With WireWorks out in the wild, the time has come to move full speed ahead on our main objective: Emerald Kingdom. Doing a persistent, multiplayer world with new features not found in every other MMORPG has always been our primary goal. WireWorks was necessary to help us get our bearings, and figure out workflow, process and design. While we are still learning new things in these regards, WireWorks has gone a long way to solidifying how we work as a group.

That being said, we have a couple official announcements. We are beginning to build some infrastructure on the emeraldkingdom.com domain:

There is not much there at the moment. Mainly links of interest for now. We are working on applying a uniform styling and UI across emeraldkingdom.com, as well as doublecluepon.com. However, it is a place you should bookmark, and keep tabs on.

It may seem like a jump of the gun, but the bottom line is development, while already brisk and moving quickly, is about to get another shot in the arm. That said, we want to start opening up a bit more, and being more discussion oriented. Another reason is, as WireWorks will be a part of Emerald Kingdom, we will be offering support for it there.

We also want to continue in our tradition of being “open” about how and why we do things, letting people who follow us have a window into our designs and work. While we cannot be everything to everyone, we want to stay true to our mission: creating things which do not suck, and eating our own dog food. We realize we could just disappear for months on end and then show back up when we have something in the can. To a lot of game developers, this may be the norm. For us, we see that from our perspective as leaving out the most important part of the equation: the players.

A big part of continuing this “Open” methodology is the Emerald Kingdom forums. Later today, I will be starting a thread which will outline some of the basic features being planned for Emerald Kingdom v1.0. If you want to know what the plan is, and where we are taking this…the forums will be the first place you should look. But we want you to do more than look. We want you to poke Double Cluepon. We want you to ask questions, make suggestions, and take up our invitation to look through the window into what we are doing.

Next stop on this train is Emerald Kingdom.

All aboard.