As I mentioned in the last news update, we reached our 10th birthday here recently. I thought that it would be a good time to share the story of Allacrost, since very few people have known about our efforts for its entire existence and so much has changed from the beginning to today. It’s pretty amazing to have this kind of history with a project such as ours. Hopefully you’ll find this information both educational and entertaining.

There’s so much to this story and no way to share it all in a single news post. I’m going to break the tale up into digestible segments and publish a new post roughly every week until we are caught up to the present. So I hope that you’ll continue to check back with us and relive the past. If you’d like to ask questions or make other comments regarding this post or any other in the series, I’ve made a thread on our forums for you to share your thoughts. It is linked at the bottom of this post.

Birthing Process (June 2004)

Allacrost was born in June 2004, but this story begins a few months before that date. I was in my final semester of college and had begun using Linux exclusively for all of my computing needs. As I began looking around for games to play on Linux, I quickly discovered Battle for Wesnoth [1], a turn-based strategy game that was free to play and open source. I was inspired. Studying this game and the people behind it made me realize that I already had at my disposal all the tools and abilities that I needed to create a game of my own. The only thing that I was missing was time. I began pondering game development, which had long been an aspiration of mine during my childhood. But I soon pushed these thoughts aside as my studies were far more important to focus on.

In May, I graduated with my degree in computer engineering. I was committed to continue on to grad school, but classes didn’t start until August and I had nothing to do for that entire summer. I was bored out of my mind. From this boredom, I began writing a short story one day; Something that was completely out of the ordinary for me to do. I had no plan for what or who it was going to be about, and let my imagination make it all up as I went along.

When I had finished, I read it through and thought that it wasn’t half bad. So, I decided to share my story online and get feedback on it. I posted it to the AnimeSuki forums, a community that I was an active member of at the time, and I received overwhelming positive feedback on it. I decided to write a little bit more, and the story quickly grew on me. You can still find the original thread that gave birth to Allacrost on the AnimeSuki forums [2], though that first draft of the story is no longer available.

The success of this story caused me to recall my curiosity about game development from earlier in the year. I started brainstorming and sharing some game design ideas on the same forums in another thread [3]. One forum member sent me a private message stating that he was interested in working together with me on the game that I had been describing. A friend and classmate of mine from college also expressed his interest after I shared my story and aspirations with him. We somehow managed to find an artist and a composer willing to lend a hand as well, and the team was born.

Roots - Team Lead, Developer, Writer

gorzuate - Developer

Balthazar - Manager, Developer, Editor

Biohazard - Artist

StarPilot - Composer

I chose a domain name URL and hosting provider, set up a (very primitive) website, and installed the phpBB forums. The forums came online on the 16th of June, 2004 and this is the day that we recognize as the birthdate for the Allacrost project. I’ve always told people that this project was the result of a series of fortunate accidents. I was never very serious about making a video game, as it was all just a group of ideas that were floating around in my head. Everything I needed to turn a dream into a reality just seemed to fall together in my lap all at once. Before I knew it, I had a story, a website, and an excited team to turn ideas into something tangible.

Sources:

[1] Battle for Wesnoth - http://www.wesnoth.org

[2] AnimeSuki Forums - Short Story Thread

[3] AnimeSuki Forums - Early Allacrost Design Ideas Thread

Coming up next:

The origins of the main theme and core features

Turning ideas into realities

Early concept art and designs

Forum Discussion Thread