NGD Studios interview

Few days ago one more NGD Studios Interview (report about previous one see here) has been published. As you all know, starting from yesterday new Bunch of Heroes first action game is available for buying, and all of us, Regnum Online users, might get an exclusive gift too, woo-hoo!

NGD Studios new logo

Short interesting facts from interview are below:

• About origin of NGD name: "NGD started as the fusion of three teams of game developers" and they "named with the placeholder name “Nuevo Grupo de Desarrollo” (New Development Group in English)", and "almost 6 months we fought to come up with a super-cool new name for the studio" and finally "in the end we settled for the [NGD] acronym".
• About development details of their new Bunch of Heroes game: "The development of the [Bunch of Heroes] game started two years ago when three of the most experienced developers at NGD, Gastón di Pasquo, Leonardo Benaducci and Javier Barreto, decided to do a shooter prototype to test a new engine Leo came up with on his spare time" - so, "core team was around 6 people, peaking at 12 people when finishing all of the game's content".
• About NGD plans: "Our next big thing might be a huge and original MMO that we are prototyping, but it’s a very ambitious project and we are still looking on how to fund it".

NGD Studios team

NGD and Regnum Online: past, present, and future

Few days ago an interesting NGD Studios’ Andrés Chilkowski on Bunch of Heroes, Regnum Online & Designing Game Engines interview with Andrés Chilkowski, one of the members of NGD’s management team, has been published. And, now we can clarify some historical details about both Regnum Online game and NGD Studios company, which created this wonderful game.

So, short story is next. They had started a game development in 2002 with only 20.000 dollars and with only 7 people, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and wanted to have beta version in 6 months, but in almost 5 years later they launched Regnum Online.

Right now NGD has 35 people working on various projects including Bunch of Heroes and Regnum Online games.

For Regnum Online game they are using own NG3D proprietary game engine, but have other game engines. Bunch of Heroes game was built using a new Perfection engine developed by Leonardo Benaducci. And, currently they "are halfway through the development of our third Engine code named Crush".

Approx 1,000,000 subscribers played NGD’s first major release of Regnum Online. On their hard development way they passed such early stages as "the servers would crash with more than 100 users online" and "2 years to make it work as a business -optimizing the premium items and monetization". So, current status is declared as: "game is just now reaching our original vision as we are continuously adding new features every month", and, it smells mature and sounds good! :-)

Among future NGD plans they "plan to continue working on it [i. e. Regnum Online] for another decade if we can", plus "have already started working on a prototype of our next big MMO", and ... now surprise: premier of their new Bunch of Heroes game for PC will be ... yep, just in 4 days, on September 21, 2011!

New Castle, Coming to Regnum Online Next Update

UPDATED (2011/09/22): also, see another interview here.

SWS IRL: Bence from Hungary

Hi Clannies, I’m Bence Erős, a 22 years old software developer and university student and study Software Engineering BSc. I live in Debrecen, the 2nd biggest city of Hungary, about 200.000 people live here - it's close to the eastern border of the country. In Regnum Online my primary character is crystalx, a lvl 49 warlock, and I also have a lvl 26 barbarian called hard reset, and a lvl 22 marksman (nega). I started playing Regnum Online around the middle of July.

Picture 1: hard reset and crystalx

To be honest, I’m not a gamer. I haven’t played any games in the recent years. Before that - long ago in the middle of my teen ages, I played mainly strategy games: Age of Empires, Heroes 3, Warcraft 3, Rise of Nations, Settlers and sometimes Starcraft. All were boring after sometimes, since I could only play in single player, we didn’t have internet connection at home that time (I just can’t imagine how I survived my first 16 years. :D )

But this summer after my exams I downloaded RO and I gave it a go. Aaand... I became addicted to it in a few days. So I spent most of my summer with playing RO; crystalx is now lvl 49, but sadly I’m a bit bored of grinding that guy, so in the recent days I have mainly played my barb, hard reset, and I log in with my lock only if there is some invasion.

When I don’t sit near my computer, I live the everyday life of university students. I’m with my beautiful girlfriend who I have gone out with for more than one years now, or I’m with my friends in a tavern or on a rock festival, or I’m watching a movie, whatever. In my teen ages I had read a lot of books too, but sadly I gave that up. I read mainly sci-fi novels, my favourite writers are Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and George Orwell. I also liked fantasy novels, eg. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (one of the reasons why I fell in love with Regnum is how similar its world is to LOTR. :) So that’s all about books, nowadays I read IT stuff when I have some time to do that, currently Refactoring by Martin Fowler. By the way, I’m not a read-only guy, I started a blog in English last winter, it is my "just another blog about software engineering" blog. You can find some more or less interesting programming-related articles here.

Picture 2: My girlfriend and myself

Picture 3: At a university bale

Picture 4: Factory festival at Miskolc

Picture 5: A more or less cultivated garden party with friends

Picture 6: Cutting the melon - when everybody knows better how to do that :)

Picture 7: Late-night coding fun :)

Picture 8: So.. question?

Picture 9: A long-haired Bence

During the university years I worked as a software engineer for several companies, but after all I have became fed up with them, so currently I try to get by as a freelancer. When I say "software engineer" I mean "programmer", but the latter one is a damn ugly word in my opinion, therefore I more prefer using the first one :) So, primarily I write smaller business applications, mainly in PHP, JavaScript (with jQuery) and I prefer using PostgreSQL as a database. If I don’t write such applications, I develop my PHP framework, which I will release as public, free software some time in this year (hopefully). When I become fed up with PHP, I sometimes play a bit with Java, Scala or C, but I’m not really professional in those technologies/languages. I’m a really open-source guy, I rarely work with any proprietary stuff. I use mainly Ubuntu Linux with Fluxbox on my desktop, and sometimes I try out Slackware or Slack-based Linux distributions too. As I mentioned above, I’m a university student too, but now I only have a very few subjects, studying is not a really important part of my life. To be honest, I should have finished the BSc 2 years ago - I’m very lazy with math subjects. :)

Picture 10:  Finally, a screenshot about my nerd desktop

That's all guys, have fun, enjoy my pictures, and defend me when I’m under a dizzy cast. ;D

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* All postings under current SWS IRL series might be found here.

Purple Fever Event is finished - no infection anymore!

Finally epidemic Purple Fever Event has been finished! Uhh, everybody is tired to drink the cure and be infected from tons of purple poisonous spiders, to watch fully opened gates all three realms at the same time, catch enemies gems, and fight with the kidnappers of our gems. Syrtis War Stalkers clan received full satisfaction during this event. So, let's recall that nice time here, in pictures.