I've not abandoned Classic, time simply doesn't grant me the luxury of finishing up Classic for proper release. A few novas need their abilities to be coded, and the game should be able to leave beta at that point. Not to say it'l end there, though, there is still quite a bit of planned functionality Classic will see in the future, time permits.

Cheers!

Classic was once just "DarkNova", the brainchild of Natso in one of his first real dives into the world of web development. The original version is described by him lovingly as "shitty and full of security holes" so in an attempt to fix that, it's being re-coded from the ground up.

As it stands, it's the only completely playable game on DarkNova right now, and it's progressing quite nicely. I generally let Natso code in the game mechanics, and then follow behind him and make the interface much nicer, you'll notice this with the Planet page in particular.

Classic DarkNova is a strategy game where you control an empire of planets, in any number of systems. It's a persistant game, you'll need to fire off Beacons to find other players, and if you ever lose all of your planets you can die completely. The object? Simply collect the largest empire in the Universe, and defend it against anyone who might challenge you.

It's a complex strategy game, so don't let the large mass of numbers be daunting, most of it is quite sensible, and the community in the forums is more than willing to help you figure out your troops. Remember that you're mostly hidden unless someone Beacons you randomly, so don't be afraid to try things out when you're just starting to get a feel of things.

Classic is currently in Alpha stage. It's technically feature complete, but the interface isn't anywhere near what I'd like it to be in the production version, so that's under major reconstruction. It's got its own section in the forums and everything, so feel free to sign up and play. We'd welcome any testers at this point. ^_^

Have fun!

No kidding, the server was behaving very strangely today. All is well though, do kindly disregard our mess.

We're still here. I'm personally absolutely overwhelmed with IRL stuff, don't know when I'll have time to even consider reviving some of this.

On the plus side, Natso has done some amazing work with the database backend, which we're going to apply to the site in the near future, so we might see some life yet.

It's around the corner. ImPerfection and I will have the grand luxary of being next door for about a month, and between the festivities, we're bound to get something done between the two of us.

I'm still working like a dog though, I don't have a lot of free time, which is why the site has gone kind of dead. It's on my todo list, but my todo list could go halfway around the world at this point...

Anyway, be happy. We'll have something together eventually.

That's right, I finally got the News page working properly for Mage Wars. It's not a huge change, but it's one more step towards completing the game as a whole.

Oh yes, I'm ImPerfection, the one some of you knew as the artist of the last DarkNova game. I've decided to try my skills at making a website instead of just making the stuff that goes in one.

As for what I'm doing now, I'm going to get the Clan Status page working which will give you something to actually do on the site.

It's not much yet, but it's well on it's way to being DarkNova once again!

You may not have noticed, but ImPerfection is hard at work completely re-coding the original DarkNova game that made this site popular once. It's been re-christened "Mage Wars" but for now, you can get to it using the DN3 link at the top.

It's quite incomplete at the moment, but older players should immediately recognize the style. The game is going to change significantly, but we're hoping to preserve the general atmosphere of the game while balancing out some of the issues that plagued the old one. ImPerfection will probably post the most in this column, since he's the one implementing things, but you'll hear from me as well.

So do enjoy.

I'm working on implementing portal logins at the moment, and logging in just barely works on DN4. Most of the rest of the site will be down until I get this fixed, so bear with.

I mean, it's not like most of the rest of the site is a lot at this point, but just panic a little for me, k? It'll make me feel better. ^_^

...and I appologize deeply. Obviously, some work just happened today, the news frontend for the site is getting a much needed overhaul. Here's how this is going to work.

All news in the site will be accessible from right here in the main portal area. In addition, the homepage for each game will hold news specific to only itself. Think of the portal as kind of a catch-all for the games, that way we don't have to deal with multiple areas to post things in.

When I've got time, I'll be limking everyone's DN4 accounts to the portal, and there are some considerable changes to the ideas we had for it, so it's going to get a bit of a redesign. Don't worry, it'll still be awesome, just not quite in the way we originally planned. ^_^

I'll try to keep you posted. Enjoy the cake!

The DarkNova portal, although still a bit incomplete and unpolished, is now open! This is very important: I'll be clearing out the accounts in this system (which is known as DarkNova 4.0) and replacing the login on this site with the portal logins. The good news, as mentioned, is that these logins will also work for our other games, but the bad news is that I can't simply convert from this to there. You'll need to make an account at the Portal, I'm afraid. Fortunately, that process is *really* quite painless.



You can access the portal at:

http://portal.darknovagames.com/



When I've got this site refactored a bit (I've got to move some things around on the backend, etc) I'm going to make the main domain point to the portal, so be warned. ^_^ You can still get directly to this site to follow progress by going to http://dn4.darknovagames.com/, but of course you'll need to (in a short while) be signing in with your Portal account.



Happy fun!



-Zeta



PS: OpenID users, we do plan on integrating an OpenID account with your portal ID, so that you can log in with that instead of your email/pass if you prefer. However, for now the email/pass is the way to go. ^_^ Do note that the first time you log in with an OpenID when its ready, we'll need to collect some additional info from you for use with the games.

It's been a while since I typed anything here. I've been super busy with work and school and haven't really had time to work on DN4 like I would have hoped.



There is good news and hope however, and we certainly do have plans for the site. First of all, Natso (formerly Ivalice) has brought the original DarkNova (his first iteration) to a functioning state, and we're about ready to launch it into Alpha stage for testing. He managed to do this all on his own, which is a great accomplishment, and he's quite proud of it.



For those of you who started with us during DarkNova 3.0 (the one with the Mages) I'm happy to announce that Imperfection and Myself are in the process of recoding it from the ground up, with some pretty major changes, but still mostly the same nonetheless. Hooray! So the Mage Wars will be able to re-ensue.



So that means that yes, we're going to have three (3) games running on this site at once. Yay! But what does this mean for you? Basically, we're going to consolidate all user logins into one "Portal" area on the site, for convenience. You'll create an account there, and then be able to use that to play all of our games without needing to sign up again. Nothing too fancy here, this is mostly convenience for everyone.



So anyway, those are the plans for the next couple of months. I can't promise anything in way of time, since I'm about to start up college classes fulltime again, but we'll see what we can't do to get things back on their feet around here.



-Zeta

Working on the explore page, or rather, the "group listing" page since Exploration is something different, but I'm calling it that for now since it's so similar to the old Explore page. This will be *very* important, so feel free to become familiar with it while it's still in development.



It's crude and you can't really do or see much (other than the list of groups and land types) yet, but it will serve as the basis for attacks here in a moment, so be ready.



-Zeta

I just changed some core bits of the site, and to test this I need to delete all characters and land. Please re-create your first character in the game so I can see if this is all working. I'll try to make a point of not doing this again.



If this is successful, then attacks will be the next thing implemented, making the game *actually playable*. This is a major step in development, naturally.



Be happy.



-Zeta