Legends of Echo goes live

Today marks the launch of a project that I have been working on at Vodacom for the past 11 months or so. Legends of Echo is a massively multiplayer online location based mobile social game (and if you feel like it, you can throw in role-playing game in there). All in all that makes is a MMOLBMSG(RPG). There are going to be a few different acronyms that emerge for Legends of Echo (LoE) but I like the whole bang-shoot.Let me not get ahead of myself here. I've been trying to keep this all in check but working on a product for 11 months means that I have a lot to say about it, it's difficult to put it all out there in a sensible fashion.

Legends of Echo from Cow Africa on Vimeo.

Let's begin at the beginning. Vincent Maher is my boss at Vodacom (he's also a great friend of mine but that's besides the point) and he hired me nearly a year ago to help him with a few projects. The most ambitious and innovative was Echo (as it was known back then). My first week I was thrown in to the non-existent deep end of a product that emerged out of Vincent's insatiable appetite for innovation. LoE emerged from a need that Vincent and our technology partners, Afrigis, had to take The Grid's technology to the next level (The Grid is the other major product that I manage at Vodacom).What emerged out of Vincent's mind and the technology that Afrigis had built for The Grid was the desire to build a location based mobile game.There are many different facets to building a game. I had never dealt with any of these different facets. I was a game-building virgin if I can say it that way.So to sum a few things upThis game is not just a game, it's going to hopefully become a way of life for the players in the Echo. It's an alternative reality where role-playing is the order of the day. You can be who you want to be and you define the story. There is no underlying story line here. We wanted the users to take this game to the level that they felt it should reach.There is an entire economy in the game. There is a marketplace that players can use to buy and sell items. You can also use your own home base or Arcanium to sell items. Currency or Elements form a major part of strategy in LoE. But don't be misled, the game does not require players to spend airtime to be successful. Standard data rates apply and that's where the cost begins and ends if you don't want to spend money. You don't have to spend cash to be a legend in Echo.We encountered many extremely interesting scenarios around the mechanics of the game. You'll see them all unfold but one of the most exciting for me was whether we were building another social network where you could play a game or a game that allowed people to socially network. You can decide which one you think it is, but I think we've built a game and integrated social networking capabilities that allow gameplay to be user driven and defined.Many, Many thanksBeing named as the Director of a project of this caliber is incredible and I'm extremely proud of what we are launching today. Having worked with the people I have worked with I need to thank many of them:Vincent Maher provided incredible calm and steadfast guidance when it was called for. He definitely helped us stay on our toes and assisted me in bringing this game to life in absolutely every aspect of the development process. It's always great to work with people who push you to do better and approach the norms from abnormal angles and Vincent is most definitely that person. Whatever happens with Legends of Echo this game has, without a doubt, been the high-point of my career and would never have happened if Vincent didn't hire me and put his trust in me to get this game done. So my main word of thanks goes out to him, no doubt.Pietman du Toit and Armand van der Merwe need special mention over at Afrigis, our technology partners on this project and The Grid. The two of them did a sterling job of managing me while I managed them and worked many, many, many long and hard hours to ensure that this game actually went live.Rob Van Zyl from Pleasant Company did the most phenomenal job of making this game stand out and have immediate appeal. He also created fantastic debate in the group and helped us arrive at a killer game.Cow Africa, our advertising agency went well above and beyond the every day workings of an advertising agency. They will be bringing the game to life in all of our above the line media that is to come. Watch out for that, it's going to be epic.Lastly I think it is necessary to thank Vodacom for having the foresight to allow a project of this nature to exist at all. Being innovative is always easy to speak about but very rarely ever achieved and I think we've come close as a team. We wouldn't have been able to do so if Vodacom hadn't have endorsed our ideas and way of thinking in the way that they have.I am not going to repeat my esteemed colleagues, tech partners and our ad agency by regurgitating definitions and explanations by hand here. What I am going to do is quote Vincent's blog post where he effectively explains what we've been doing for the past 11 months:Be sure to head over and read Vincent's entire blog post on Legends of Echo.

What is Legends of Echo?We remapped the whole of South Africa into a steam-punk-ish world and packed it full of weapons and other items that people can pick up and use against each other.The players are divided into 5 bloodlines – Earth, Water, Fire, Air and we added Industry. Each bloodline has two allied bloodlines and two mortal enemies and as players try to thrive in the Echo they will need to make complex political alliances to get the stuff they need – Elements. Elements are the lifeblood of a bloodline. You need them to build weapons, buy weapons, gifts and other items that you need to survive.The game world has an in-game newspaper called the Echo Enquirer where players get the latest news – for example a massive stash of Fire Elements laying near the Spar in Wendywood, or a shift in the Eastern Cape bloodline domination, or a general call to arms.And underlying all of this, a location-based system that knows where you are in the real world and hence where you are in the game world. There are over 60 000 real locations in the game, excluding every single suburb in the country. You can tell your friends to meet you on Signal Hill for a massacre at 5PM, or that your Arcanium (your house) is near the Engen Garage in Ventersdorp.South Africa looks different in the EchoYour Arcanium is also a shopfront, so if you find stuff in the Echo you can sell and trade it for Elements. Passers-by can enter your house and buy directly from you, even when you are not online.The ArtworkWhen we started this project our goal was to make it as visually rich as possible without breaking the bank. Have a look at some of the graphics below, our creative director Rob Van Zyl from Pleasant Company did a fantastic job of translating and augmenting our vision. Our agency Cow Africa have done a fantastic job of keeping us all sane (unusual for an agency) and have done some amazing things with our launch media, the cinema ad, the radio campaign that will go on air soon and our AWESOME t-shirts.There are lots of different kinds of weapons, powers and items that you can pick up by moving around the country from city to city, province to province. Each one gives you a slightly different edge in battle.Each screen has been meticulously designed to look as good as it can on a mobile phone and there are tons more game graphics, wallpapers and other cool stuff available at legendsofecho.com.Nic and I story-boarded every single screen in the game, every single menu item and all the paths a user can take. There are just over 190 screens in the game with many permutations depending on the context.Social Vs BattleOne of the most entertaining things to do in the Echo is to find a completely random person and challenge her to a battle. The battle is fun and is greatly affected by the weapons and health items that you carry around with you. It’s not all about battle though, you can also chat with other users using intant messaging, or go to their Arcaniums and leave messages on the walls of their houses.There is a Players and Chat section in the game that keeps a list of your contacts, shows you who is online (so you can teleport to them and fight them) and a section for chatting with each other.The TechnologyOur development partners, Afrigis (who also work on The Grid) have done an outstanding job of getting this game as scalable and bandwidth-light as possible. As it’s a mobile game one of the main objectives was to keep the volume of data transferred between the client and the server ultralight and we have got it to the point where it will cost you about R2 (out of bundle) to play for an hour which is really good considering the richness of the experience.The backend is build on Darkstar, a project initially by Sun Microsytems and now RedDwarf at Oracle. Darkstar is build for this kind of thing and it works really really well. We have made some modifications to the code to optimise it for the mobile experience but we’re all quire sure the people at Oracle are going to be stoked to see what we did with their tech.Some background – LoE’s precursor was a SMS game called OpenSeason built by RetroRabbit and Afrigis in 2004 and our script-writer was one of the original team who worked on that game. Things have progressed really far since OpenSeason though, as you will see when you look at the UI.

You can download the game by visiting the mobi site: www.legendsofecho.mobi and choosing the application that will work on your phone.Follow Legends of Echo on Twitter for game updates and information.