Hello everyone,
Today I was digging through some old files and stumbled across an extremely early alpha of Barony dated from when the game was only 7 months into development. For historic interests I thought you'd all be interested in seeing what the game looked like at that stage of development, so here is a first ever public link to that alpha version of the game:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gb8sssj8w6qa6sx/BaronyAlphaPublic.zip?dl=0
Some interesting things to notice:
- An original software renderer! No fancy openGL stuff involved.
- We didn't have our own music yet... Chris had composed a few tracks, but none of them fit what we were going for so we just stole tracks from Ultima Underworld instead.
- The game's backstory changed a few times during development... the one we ended up with in the end was ultimately the first one we came up with, however.
- The only working enemy in the game is the rat.
- Morrowind style combat (ie hit chance) was a big thing. I had been playing a lot of Morrowind at the time and so I had come to think it might be a fun idea to toy around with. It didn't get tossed out until about two weeks from our Steam release.
- No swimming
- No removing torches from walls
- A lot of objects are unusable
- Even at this stage, multiplayer had been working for months (though shakily and inefficiently)
- Most of the level design for the mines was already done (though it would be refined in minor ways many times over the following months)
- Art spreadsheet, audio spreadsheet, and two versions of the game's design document! These documents were written by me personally with minor edits from other team members. They were used to help coordinate development early in the project but for the most part they fell out of use once everyone on the team got a feel for what the project was and where it was headed.
- Though you can't see it in this download, the game was cross-platform from the beginning and we were developing and building binaries for both Windows and at least two flavors of Linux.
- We had a few more monsters planned for the game than what ended up in the final version. Perhaps these monsters will make a return in a future update.
Perhaps if you go digging you will find more interesting things that I have missed. It's been a long time since I've looked at any of this old stuff, so I hope you guys have fun looking at the game as it was in a rather primordial state.
Cheers,
Sheridan