Beanstalk (space elevator) model

Asylum was originally a mission-driven mod for EoC. Hot4Darmat and I sought not to change the core gameplay but to focus on missions and cutscenes. We wanted to continue the story told in EoC and illustrate what happened to the rest of humanity after the release of the Chaos Aliens.

Of course, everyone in this hobby has to have a dream... right? I'd hoped that, if a good enough job was done, we'd be able to approach PS with the completed mod and see if it could not be released as an expansion.

Of course PS became Argonaut-Sheffield... and then Argonaut closed its doors (a crime of economics if ever there was one). And the dream which drove Asylum went out the window. I became a bit depressed over it... so much work had been done. And increasingly it looked like Asylum, when released, would only reach a handful of die-hard fans who still owned EoC.

It became hard to work on Asylum. We have a wonderful story, but so much work remained to be done. And the thought that hardly no one would see it was maddening. To try to moderate this fear I'd hoped to package up the cutscenes and fill out the missions with new scenes, and after Asylum's release as a mod put together a small, free internet movie which could be downloaded.

That's a lot of work. But still I was willing if it got the story out there.

Finally I reached a point where I could not find EoC on Ebay... and came to the realization that the game is nearly a part of history. That finally pushed me to contact Hot4Darmat. We began to discuss taking the story out of the I-War universe and building a stand-alone game which could be marketed on the internet.

So I'm building a space sim. And I've got my dream back, but I've lost the I-War universe to play in. If I thought for one moment that I could track down the owners of the license I'd jump at the chance to purchase it... or even create the game and then allow them to publish it. I'm much happier in I-War. And this is the universe Asylum began in. But repeated attempts to contact them have failed... so a new universe has to be created and the storyline altered somewhat to make it fit. (Still, I'm researching some last-ditch efforts to contact the license owners. A new updated and moddable I-War title would keep the series going and save me a truckload of work.)

I'm currently developing the design document for this new phase. I've looked over engines like Torque and Ogre... but have decided to write my own utilizing DirectX (thus... I've already limited my platform to Windows... but DirectX eases a good deal of the workload (input/audio/etc.).

Leaving Freehauler was indeed difficult. Damon and I are still good friends and have discussed ways to cooperate and assist each other in our development. But Freehauler is a good ways ahead of Asylum in development and is now getting to the point where recruitment can commence. They're in good shape.