Graal Forums - What I have been up to, and don't get excited

Over six months ago I started a project of my own. This project was intended to be a simple hobby of sorts to pass time and be a creative output.

This project spawned from my imagination as to what I could do with Classic if I had reworked it with my ideas. I am a very old player from Classic, who played the earlier versions(pre-P2P) of Classic, if it should even be called that. Thus, many of my ideas have grown from very old perspectives. For example, the layout of the overworld is structured after the very original layout, nostalgic areas returned, old names... These were all something I related to, so they had a big impact on the directions I took.

I spent a month or less offline working on the overworld and various graphics, fleshing out ideas. I took the original overworld and converted it to a gmap. Then I sat and took all those levels and updated and fixed them up into an original overworld. Then I took it online with a 6-month subscription and I worked on it when I had free time and felt like it. Like I said, this was to have fun, not to be stressed. I worked on scripts here and there, and my original ideas started to fall apart. See, I wanted to originally have everything work with default, I wanted things to be kept simple! But as I added on ideas I started to realize default, as it was, was too limited. I had to rescript EVERYTHING from scratch. Movement, hit detection, horses... everything. The more I worked on it, the more complicated things got. I had a full movement system with various functions interwoven with other various systems... it was much more of a mess than I had originally hoped.

Months passed as I worked on it here and there... but as time went I started working on it less. After a few months I started to realize I had learned a lot in terms of scripting and I wasn't happy with my scripts anymore. However, I didn't have the drive to rescript and restructure the whole server from the ground-up again and I started losing motivation. Six months are up and the server is about to go down and I have no desire to continue it.

Regardless of it all, I enjoyed my time I spent working on this server. I kept it underwraps through the months because I didn't take the server as seriously as a server deserves to be taken, and I didn't want it to get any hype that would eventually lead to disappointment. My hopes was to work on it for fun, and maybe, just maybe it would all piece together and I'd eventually have a server to release for the players. Of course it didn't work out like that, but I have learned a lot and it was a great experience.

Here is a crappy video of some various mechanics(it really IS a crappy video. I'm not good at video editing at all so I just slapped it in Windows Movie Maker and threw in a song), as well as some screenshots.

I'm not sure how many people are aware, but the image in my sig links to an image that I updated of the server every so often... sort of a subtle advertisement of sorts. The image represents a Pheonix rising from a Graal, representing the rebirth of Classic.

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To close, there is a lot I just can't put into words. The amount of planning I had put into, ideas that were never brought to live(thus screenshots or videos can never show). For example, I had planned to turn the quest for Graal's into a huge interactive quest for all players to get involved. It involved exploring and finding the four hard-to-find shrines. Each would have a large Guardian that you had to defeat to claim the Graal. Each color guard(for each color Graal) had various strengths and weaknesses. The Graal's weren't clientside. Only one person could hold a Graal at a time. Eventually after all four Graal's were claimed you could return them to a large Shrine that would make an island raise out of the ocean that lead to the Golden Realm. Any player could enter it then, and it would stay raised for a few hours, or days.

I wanted things like that to bring the community together. Either to fight together to all reap the benefits of the Golden Realm, or to fight and claim the Graal's for themselves. I also planned for a lot of random stat keeping for fun(how many bushes were slashed, chicken's killed, times you slashed your sword...). Also planned to introduce new content in an 'in-character' sort of way. For example, an earthquake would shake the screens of all the players, and a townsfolk NPC would run to populated areas, screaming of what she had seen. Players who missed it could go to the nearby Fortune Teller and have them recount recent events, which would tip them off as to where to go... various things like that. Like I said, many things I can't document, and really pointless to do so regardless.