Our magical world would have it’s own lore. It’s own story. It’s own history.
I’ve made decision to rename ‘Angband Online’ project to ‘Tangaria’ (accessible by tangaria.com). There are several reasons why I did so, there they are:
- for more than 10 years I’m creating my own fantasy world in form of the book. It’s called ‘Tangaria’. And it could be fun to make it ‘alive’ for real – in multiplay online game! Also I’ll start publishing chapters from my book at this website 🙂
- ‘Angband’ is Tolkien-based name and game itself got a lot of Tolkien lore in. And it means possible copyright problems, especially if we ever would come to Steam platform (which probably wouldn’t happen in several years, but still)
- ‘Angband’ name for a game got quite big history and I’m not sure that I deserve honour to use it; I was always a bit unsure – was I right to call project by this ‘loud’ name
- There is also http://angband.live which appeared long time before AO and it’s quite easy to get confused between angband.live and angband.online
- Acronym ‘AO’ is referring to a lot of other online games (eg Albion Online, Anarchy Online etc)
- ‘Tangaria’ sound more unique, it’s easy to remember (especially among 100+ variants of Angband).
- And the last reason.. I didn’t want to share it at the beginning, but I think I should do it to be completely honest. At first when I started ‘Angband Online’ server I was very proud to be part of V-Angband community. But after recent changes in V-Angband lore, something broken inside me and I can not properly associate myself with Angband community anymore. I respect this people, but I feel myself as divergent; I do not feel myself comfortable when I’m working at ‘Angband Online’ project after all this fray. So it’s time to part our ways.
Tangaria would have it’s own lore, world and story. But it doesn’t mean that any traditional *band monsters would have to go. For vanilla Angband, all lore concentrated in monsters. And I’ll preserve all of them and would treat it with great respect; I would just carefully rename copyrighted boss-monsters (to preserve their ‘meaning’) and would adapt DnD and Tolkien lore pieces to ‘Tangaria’ ones.
Just a small lore sneak-peak @ Tangaria:
Dragons and Giants (some like to call them Titans) are essential, primal forces of the World. Their magic was what gave life to the Earth and divided it from chaos. For the past ages there was relatively calm and peaceful life (if you could call it peaceful when hordes of orcs fight men, undeads stumbling elves from the north and Covent of Mages burning whole cities alive), but now there appeared some strange events which look like real signs of coming catastrophe..
You could ask: “How come The Dark Lord could fill in to this concept?”. Soon you would know 😉 All this years it’s very hard to force myself to write book cause I put it ‘inside of my table’. At last I’ll be able to publish stuff on-fly, so I hope it would motivate me to work more intensive on it 🙂
And at the end, considering Steam publishing (as some folks asked about it): it’s VERY long-long time away from now. But I think it’s possible to achieve it one day – for the sake of online roguelike genre promotion. Good example of proper Steam publishing in roguelike genre are ADOM and ToME – where game itself is free without any restrictions if you download it at the website, but if someone would buy game via Steam – it would be possible to aquire achievements and Steam ‘cards’, which give modern generation of players (who mostly non-familiar with hardcore classic roguelike perma-death gameplay) feeling of progress. We could try to implement it one day.
At the same time one of major things which I still see is an attempt to combine efforts of all 3 teams which work at online rogulike genre right now: MAngband, TomeNET and PWManband. We should work together at common ‘game engine’ core; at the same time each game could have it’s own unique features as sub-systems which could be turned on/off as modules to the core.. Soon I’ll make a presentation about it.
And another good news: PWMAngband new release is coming closer; it’s a major one, with a lot of great features. I’ll try to finish work on ‘basic’ world layout asap to be able to migrate server to the new version at once.