Mirage Legacy, where it's at and where it's headed.
I'm Kevin, head developer at Voltisoft and the developer of Mirage Legacy. I'm here to talk about my engine, what it can do, where it is at right now and where it is headed. I've got tons of plans to make this engine accessible and rich, so I'll need help, support and feedback along with a little elbow grease.
So what did I have in mind with creating Legacy? Legacy comes from a background of Eclipse engines, Eclipse being a long-running line of ORPG engines written in Visual Basic 6. The community behind it has always been full of talent and plenty of code contributions have become available. The problem I've always had is that their engine lineup and community support has been very difficult and elitist when it comes to people who come from no coding experience or cannot get their hands or work with VB6. This was because in order to create something meeting the standards of an RPG today, you needed to be able to program your own systems. My vision with this engine was to implement features that can easily make it so the development team never has to touch the code, but if you want to, you have free reign over it. Of course I develop the engine in releases so bug fixing can be taken right to me. I wanted Mirage Legacy to break the norm of Eclipse-based engines and provide a professional and easy to understand suite.
Where are we at right now with this goal? We were reserving Legacy and releasing it on select few sites before we released it to IndieDB with v1.1.1 because we knew we had to fill a tall order. As the head developer of the project, I had to consider my very own game design theory along with what everyone else might need in order to create an RPG. Our engine is kept at a certain element of simplicity because this way the users can easily understand the environment. Our goal is open-ended really, because it's based on user feedback that we grow and improve.
What's left to be done, however? The task of maintaining the engine is never over, but when it comes to getting things done, my main concern is documenting the engine functions using tutorials, reference sheets and visual guides. The engine's many functions can be somewhat intimidating, but it is not my belief that an engine should be released without providing documentation and support. As I write this article and even as you read it this is probably our biggest and most important matter to deal with here at Voltisoft in regards to the engine's progression.
To those who are interested in the project, I'll need your help too! I need people to stress test my engine and see what they can do to it, all kinds of things need to be tested! I'd also love it if people could list their game made with Legacy under our project page. Any recommendations or feedback are gladly welcomed, and I appreciate every bit of it!
Happy Developing,
-Kevin.
