11.



If of course you are an incredibly awesome person that wants intergalactic-space-marines to beam down and grant us gifts of chicken and bacon, adopt your very own space marine today! Trust us we would be eternally grateful you did.



As always don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Desura, IndieDB, Blogger, and Steam! You can now subscribe to our Pixel Pushers Podcast on iTunes!

Survivors of Ragnarök - When In Rome

As many of you fine dashing gentlemen(and ladies) know, in our last content update we converted our entire graphics library from some very obscure not so awesome library to everyone's favorite type of GL; open of course.

It has been a long grueling process process in the short term; even now we are still trying to convert a lot of our code to reap the benefits of OpenGL. However The long term benefits are invaluable not only for us as your narcissistic developers, but also to our fantastic and incredible community.



So before we talk about the awesome benefits that OpenGL offers you guys, let's talk about how awesome this is for us. Many of the features OpenGL offers serves to streamline our work flow. No longer will recoloring dwarfs require a right AND left animation set. This effectively cuts redundant and repetitive work time by half, and that's the kind of work time you want to cut down. Which leaves for more shenanigan work time; the type of work time you want to increase.

We also have the ability to do a lot more with our engine visually. Effects that were complex on our old library has become substantially easier such as day/night cycles and parallax layers. A wide breathe of effects we probably will never use like per pixel lighting and depth of field are available not only to us but to you guys as well. Which is a fantastic segue to why this will benefit our community.



The ability to mod the game and add user created content will be MUCH easier for you guys. Not only will we be gradually adding more and more mod support throughout development but our fantastic community has tools that we may never use. We want to empower our community not only with the ability to create fantastic and out of this world new creatures and items, but also wanted to give the ability to allow our community to create new and interesting game modes and worlds.



Of course Rome wasn't built in a day and Survivors of Ragnarok is no exception. We want our community to be as active in development as we are. From the very start of the project we have shared each and every new build with our community; bugs and all. These are as internal as builds get without developing a game yourself. Everything we have we've shared with our community, and that's our development philosophy moving forward.

Although to be fair our single-player campaign we will be keeping fairly secret until we get closer to release. That's mostly cause it would litterally blow your your mind away (Seriously, we legally are required to have everyone agree to a small EULA where we take no responsibility for the spontaneous combustion of your cranium).



Public Service Announcement:

Millions of pigs each year are battered, beaten, abused, eaten, and killed each year due to swine related violence. Nine out of ten people know someone what has been affected by domestic pig violence, and one out of every three children will be never own a pig.



Help fight against mistreated pigs and piggy abuse by adopting a pig today. There are plenty of pigs that still need a loving home. More importantly there are plenty of children that need a pig to love. Adopt a pig today.



As always don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Desura, IndieDB, Blogger, and Steam! You can now subscribe to our Pixel Pushers Podcast on iTunes!

Stylishly Late (Mini Update)

Thank Odin for Valve time or we would have never gotten this patch to you guys on schedule. Hell we were even surprised we managed to finish a patch like this in a single day. Check out our wonderful change log, a patch like this should have taken minutes to fix.

Alpha 10.1

• Fixed Giant memory leak.
• Changed Chickens and pigs now spawn less often.

The funny thing about that memory leak is that it had to do with our animation system. And as everyone knows rewriting a games entire animation system only takes a couple minutes to do. Simple logic suggest we spent the rest of the time attending to random shenanigans, and you are 100% absolutely right.

Luckily for you almost all that time was spent into new content for Alpha 11, which in the generally accepted view of time should be out next week for you guys to get your hands on.

What should you expect from Alpha 11?



Along with new mobs we hope to get some new UI features implemented. More specifically this sexy multi-object-tile interface. Which would so happen to be a great update to segue into Aggressive Mobs for Alpha 12.



As always don't forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Desura, IndieDB, Blogger, and Steam! You can now subscribe to our Pixel Pushers Podcast on iTunes!