In a forge there is a moment when the master realises: the blade is good, but the steel will not survive what it was made for. Then it is not sharpened further; it goes back into the fire. This is exactly that moment for us.
What the prototypes gave us
Over these months we built several working prototypes of Alardon. They brought a living world with changing seasons and weather, battles of thousands of warriors, sieges, the hero editor and the banner editor. We showed all of this to you in the blog and in the gallery. The prototypes answered the main question: the game we imagined is fun. And they also showed us where the limit lies.
When thousands of people meet on a field and each of them thinks for himself, when horses carry riders, arrows fly and banners sway in the wind, the old foundation becomes too tight. We could hide that behind simplifications, but then Alardon would become smaller than we imagined it.
One core for everything
So we are reforging the heart of the game. The new core is written from scratch in Rust, a fast and reliable language used for serious servers and engines. The main idea is simple: the same rules of the world live both on the server and in every player's game. The server works out the battle, and the game only shows it. That keeps fights fair and leaves cheaters nothing to tamper with.
Together with the core, the engine that draws the world is changing too. It talks directly to the graphics card and gives us what we were missing: more warriors on one field, more detailed models and animations, living light and cloth.
What stays the same
The world, its history, the eight peoples and everything we have invented are not going anywhere. Models, animations, coats of arms, heroes' faces and thousands of lines of rules move into the new core with us. The foundation changes, the house stays the same, only now its walls are made of stone.
What comes next
The move will take time, and we will not promise dates. But we will show every step here in the blog: the first frames on the new engine, the first battles and the first builds of the game. And in the next post we tell you on which platforms Alardon will appear and in what order.
