Dev Blog 1: An Introduction

As this is my first time writing one of these, not to mention this is an introduction to both myself and Iron Legacy, this dev blog may be out of the ordinary for some readers. My apologies, but bear with me.

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So you may notice (at least at the time of writing) that the website isn't quite complete. There is a lot of default imagery courtesy of wix, and while they look great, and almost fitting, they do not depict Iron Legacy. That will change. You may also notice references to "our team" or "we". Right now that just means me. But who am I?

My name is Ryan Nicholls, and I am currently the sole developer of Iron Legacy. I've been playing games for as long as I can remember, beginning in the late 90s with educational games. Yes, my parents can attest, I knew how to work a computer at 3. Some of my fondest memories involve the Command and Conquer series, Warcraft 2, and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and RuneScape (on dial-up no less!). Gaming has had a huge effect on who I am today, introducing me to people across the world, and eventually peaking my interest enough for me to pursue a career in IT.

However, I must confess: Game Development is not my full time job, nor is it my part time job. It is a hobby and while I hope it one day becomes more, keep that in mind when reading through these blog posts. They won't be jam packed with AAA content, and that's fine with me.

So, what is Iron Legacy?

It is a RPG set in medieval times, and it is going to start off as a single player experience. I would like to move to multi-player one day, but that's not feasible right now.

Iron Legacy was inspired by my eventual boredom for a lot of modern games. I'm an extremely busy person, and I don't always have time to be 100% focused on the game I am playing. I also sit at work hunched over my keyboard all day, so the last thing I want to do is hunch over my keyboard and button-mash a boss to death after work. However, on the weekends I am plenty motivated to set aside a few hours and really get into a game and hunch over that keyboard and get it done.

This brings us to what I believe to be one of the biggest strengths this game will have, freedom. For example, a huge portion of this game is designed to be played with just a mouse, and all of it will be possible with just a mouse (although some things the keyboard is simply better suited for).

But that's not fair to those who prefer the keyboard!

So I decided very early on I would work hard to be sure that we had toggles for First Person WASD, First Person Mouse, Third Person WASD, and Third Person Mouse. No excuses..Simply put it isn't working yet and has proved to be more difficult than I expected it to be. As it currently stands, both input methods work, but they aren't toggle-able and the camera angles aren't acceptable. Same goes for the zoom functionality.

But this concept of freedom reverberates throughout Iron Legacy in other ways too. Things such as classless combat, numerous skills, a refreshing quest system, and community designed content.

These mechanics and many more will be covered more in-depth in the coming dev blogs, which I am aiming to publish monthly. Expect next month's to focus on the how I plan to format the UI and why, and to actually have some screen shots of the game! I'm sure visually this introduction was very underwhelming, but I plan to update the site with some in-game images and include images in the blogs as well.

Thanks for reading!