Title:  The Foundations of Hope Online
Genre: Christian Fantasy MMORPG
Game Website: www.foundationsofhope.com
Company Website: http://www.lethalgamescorporation.com

Background:
The Foundations of Hope Online is the online game based on my Christian Young Adult Fantasy book series and is being marketed as a Christian Fantasy MMORPG.

I am hoping I am 6 months from going full Alpha and figured I'd start posting updates at MMORPG.com.   Alpha to Beta should take less than 6 months after that.  Currently FoHO is in pre-Alpha testing which means I am letting people into the world as I still build it.  Pre-Alpha is all about creating the technology and the art while Alpha will be about testing the storyline, quests, etc. and Beta will be everything in full testing before going live.  I am hoping MMORPG.com will setup a Foundations of Hope Online area so I can post updates there, but for now I'll just post them in this thread.

Storyline Intro:
From the back page of Book One: Faith of the Unforgotten
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Four hundred years into the future, after the Great Pulse Storms began, the civilizations on Earth have managed to stay alive and cope with the changes that were dealt to them. The Great Pulse Storms have made it impossible for electricity to exist, and the ionic atmosphere from the Storms ignites nearly all explosive substances. Overnight, the Storms had set the civilizations back to a medieval-like time, and only the strong and knowledgeable survived. But the potential for humans to remain alive and free on the planet will once again be tested.

Dragons have returned from a time of old, and an intelligent lizard species from within the Earth is waging war upon the upper land-dwelling humans in an effort to take their lands and take the humans as slaves. The merciless enemy is stronger, quicker and more intelligent than humans, and all looks to be lost for the descendants of the Heroes of Sorms.

Rebekah Ann Smith, a spirited, fifteen-year-old innkeeper's daughter, has been placed at the forefront of the battle for the existence of their lands and lives. Rebekah and a small, scattered group are all that stand as a chisel against a mountain that is ready to fall. All they have left is hope that their faith can move that mountain, and hope that the Gifts given to them by their God can cut through the falling boulders of human desolation.
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Game Intro:
The Foundations of Hope Online game will place a player in the middle of the Saurian(lizard creatures) and Human battle. The storyline of the game will run along side the storyline of the series. Players will not play characters from the book, but who knows, the characters from the book may pop up every now and then(GMs). FoHO will be part Realm vs Realm and the rest PvE. Players will choose to be either a Human, Saurian, or a dragon. The game will take place in a future medieval North America and will have many zones taking place in areas such as Lansing, Detroit, Chicago and New York. North America will be divided into two realms. The Saurians control the southern half and the humans control the north. Each of these realms will be split into either PvP or PvE zones. PvE players may have to cross into another realm's PvE zones, but they will not be forced into PvP action.

During the physical battles, there is another battle going on that humans can deal with if they go that route, the Spiritual Warfare aspect.  My goal for the game is to not make a 'preachy' game, but acceptable to mainstream and Christian-gamers. It is a very very thin line, but I have done it with my books, and I am confident I can do it with the game. I personally would never play a preachy game, so I stay far away from that. For example, the human 'magic' is replaced by Gifts given by God. They still will have abilities of swords of fire, lightning strikes, 'fire from heaven', etc. Is that overly preachy to a gamer? No. Is it Christian-acceptable? Yes. Everybody wins.

FoHO will have both a low-end and high-end client.  Players will be able to play on older computers or players can turn on shaders and play with the eyecandy.  There will also be a Windows and MacOS client.

The base game will take place in North America.  From there, expansions using the other continents are planned.

The FoHO Project Tracker can be found here:

http://www.foundationsofhope.com/mantis/roadmap_page.php
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Marketing:
Provided are the covers showing how the game is being marketed in the bookstores.

http://www.foundationsofhope.com/screenshots/fotu/fotu_paperback_72.jpg

http://www.foundationsofhope.com/screenshots/itd/itd_paperback_72.jpg

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Here are just a few of my favorite pics, but you can find the rest at.

http://www.foundationsofhope.com/screenshots.php

ive been searching... for something worth dying for ... to make it beutiful to live... i believe ive just found it...

Impressive.

The screen shots are great.

Whoever did the website did a good job too, it was worth turning my flash-block off :)

Shouldn't you have an alternative text version for SEO'ing it though? When the search engines spider though your site they wont be able to see your content. Or will your pagerank be based 100% from inbound links? (Sorry, I do web site's so I'm constantly thinking about things like this)

Leathel,

Very impressive Website. I really like the background story and concept for the game. I always believed the `literal` interpretations of the Bible offered excellent material for Fantasy games. I'm certain many games use connotations from the Good Book to build their Lore upon. 

I'm gonna be honest with you, slapping the word `Christian` on the front will leave some gamers who are not to feel excluded or not welcomed. I had some experiences with `Christains` that left me feeling left out. Your background story read like Fantasy, but as soon as as saw the word `Christian` I automatically assumed - oh, oh, its gonna get preachy and thats not for me... even though that is not the case.

Foundations of Hope Online transcends not only one paradigm, but two. You have my best wishes for success. 

Thanks for the responses.

The website initially was a full flash web template but has been heavily modified to fit over osCommerce and phpBB.  So I get the special effects of flash, but still get the full operations of the other technologies.  My worry it is not the standard MMORPG company type website(a little to flashy) but good to hear you didn't mind it.  I just updated the website with new content after creating it over a year ago.  Kind of funny cause the website is rather large and I had to go through a bunch of files to figure out how I achieved many of the tasks.

The search engines are defintely on my mind, but for now just relying on direct linking.

I agree on the Christian labeling.  I have seen games out there, and well they are just not my type.  Hoping I can break that stigma with a good raw non-preachy game.  The FPS game that Lethal Games has planned will be an even darker, hardcore game, but still Christian acceptable.  So we'll see if I can pull off the style  

Speaking of website, I use the website as the foundations of what the game guis look like, so since I recently updated all the website images, here is a glimpse on how the game guis turned out.

Just one more old update to catch people up. The rest of the updates will be the new additions to the game. 

December 2008 was my underwater design/modelling of the game. Not sure how many MMORPG's have underwater zones, but thought it was pretty cool. More pics are at the website, but a few to show off here. One of the underwater zones take place in a flooded New York where people will be able to swim around skyscrapers and such. The other water zone is the Gulf of Mexico. While I don't have it yet, the goal will be to have some sunken ships in the Gulf of Mexico zone players will be able to swim around in.

Underwater Zone, now thats unique. The client is looking good. Are you developing everything solo?

The technology portion is using the Torque MMOKit which is the same technology from Minions of Mirth.  It is using a newer version of Torque than MoM uses so I can use shaders and more special effects.  We(the kit community) have added alot to the coding that goes beyond MoM(harvesting, synched combat, auction system) so hopefully most of the lackings people found with MoM are gone. So on the technology side we have a group of developers working on seperate games but all helping one another to increase the techology.

Other than that I am doing everything(website, modeling, zone creation, python changes) myself to take the technology and make it how I need it to be for FoHO.  I should be done in 6 months with the technological changes and art assets, then can start working on the biggest part of the game the storyline/quests.  As an author this is rather important to me since I need to almost create a whole story that coincides with my books. 

I forgot I had videos on youtube.  Some special effect testing and also you get an idea of the dragons that are the playable 3rd realm.  You grow your dragon character from a hatchling to an adult dragon.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LeathelGrody

I started implementing the initial stages of the mining skill with breakable rocks.  I previous had just implemented some changes to the charm spells and had a thought I had better test.  Sure enough, I had to tighten down the charm spells.  Why?  I ended up charming the rock I had just placed into the game.  Had a nice big rock following me all around

But in the end everything was locked down and put in place for testing.  I will implement trees that fall and other type of animated harvesting in the future.  Need to remove the 'Corpse' tag still from harvestible items. The inside of the rock does have UV stretching, but it looks like sheared rock so may or may not change it.

The newest edition.

Ooo reminds me of EQ! I want to play!

Originally posted by Eronakis

Ooo reminds me of EQ! I want to play!

There is a sign up at the forums if interested in being part of the testing.

Newest addition to the harvesting.  I was actually surprised on the difficulty of getting a pine tree poly count down.  This one is still 460 polys.

Haven't posted recently. Been too blasted busy. The last couple patches were crazy huge and the next one is going to be just as huge.

The last patch I had to modify almost every zone to include foresting and mining spawns for crafting. All crafting is now done through harvesting trees, rocks, etc.. I probably have over 1000 resource spawns through the game. Thankfully never saw a performance hit on the server and tried to keep them seperated enough through the zones to not kill the FPS too bad on the client. For resources, I implemented eleven of the twelve mining rocks and all six harvestable type trees. I also had to add in mobs around the resources to make harvesting a bit more challenge. I'm not that nice :)

Because I implemented my own mineral deposits and blacksmithing items, I had to also go through and modify the weapon and archery crafting configurations. I now have things like they have to mine copper and tin to make bronze. Or iron and nickel to make steel.

After that patch, it really become noticeable on the Map Windows on what happens when you place alot of spawns in one location. You can't see anything :) So I created new map filters which allows the user to turn on or off Resources, Vendors, Quest NPCs, Trainers, as well as the original NPCs, enemies, etc..

The Tracking Window was totally flooded as well. So instead of removing Resources from the tracking window I decided to change the color the spawns with different colors based on their category. Resources now show up as green, Vendors blue, Trainers yellow, Quest NPCs purple, etc.. But wait, couldn't stop there. Had to color coordinate my game, so I changed spawn colors on the map to coordinate with the Tracking colors. And of course, that wasn't enough of a color coordination. If you looked at the spawn it showed a different color. So I then changed all the different categories to now have a different color to match the map and tracking. Whoosh! I can now leave my house color coordinated. I also was able to remove the "corpse" from the dead resources. No more Copper Vein Corpse or Pine Tree Corpse!

The next patch I am finally working on armor crafting. Ugh. I am just working on the coding side and it is killing me. For now I will implement one texture for light, medium, heavy armors. I just want to get the coding out and tested. Why so difficult? Armor is shown on the characters by swapping out textures. Each male/female Profession(race) has its own UV mapping. So right now I have 3 humans and 3 Saurians(will have more later) and each has a male and female model that has its own UV mapping. Therefore, I have to create the code for 12 chests, boots, arms, etc... Alot of copying/pasting, but still alot of time. Also that is, 12 UV sets times 36 different armor types(12-light, 12-medium, 12-heavy), then times that by five different texture armor parts(chest, boots, hands, arms, legs) equalling 2160 textures. Uhm, I'm going to wait until I try and texture all those :) Unfortunately that is ALOT of textures calls and VRAM usage, so will probably in the beginning just do 1 texture per armor type(light, medium, heavy) instead of 12 and then go from there.  Thankfully the Animal Armor Crafting for pets and Dragons characters will be only one UV to work with so should go fast to implement. Pets don't get texture swapping, but the dragon players do, so that will another set of textures. But besides that, my armor is using resistPhysical to decrease damage so had to spend a few days playing with the numbers per mob level to figure out the appropriate settings to use.

Some pics to show what I mean:

New setup of New York:

Mining in New York(mining all underwater):

Mining in Gulf of Mexico(a total underwater zone):

The new Map and Tracking windows. Also notice the new filter buttons on the map window:

And just some showing of different text colors on the spawns.

For a single person, your work is just AMAZING.

I would consider getting some help. Not that your work isn't good, but adding content to the game is going to be one of the hardest parts.

I'm out of the preachy way, but I still don't see the Christian side of the game. Other inteligent races? (actually "more intelligent than humans" as you said). I mean, that's ok for a fantasy game, but Im still not sure why is it more Christian-Acceptable than any other fantasy MMOs out there. Well, at least you are honest enough to name God and Heaven by those same words instead of using the euphemisms we usually find in games nowadays.

Anyways, great job. Keep us informed.

Great looking game.  I'm looking forward to seeing more as you progress.

As a Christian, I'm always looking for games that I feel comfortable playing and that will be appropriate for my grandchildren.  Interestingly, 4 out of 5 of them are already gamers.  :)  Hopefully this will be one that they can play.

Is this going to be a P2P game or a F2P with a cash shop?  The reason I ask is that I saw "Premium Edition" on one of the screenshots.

May God bless your endeavor.

Ion

Thanks for the comments.

@Duran3d,

FoHO is similar to other fantasy games, I just have toned down alot.  There are no mystics, magicians, sorcerors, druids, etc...  Instead the Humans have Gifts based on Spiritual Gifts that are used.  While I have not yet, later I will reference these spell type skills to verses in the Bible. 

The Saurians and Dragons on the other hand use mental abilities(psionics) to perform their special abilities. So it is more of a scientific nature.  When humans cast a 'spell' it says "character name begins praying".  When Saurians or Dragons do the same it says "character name begins focusing psionic energy".

Other than that much is the same as other games.  A person could play a Saurian or Dragon and never get hit by Christian concepts.  My goal is just to tone things down so parents feel more comfortable about playing in the game instead having their kids in what they might refer to as cultish activities.

While not Christian, there is also chat censoring for swearing.  Just one more layer for the teens.

@Ionselon,

There will be a nerfed Free version(more like Demo) but to access higher levels and Premium items, a player will need to purchase the Premium edition.  Most likely a low yearly fee($39-$49) for Premium online access. 

Testing is always open. Just sign up in the www.foundationsofhope.com forums under General Game Information=>Pre-Alpha Signup.

Very nice design. I agree for a solo effort, this is awesome! The christian label would generally ward me off, as I'm not of said persuasion, but I see that you are keeping the tone light and I'm really hoping people will give your game a shot!

All the best!

About the christian label...

I'm my case it was the opposite: I found it appealing because I expected a storyline different than the overused medieval fantasy. Maybe a fantasy based on early Christian times or maybe and Angels vs Demons background or something.

(just to let you know not everybody will feel intimidated by the christian label).

Will be spending alot of time coming up on different types of crafting so have been crazy busy.

Last couple weeks I've been working on poison crafting. Poisons can be applied to weapons and proc randomly.  Fun stuff.

I have it setup that a player first uses Chemistry in mixing harvested materials and then use the Chemistry item in the final poison crafting.  So have 100 Chemistry and Poison recipes currently setup.

Figured I'd post some pics of the harvestable items for the Poison Crafting. Nothing awe inspiring, just where my time has been lately.

So the last patch was my biggest ever. This next one is probably twice its size :shock: Absolutely huge, but is my favorite.

Hopefully later this week or early next week it will be implemented. Just finishing up creating all the new weapon recipes.

But I have 64 new weapon models equalling 64 different style weapons for crafting. Should have a model type that fits your personality I would think. So that is 64 types X 12 minerals = 768 different craftable weapons.

I also have 12 dragon weapon models now. Will create more later, but atleast better than just the claws.

Some example of dragon weapons:

Was able to get away from crafting code and back to other misc additions. Players enjoyed the wide variety of weapons and the new crafting design.

Besides adding some new features to FoHO I created a new SP for the Torque MMOKit with the same features. New features now include Selectrons around clicked target and floating damage text. I also implemented the ability for clients to turn on or off these options. In FoHO I have implemented multiple Selectron choices a user will be able to choose from so they are not stuck to just one.

I still need to add a gui choice for Selectrons, but users can manually change Selectrons by changing the prefs file.

Floating Text and Selectron:

The Red Arrow Selectron:

My fun task this week was to implement that light sources can now be held in the hands instead of being in the Light slot. Was never realistic to me. Users always had a light glow around them because they never had any need to remove the item. Modified the code to allow Light items to be held in the Secondary hand even if the player did not have the Dual Wield skill. The light sources are 1H Impact so Dual Wielders will use them as weapons and get procs of small fire damage, where as non-Dual Wielders will not get the attacks.

I still need to add a new mount point so the fire is farther out properly, but that will require adding it to all my player models and I'll do that another day. So for now, just using a hand mount point and that is why the fire is in the players palm.

Torch:

Lantern:

Instead of reposting all the same, the newest updates are in an MMORPG Blog.

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Leathel/072009/4168_Foundations-of-Hope-Online-Spiritual-Warfare-Realms

Just released what I call the dragon patch. I removed the template system and implemented that the third realm can now control the dragon stats, classes, etc. just like the other realms. Also figured out a way to still allow the dragons to grow a size at levels 15,30,45,60. So they still start out as dragon hatchlings and at level 60 they finally reach dragon adult.

Dragons now have four colors and five classes.

Also implemented changeclass commands to allow users to ability to change their secondary and tertiary classes but it resets them back to level 1.

I created a fourth realm for animal mobs so they were not part of the dragon realm.

Dragons can do Animal Armor Craft, Animal Weapons Craft, Poison Craft, First Aid Craft, and Enchanting.

I look to have a stable floating damage text and I also might have figured out my random zoning and characters getting stuck issue. Two of my biggest nemesis are hopefully defeated.

New dragon colors and first armor: