No. 1, November 14, 1997
Welcome to the world of Panumbra, the first game of Shareplay!
You are reading the very first Panumbra newsletter. If you cannot recall ever hearing about Panumbra, its maiden name used to be Dungeon. Which leads me to the news right away.
The newsletter will be published on an "as needed" basis, i.e. when there is anything to report. I estimate that you will probably get one or two newsletters per month.
This is the very first newsletter, and I sent it to not only the people who signed up for it, but also those who may be interested in it. All additional newsletters will be sent to only those people who sign up. If you are interested in receiving this newsletter and are not signed up, please drop an e-mail to mcc@manton.com.
We named the game! After one and a half year of development and struggle to find a name, the team unanimously accepted Panumbra as a cool and mystical sounding name, appropriate for an RPG.
We announced the existence of Panumbra and the website on Wednesday, Nov. 11, 1997. I sent out e-mails to register Panumbra on several online multiplayer game listings, and added the website to search engines. By far I got response from Geoslums, which lists us in their OOG (Other Online Games) section, and the Mudconnector, where we are listed in the graphical MUDs section.
Development news. Panumbra will go into system test next week. We call system test the first internal test conducted by a non-developer. It is similar to alpha test, if you are more familiar with that term. We configured the test server and are in the process of setting up the first tests over the Internet. In internal testing the game (demo version) seems pretty stable, both on the server and the client. The graphics still need quite a bit of work, though.
Demo release news. We plan to release the demo version in the first half of December, 1997. We urge players to try the demo and report problems with it, however we will not organize a big beta test, simply because we do not have the resources to support it. We will incorporate suggestions and correct problems in the upcoming release version. We will have an organized beta test for the first release version, expected around March 1998. We will keep you updated.
Demo features. You can read about the features what goes into the demo on the website, under the features section. It will be pretty basic, from a game play point of view. The demo will contain eight world areas to explore. six of them will be mines, two of them caves. The graphics will be pretty much the same in the same type of world area. There are about 20 different monsters you can encounter and fight.
The praise of our development philosophy. Behind what you can see in the demo lies a quite sophisticated and extremely flexible game engine. Our emphasis is on the server, for players that means that we concentrate on the variety and sophistication of the game play rather than the flashy graphics. The features the system already contains are very sophisticated, albeit there is a limited number of them. As an example, the skill advancement system is completely implemented already, and allows skills being dependent on other skills, and custom templates to allocate skill points. Those features will be important when we release later versions. Our development philosophy is to make only what you can make at a time, but make that well!
Thank you for reading this newsletter!
Marta Gabnai - lead designer
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