Project Top Secret is an absolutely astounding venture that I happened upon a few weeks ago. After spending a few days doing some research, I discovered that this was no new discovery. In fact, this project, spearheaded by renowned video game director David Perry and Acclaim, has been going on for several months and has been featured on sites such as IGN, The Inquirer and Joystiq. From recent readings I have done, it seems that the consensus of the gaming community, driven by the announcement of the genre of the game, is one of skepticism. I must admit that skepticism has haunted my thoughts at times and the community driven discussion has at times seemed to be a bit out of order, I am reminded that nothing worth doing is ever easy. This game, in a nutshell, is to be an entirely community driven venture; no, not simply the character creation and story input, but everything from the world design to that of community development teams doing the final programming themselves.

After my initial research on the project, the desire to be a part of the game creation process in some way that has smoldered in me just about as long as I can remember began to be fanned to life. Ever a fan of the RPG genre, I fell into the same assumption that so many people who have read about this project were also guilty of: this game, obviously, is going to be some sort of MMORPG. In fact, while this game is an MMO, it is going to be following the racing genre! But, it will not be like any racing game you have ever played before. Rather than driving vehicles around static tracks, the players will be able to create a persona who will actually be a rider: one with the ability to train, breed and race beasts on courses filled with obstacles and other riders. While the premise of the races will incorporate a lot of action and racing elements for the races (and battles within those races), the overarching game world will still be one that is reminiscent of an MMORPG. Players will be able to interact with one another on many different levels, purchase items and weapons, breed their mounts and participate in RPG-esque quests throughout the world.

I personally have been taking a large interest in assisting in the writing and design of the game world, character development and world history as a whole. One of my drawings to the RPG genre has always been the complexity of story lines and the intertwining of items, battles and believable worlds outside our own. I am incredibly excited at even the most remote possibility of being able to actually claim participation in a major video game production, and I am trying to scrape together any free time I can (usually simply minutes here and there) where I can give input on different areas of the design process in which I feel I may actually have something valid to add. In addition, I have had the privilege to receive an invitation to join one of the development teams, so I have been able to use my web knowledge and experience to help out with our submissions to the PTS community as well. Merciless Development is a pair of incredibly talented programmers based in the UK who have spent the recent part of their careers developing an amazing cooperative mod for Valve’s Half Life 2 game using the Source SDK released to developers via Steam. This coop mod, Follow Freeman by name, has quite a following, and those who have played the mod speak very highly of it as well. Using their knowledge of the SDK, Merciless has already been able to provide David Perry and company with a hands-on demonstration of their capabilities. With only a handful of days’ development time put in, we already have been able to demonstrate checkpoints, lap counters, and model adjustment to allow players to run the tracks in a simulated racing environment.

My current addition to the team is to help organize a website that will allow us to promote our submissions to PTS while updating the community with the newest additions. For you web guys out there, you may appreciate the simplicity and functionality of the site with which we will be working. Currently sitting on my server here, I have just begun to transfer data over to the servers used by Merciless in order to keep all their products centralized in one location. The site is set up to use mod_rewrite for the individual pages, and in using this method, the admin panel allows any of the three of us on the team to create new pages and choose what we want the URL for that page to be. This site is intended to be simplistic in design yet very sophisticated in scope. Once we get more support and interest in our submission, we will be working on the best way by which to keep the community up to date on the development process. We will also be working on submission forms by which artist can submit concept art, 3D renders, textures or any other works they desire while writers will be able to submit their final versions of story. When all is said and done, I will most likely be acting as the compiler and editor for our PTS submission as well.

One final thing I wish to touch on is the driving force behind this whole thing. To be perfectly honest, I have to hold on to the hope that this, in some way, will help me to break into the gaming industry. Game design has always been an interest of mine, and I would definitely jump at the opportunity to further myself and have my name be recognized within the industry. However, I can honestly say that the biggest driving factor to this point is to see this type of project succeed. I cannot express my admiration of Dave Perry and his foresight in putting something like this together. Anything we, as gamers, can do to help in a project such as this is a small thing to help repay this visionary. Oh, yes, and I almost forgot to mention the actual prizes. Dave Perry himself will be selecting a single individual who shines throughout the course of this development process: showing their possession of knowledge, organization and that special thing that only Dave knows what it is. This individual will be given the opportunity to be the director of Dave’s next game. I don’t know if the significance of that really sinks in for everyone who reads this, but this single prize alone could very well be enough to launch someone into a full career in the video game industry. Having your name on a major title produced by a major company such as Acclaim with all the recognition and royalties involved would be absolutely amazing. While I have no false aspirations that I will win that type of prize, never having done any work in the industry before, I am sold on the need for dedication to a project this size, and I will be doing all I can in my free time to see to it that anything worthwhile I have to add will be committed to the project.