DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

Chapter 4: Going Public

April 2001 - January 2002

by RambOrc

Around April 2001, another roadmap change was decided upon. It was to release a gameplay mod first, called Korax Mod. This decision turned out to be the salvation of the whole project, as it made us widely known and gave us a lot of new helpers. Would we have proceeded with the original plan of making Korax Alpha the first public release, it might have never seen the light of day. Korax Mod proved highly popular, with thousands of downloads in the year after the release of the first version.

By May 2001, a large amount of RPG features, like the ability to manually adjust skills when reaching a new level, was implemented (previously, this was done automatically by the program after a predefined table). We also created an all-new spell system for the cleric and the mage. In the first released version of Korax Mod, the cleric had 3 spells and the mage 5.

Thanks to our increasing popularity, we got a lot more mails from people to help us out with the project. While most of them disappeared within a short time again, some of them at least left us something to use (like some story sketches by Voices of Xenon or the Heretic maps by Levelkiller we only needed to convert to Hexen to be able to use for Scattered Evil).

Luckily, there were also some who remained for somewhat longer with us. The best catch we made was Tzar Sectus, who found tons of bugs in Korax Mod 1.x and gave us suggestions how to correct them, and also delivered a whole bunch of new ideas for future versions of the mod - then after a couple of weeks he started programming these new features. It's thanks to him that Korax Mod development didn't stop after 1.1 as first intended, but went on to 2.0 with many exciting new features like new weapons, spells and a shopping system, just to mention a few.

I could also persuade a capable 2D artist to work for a short time for us, and in this time he created dozens of all-new textures and an innkeeper, our very first NPC.

Upon requests from several people, I created an overview map of the part of the continent where Korax' Heritage will take place.

Based upon Sylon's textures, some Heretic artwork, a couple of Heretic II windows and some original Hexen graphics, through Summer 2001 I created a lot of new textures, especially for the town, so that it started to look like a place inhabited by people instead of a collection of featureless cubes. Too bad that by this time Sylon left our team, leaving us without a 2D artist once again.