Log 1 – From idea to production
Welcome Colonists, to Rokh’s Dev Diary. I’m Ben, Creative Director of the game.
We’re so excited to launch this devblog. We’ll use it to share with you our plans, our progress, our success and even our struggles.
Rokh is an amazing project. It’s an insanely deep Sandbox which makes it a great challenge to build. Remember, we are developing this game for you folks, so please give us some feedback. We’ve made sure to have all interaction channels available to you: the dev blog itself, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
I’m aiming at a weekly post here and will also answer all the questions you might have in a video regularly. Stay tuned, we’ll release the first one very soon.
Before getting into more content, I would like – on behalf of both Darewise and Nvizzio – to thank you all for the incredible support we’ve received so far. Coming from AAA games, we’ve lost this kind of connection with the community and it’s such a great feeling to get it back.
The idea & concept of Rokh
As most of you I guess, we’re die-hard survival games players here and the Rokh concept was created while enjoying DayZ and Rust. I must say that I was so happy to finally experience again the intensity of a real persistent game with Rust, that the stress generated from being away from the computer kind of reminded me of a game of my childhood called Mankind.
We really wanted to work on a true Sandbox game, the one where the Users Generate the Experience.
That’s what you can expect with Rokh: a real survival Sandbox on Mars. Here, no mission or quest givers, you have a complete freedom to play the game any way you want. Trade, build, fight…. Find your own way to survive and interact with others. In a game where everything is craftable, your imagination and creativity are your only limits.
But don’t stay away too long, the game world never stops!
The roadmap
Rokh’s production is organized in milestones. We are working on a new milestone every two months. Each milestone brings another layer of polish and adds new parts of the design. Since September we have designed a lot of systems: habitat building, crafting, programming, combat as well as creating lots of concept art. We have completed two milestones, fully on track with our initial planning.
Rokh Development roadmap
During each milestone period, we are working in sprints. Each sprint lasts two weeks and focuses on certain parts of the milestone.
Rokh Milestones list
As you can see, the level of polish shifts from Design to Prototype, to Basic, to Intermediate and finally to Alpha.
Rokh’s map concepts
Map Render at basic level – no texture
What’s coming up next?
Next week I will present to you in more details the map that you will be surviving on when playing Rokh. It will include the map’s design, how it was created, and its current look.
Stay tuned and in the meantime, don’t hesitate to shoot your questions here or on our social media channels.
Have a good day.
Ben.
PS: The original project code name may have been revealed in this post…