DATE POSTED: March 24th, 2017
Big changes for a bigger world!
What a crazy time for the Identity development team over here at Asylum! We've been running all over the place for conferences and expos this month, including both GDC and PAX East, where we met all sorts of new talent and potential technology partners. We've unfortunately had to push back the release of the Town Square module from our original Q1 2017 release with all of the big developments here, but most systems are in place and it's not far off!
The biggest and most exciting news we're officially announcing today is a new partnership with Improbable, the creators of SpatialOS! The Identity team has been testing the waters with SpatialOS for a couple of months now and we're incredibly excited about what it's going to mean for Identity. Identity can now be what we all hoped it would be, a true MMORPG in scale.
SpatialOS is going to power Identity behind the scenes, allowing absolutely enormous scale for our world and the people playing in it. While we had originally hoped to be able to get 300 people into our servers with decent performance, with just a tiny bit more effort we're going to be able to expand that as far as the game needs. Instead of 300 players in a single server, we could now potentially have thousands. The size of our servers are now going to be set based on what we feel is ideal for a fun and immersive environment and we're not limited technically like we were expecting in the past.
It opens more doors than simply the number of players on a server, too. With these changes we can now afford to have a more dynamic and interactive world. We've gained some freedom in manipulating the world and we can create features which we never imagined possible in a game of Identity's scale.
This is all extremely exciting for the team. This technology is a scope-changer and Identity is going to be far better for it. Not only will our world grow, not only will the population be denser, but you'll even be able to leave your mark in many new ways.
Development charging forward
Concept art for Town Square art gallery and library, featuring player content
We're working and expanding at an incredible rate. All key gameplay features for Town Square are now functional as we add polish and work to support SpatialOS in Identity.
The development team has expanded with terrific new talent: Antoine joins Identity's 3D art team, Cody comes on board as a new systems and gameplay programmer and Liam comes in as our first dedicated web developer. Antoine and Cody both bring experience in their field to hasten development for Town Square and Identity as a whole. Liam's talents mean exciting new features on our website will be popping up soon. We've had plenty planned for our website for some time but haven't had the resources to bring these to you, until now.