I'd like to say it's the "beginning" but it's not. It's the beginning of me posting about it.
I've spent so long developing software and teaching game design and development, that I forgot what it's like to develop games anymore.
My life long passion from the tender age of 13 back in 1998 was, to one day own a software development company and guess what? I achieved it. With good success.
I love what I have built with my company but it's been a hell of a journey building it to where it is today. You know what I miss the most? Game Development.
Back in the 90s, when I was a teenager, we had the fun of local LAN parties with all my geeky mates. Then around 2002, jumped online, mostly with a game called Soldier of Fortune II which I played religiously until around 2008. I'm talking insane amounts of hours in that game online. There was a website called C Sports (I think it was C-Sports.net) and it used to tally up all your gaming hours. I'm pretty sure I capped nearly close to 26000 over that 6 year period. Is that insane? I'm not even sure by the standards then or today.
Anyway, that was my last online gaming experience. 2008. That's 18 years ago. Disgusting. Since then all I've done is work, work, work. I've designed and developed games for clients, I helped port Five Nights at Freddy's over from desktop to mobile for Scott and I worked a little tiny bit on AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd) for the Xbox 360 port.
Worked on many games in my time, and I have still managed to play GTA V, RDR2, all the Tomb Raiders and Hitman series on my Xbox but that's just at night winding down after work. I still don't play online today.
Given my current circumstances, I thought a good side project the last few months would be to develop a brand new game. So I thought, what engine? I played around in UE 5.4 through to 5.6. Loved every minute of it and thanks to my programming background I could either code with UE, and I picked Blueprints up pretty quickly.
Then I tried Unity. Then Godot. Then one called Defold, which I'd never heard of before. Nice engine. Then I looked around at some classic engines and languages, I even went as far as DarkBasic. Nothing piqued my interest and I was getting frustrated at all these options and not being able to decide. So in the end, I decided for myself... Babylon.
Web tech has come so far in the last 10 years particularly. I looked at three.js, it was impressive, until I stumbled across babylon.js. I was even more intrigued. So I got to scribbling down the stack I would use which ended up being quite the list but babylon.js with rapier, that provides good physics support and Colyseus for the web connectivity.
So what was I going to build? You know what, I was going to develop an entire game engine from the ground-up using this stack and a few other bits of tech to literally mould it around the game I want to develop.
Say hello to ebonexus.
What is ebonexus?
ebonexus is my valiant attempt at creating an early 2000 game, with modern features, modern lighting, physics and gametypes. The aim? To not only attract the old-skool gamers back, but to also give the new gen gamers something to get their mits on and enjoy.
So a new Fortnite? Absolutely not. Nothing like Fortnite. Nothing like DayZ, nothing like GTA V.
Imagine, Quake (1/2), a bit of Half-Life, a bit of World of Warcraft and a bit of Soldier of Fortune 2 mixed together, modernised with all-new physics, scaled up for many possibilities and a touch of the current style of gaming.
That's what I envision and that's what I've been working on. One thing I remember about Soldier of Fortune 2 wasn't the graphics (even though they were bad ass for the time), it was about the gameplay. Ravensoft had done a great job of ensuring gameplay was a priority and that's why it remained such a popular multiplayer game. Single player was awesome too.
SoF2 had a gore feature never seen before. It had so many hitpoints on the body, you could literally cut a player up, limb-for-limb. Blood was all over the shop. Pun intended.
So my visions for this new game development, which will eventually be the first official release from ByteBox Games in many years and will be the biggest too, is, sure use modern graphics, but it's the gameplay that counts here.
I want players to pick the game up, create "clans", yeah clans. Remember them? Let's bring clans back. Let's bring dedicated servers back (yes, not limiting you to specially provided servers), literally whip your own server up. Create your own mapcycle but I want to go even further.
I want the players to be able to design their own maps too that they can keep on their servers or share with the community freely. Mods too, like weapon skins etc.
I want to bring those days back but for the modern times. I don't want to be selling "battle passes" and fleecing people for money. I want people to get the game, wander off and setup their own communities and servers and just have a great time with the game.
That's the aim anyway.
I hope you join me on this development journey. I'm already a few months deep as a side project and I've got lots to show off but I'll post about each piece I've done so far, bit by bit. So please subscribe to this blog and I'll stick with me on this journey.
Ciao for now.
Danny