Alanacial
Project name:
Unnamed MMO
Website:
http://www.alanacial.com/
Brief description:
We are recruiting new team members to create two (2) complete zones for a fantasy based MMO. The game client, client patcher, world server, chat server, patcher server have already been in development for 3 years. We are looking for help moving forward with creating content and tools to help with the creation of content and levels.
Business Model:
Free-to-Play eventually, but for the purposes of this posting and recruitment, the project will be distributed as freeware.
Compensation:
There is no compensation for this contract.
Technology:
We are utilizing the following open source technologies: Irrlicht, IrrKlang, Raknet, LUA, MySQL, Bullet and Blender for B3D modeling.
Positions needed:
We are looking to expand the team to support and develop a full blown MMO, and are utilizing this 2 zone contract to evaluate people to bring on for a paid position with the full Free-to-Play version. We are primarily interested in content developers, but are recruiting for all positions:
C++ developers (game client, server, content creation tools)
Web developers
3D Modelers/Artists (Blender strongly preferred)
MySQL DBA (and must be able to manage the C++ socket development/connection class)
And any other position you have strong skills for, like audio engineers, sprite artists, ect.
Contacts:
You can apply for a position on the team by emailing a resume with experience to jobs at alanacial guesswhat com. You can respond to the forums here but this post will be placed on different forums in an effort to recruit many talented people, so email is your best bet.
Additional Info:
The game will be a Fantasy Based Anime style MMO that targets casuals and hard core gamers alike. What will stand out for this game is a unique mixture of traditional targeted based combat system for Base classes, with a transcendent class that focuses exclusively on third person shooter type based skills with no auto attacks. We believe this combination of difficulty and simplicity will create a unique atmosphere for our gamers, and offer a gentle learning curve for those that are overwhelmed or under skilled to play in a FPS exclusive game. Think action adventure Legend of Zelda, God of War, or Dynasty Warriors. Base class has “Z-Targeting” (to borrow a N64 term) and transcendent class skills do not, although attacks and skills are stronger if you use transcendant skills.
The game will strive to keep players questing and away from grinding with a strong central storyline, and a plethora of undocumented side quests that players discover by involving themselves in the game world and its people. The Japanese inspired world envelopes two ideologies that give a general conflict between two beliefs: Those that believe in living passively through the energies of nature, magic and its creatures, and those that believes in technology, its advancement, and taking a more active role in life and conflict. While these beliefs do not divide our game world races or classes, it provides a common conflicting point that characters in the world endure and provide the player with obstacles to overcome as they fight for their personal belief.
The game has been in development for 3 years as a C++ game engine testing ground for several technologies. These have been integrated and utilized to make our project very versatile and easy to work with. The work on this project has been only by programmers, so 90% of the time spent on Alanacial project as a whole has been programming code. There is a multi threaded patcher for your client, a client login to the game server and chat server, and testing bed level that allows multiple people to move on the server world using interpolated movement algorithms, and have all user input server validated from movement to using abilities. Right now the world is loaded dynamically using .irr files and models using B3D animations. We have created a lot of the ground work for a MMO but are left primarily with modeling content assets; something that we did not at the time have a strong skill set to create.
We have a Game Design Document that will be available for review specifically for the scope of this contract. Based on a postmortem of each contract, we will chose to move forward with certain contractors on the future development of this project. Prospects for this contract position will be expected to provide a minimum of ten hours per week for a duration of six months.
About me (and MY qualifications):
My name is Philip and I have a Bachelor of Science in Game and Simulation Programming. Curiosity (2007) was a turn based RPG (named in the same mind set as Final Fantasy with game play similar to Final Fantasy Tactics) developed for and demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco 2007 (http://www.gdconf.com/). I was the project manager and lead programmer of the team of 9 other college student developers pursuing a degree in Game and Simulation Programming.
My first 3d project was my Senior Project for college. It was a 3d Tetris clone, called PerspectaCubed, and again was a 3d engine created from scratch and DirectX. I was a programmer on this team of 4 and completed it in 6 months.
video of the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XumAbvOmNqE
I’ve held a software engineering job for a vendor (http://www.gpj.com/) used by Oracle, Cisco, and Charles Schwab, and was a database administer for their onsite events. I’ve created ecommerce websites (and accompanying SQL database) for two companies (http://www.digitalstormonline.com/) and (http://vinotheque.com/). Now I work for Comcast as a Network Engineer on a nice shift: 4 days a week for 10 hours.
This offers me a chance to spend my 3 day weekend to again focus on managing and releasing the game to end users. I have a bucket of different skills that allow me to wear different hats and I’m really excited to work with some new programmers and, for the first time, some real artists. I hope to build a team to do a lot more then just one or two levels, and by keeping us on a realistic timeline and providing project goals, we’ll all see it come to fruition and make a little side income. Primarily though, we are looking to have fun and make a game we would enjoy ourselves, and add to your work portfolio a home brewed MMO. I look forward to meeting you new team members over Skype!
p.s.
Temporarily (obviously) most of the game's models/textures are being tested shamelessly using the demo objects included from some open source projects that many IrrLicht users have offered on their forums. I am not an artist or modeler (as you can see from my player model..) and used what I could to test client functions.
