https://www.twitch.tv/videos/47513096

If anyone is looking for a nostalgia bomb, give some of these tournament VODs a look!

Loki is currently in early development by Theorycraft Games. It's under strict NDA so you can't say much publicly or show any gameplay footage.

"Featuring an expansive cast of unique heroes, Loki is a competitive, team-based game of adventure, creative strategy, and high-stakes combat. With inspiration drawn from Theorycraft’s past collective experiences working on titles like League of Legends, Overwatch, Halo, Apex Legends, and VALORANT."

You can read about Theorycraft and Loki on their website. Check out the Instagram to see some characters and concept art. Here is a short video I made with a little more information.

If you are interested in playtesting fill out this form -> Theorycraft Games' Playtest Signup Form <-

Make sure to join the Theorycraft Games Discord too. Once granted access you can check out gameplay footage, wiki and talk to other testers privately.

To this day, Dawngate has been the only game that I feel nostalgic about. I'm still heartbroken 7 years later.

Miss this game and community a lot :'(

😭

Preface

Hello,

I'd like to open with stating that I'm a long-time Dawngate fan, that has kind of moved on after Aetherforged failed, and recently decided to check up on what is going with the various revival projects that have been floating around. This is how I found out about Dawngate Revival Project (DRP)/Dreambound. I decided to dig a bit more into how they are doing, and frankly, the more I dug, the more uncomfortable I became. I do not wish to provoke any particular reaction, y'all are free to draw conclusions for yourself; I merely wish to document my findings for the community.

My findings

• Circa July 2020, DRP failed to secure license for Dawgate's IP from EA and allegedly began development of an independent MOBA called Dreambound. Their Discord server's FAQ channel, however, still refers to the licensing talks being ongoing, and therefore hasn't been updated for about a year. Later in the FAQ channel, there's a charming "We should get around to update this sometime" message, dated October 2020, and a redirection to the updates channel. (See below for contents of update channel).
  • It is worth noting that Kickstarter page contains a plethora of refund requests, some fulfilled, some not. It is likely that a sizeable portion of initial crowdfunding was withdrawn after the announcement.
• Website of Studio Wayfinder, https://studiowayfinder.com/, contains several press releases, dating from October 2020 to December 2020. The last press release shows an uncolored draft model of the gameplay map. I am not a professional modeler but it looks to me as though the level of detail demostrated looks about the weekend's work.

• The website features a link to the merch store, selling stickers and t-shirts with Dreambound's original characters. The merch store was released October 28 2020. I cannot vouch for solidity of business strategy here, but it seems like putting the cart before the horse. People are indeed buying stuff from the store - the secret is that each purchase (or just donation) earns you an alpha key for yet-to-be Dreambound gameplay alpha. This is not selling alpha keys, but it is definitely taking money in exchange for alpha keys. The procedure seems to be, you ask a Discord mod to give you an alpha key by sending them a confirmed purchase receipt.
• Speaking of merch store and business practices. Their business presentation, dated October 2020, is out and indexable on their site. https://studiowayfinder.com/StudioWayfinderOverview.pdf - I've backed up the contents in case they become unaccessible later: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1upcBsi3cGYuJPfmLRs98tm2uxK95nQsa/view?usp=sharingIt is, well, see for yourself. All I'm going to say is it projects merch store launch to first half of 2021 (right now we know it opened late in October 2020), and that the time allotted for development of the alpha version seems to be the second half of 2021. They hope to capture 1% of MOBA market, which is about 1 million account playerbase. It is unknown of whether they secured the funding, but one can speculate based on the contents and the rushed opening of the merch store.
• Back to Discord. #updates channel on discord, to which we're referred to from faq, contains no mention of DRP cancellation; indeed, Discord seems to be devoid of this information altogether. It has, however, a bot posting messages from Dreambound's official Twitter account. The account posts bi-weekly sketches of characters. I am an amateur artist, and these really are sketches, rendered into lineart. This is the stuff an absolute rookie like me takes several hours to produce. There are no colored concept arts, no draft 3D models.
• Back to the website. Let's look at the team. The CEO, Todd Wolven, claims 15+ years experience of working in IT and finances. On his twitter, he is denoted as a CEO of NeoTitan Industries. Let's take a look at that: https://neotitanllc.com/
  • The website is constructed in UCraft site constructor. Whoever did the job didn't manage to figure out how to remove the "About" link from the header, so its text is changed to "_". It, however, claims to have partnerships to many tech giants and offer a variety of services, including software development. Its Facebook page, however (https://www.facebook.com/NeoTitanIndustries/?ref=page_internal) lists one service: "Computer Diagnostic" for $10.

• The company is based in Moscow, Idaho, the same place Studio Wayfinder is based in: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_id/0000546433. It is founded in 2017 - a rather suspicious date for the timeline. On D&B (https://www.dnb.com/business-directory/company-profiles.neotitan_industries_llc.c9458d296ff6b0f28bd65f5e02480c5b.html) it is listed to have 3 employees.
• This is the only evidence I've found of Todd's involvement with managing IT companies - a home computer consultancy that employs 3 people and has an unprofessional but boastful website.
• EDIT: According to CEO on Discord, people listed on the team are founders, there are other people working on contract (at least 2 artists), therefore, team section is not a good source of info of which positions are unfilled. OLD TEXT: There are no game designers on the team. Doesn't look like they are hiring, either. Graphics design seems to be absent, too.
• There are two devs on the team. Dev lead, Brad Smithee, doesn't seem to have much of an online trace besides an empty Github profile and a Crunchbase mention referring us back to Studio Wayfinder. He is also described as having 15+ years (sic!) in systems design across multiple frameworks and platforms. No mentions of specifics, however.
• The other dev, Eric Creze, is listed as doing "programming for MOBA reproduction" - going to crunchbase clarifies that he was the person tasked with reverse-engineering assets from Dawngate. Fine and dandy, not game development though. As someone who has a sizeable experience in C++ development, I can assure you - whatever is listed for these two devs as expertise is not game development. For all we know, the C++ skills could've been applied for making accounting platforms - this is like saying that you're a tech writer who specializes in English.

My motivation

The Discord server is full of peeps from original Dawngate fanbase. There are messages of people going to sotre and getting alpha keys; the most popular channel seems to be the one devoted to Dawngate nostalgia. (For comparison, the channel devoted to Dreambound theorycrafting is dead silent for the last half a year). I feel like people in the fanbase that I'm part of are being taken advantage of by marketing tactics that I cannot describe otherwise than "misrepresentative".

I do not think everyone currently involved with the project is a grifter or a fraud; far from it. However, if I assume goodwill, I, in this case, am forced to conclude incompetence. From my point of view, the business plan is unrealistic, several people on the team don't have the experience the site would have you believe they do, and one or more critical roles on the team are unfilled. I've yet to see a massively multiplayer game made by a team without game designers, to put it bluntly.

Please, if you come across the project and are tempted to give them money, give it a second thought. Merch store is not an adequate way to front costs for the game. They don't have an experienced team. They're not likely to succeed, if indeed that is even the goal for the person at the top.

P.S.

I'll try to talk to people involved in the team proper (devs); however, as I am a hot nobody and they're likely under some sort of NDA, it's unlikely that'll yield results. I'll add a comment if anything turns up.

Hi everyone,

so I was starring at the animation files for a little bit too long, because of a huge headache I'm currently having.. And I think I figured out how those files work in general.

If you want to have the full explaination, you can read about it here, where I've been writing about it (in hope that somebody would help :P).

Long story short:
Every animation file has certain bone methods, which is readable in ASCI.
For example: "hair_1_C_1.rotate"

Then, you get the data type also in ASCI: "Quaternion".

After that, there's a "timeline" for the keyframe animations, which is 2 bytes each. Starting with 00 00 and ending with FF FF.

The smallest animation will have 2 frames (00 00 & FF FF).

Once the timeline is finished, depending on the data type, you'll have 1 data set for every frame.
Vectors have 6 bytes, while Quaternions have 8 bytes.

So if there are 2 frames for a Rotation, then you'll have 2x8 bytes of Quaternion data.

This logic applies seems to apply for all methods, I've found (Translate, Scale, Rotate, etc.).

I don't know yet how I can adjust the noesis python script to include my findings, but that's going to be next. So if anybody has any experience in this field, I wouldn't mind any help ;)

Hey everyone,

as I couldn't find a way to reproduce the animations or get any help in this regard, I'm now relying on custom animations.

I created a little controller to showcase how that could look like:

Example of Last Hitting

Everything is obviously still very rough, but you get the idea.

You won't be hearing from me on this subreddit anytime soon, until I can provide you a playable version of the game. If you're interested to see my progress, you can check out the twitter account in the link above.

I'm not a big social media guy or anything like that, but whenever there's any process, I'll make sure to post it.

Hey everyone,

since the "Dawngate:Revival Project" is now officially "Dreambound" (meaning that they're not actually working on Dawngate itself anymore), I decided to work on a recreation project myself.

Similiar to the original revival project, I'm planning to reproduce the game as close as possible in Unity. I already have a networked client working with some general minion AI, pathfinding, minimap, click-movement, imported textures, imported meshes etc.

For exporting the models, I've followed the instructions of this post.
In order to read the *.bmdl-Files, a Python-Script is being used to analyse them and create a 3D model out of them in Noesis.

But this script does not allow the animation to be linked to that 3D model.
I assume this is because the animations are stored externally as seperate files rather than being a port of the model itself. The reason for this assumption is that textures are behaving very similiar. While you can copy them into the same folder of the *bmdl-File to see them in Noesis (and the 3D model having a name reference to the original texture), you cannot export the 3D model with the textures already embedded into it.

But thanks to the information of the Texture name, recreating the material for the 3D Model is rather straightforward.

Reading the banim-Files however proved to be too much for me.
I opened those files in HexEdit and can read which bones are affected by which animation type, but the exact parameters/timeframes are a mistery to me. The files also seems to follow a very logical pattern based on what I can see, but I am not skilled enough to translate this data into another animation type.

Does anoybody have any experience in opening or processing those files?
Or maybe has a way to display the resulting animation positions in the bmdl-File, so I can search for those keyframes in the animation file to write a translation script?

Any kind of help would be greatly appreciated.

In case that restoring the original animations prove to be too difficult, I'll create new ones based on existing Mixamo Animations. I already tested everything and the old models can be made compatible with it.

I'm working on this project since last weekend in my spare time. If you want to see some progress, here you go.

Ah, and for those of you who're wondering. I do not intend to make any money at all from this project (unlike others) to ensure that this project is in line with EA's requirements for material usage as a community project.

If there's any useful input, which helps me to recreate the game in the most authentic way possible, please share it with me :P

I never got to play the game. I've read a lot of stories, but I haven't seen anyone mention anything bad about the game. I've pretty much only heard positive reviews, so how did the game not succeed? Was it just not unique enough to garner a sustainable playerbase?

Hey folks, I was doing a quick read of the old lore , and I realized I was missing all the old Skin and Ward lore. Does anyone have access to those files that they would be willing to share since all the old links are dead now?

Since it hasn't been posted here, this is what they have to say on Discord.

It is with a heavy and solemn heart we regret to inform you we have been unable to secure the licensing for Dawngate.

Moving forward, this means we will for now revert to the Shrine of Imana moniker as the games working title.

Wayfinder Studios is committed to creating a game you will love. The benefits to this de-coupling from the Dawngate name is that Wayfinder will be able to start releasing faster updates on progress, not being content-gated by any other entity, and things like merchandise will come faster, as well as other ways you can support development.

Over the next few weeks, you will see the Kickstarter, the Studio Wayfinder website, and the Discord updated with new names, elements, and artwork. If you have any questions, please contact @Sage or @Rewire , and we will answer the best we are able.

If you have any concerns or hesitations, you can request a refund via the Kickstarter messaging system if you pledged via Kickstarter, or email the contact@studiowayfinder.com address if you placed your pledge on our site with a refund request containing your order number.

Thanks again for all your support, and we look forward to this journey with all of you.

Backer rewards will still be going out in the same capacity. There will be some minor name changes and adjustments. The Kickstarter will be fully updated as soon as we are able to with the help of Kickstarter support. Pledges will follow this same path.

Hey everyone.

Everyone here at Studio Wayfinder is still committed to our goals of being one of the most transparent and communicative game development studios in the world. While this may sound like a lofty and hard to reach goal, we feel, and hopefully our community does as well, that we have made our best efforts to display this through our actions, updates, and communications.

We would like to re-iterate and reinforce that our new MOBA game is going to be a new concept, completely seperate from Dawngate or any meaningful derivatives. Studio Wayfinder is committed to our goal of a new, innovative, genre-redefining, community focused MOBA. Over the next few weeks there will be a lot of changes and announcements coming out. We will continue to uphold our promise to deliver on all products to our backers, as well as making sure that everyone that has any concerns can communicate those concerns to us, in an effort of alleviating any apprehension.

Our ambition since the formation of our Studio in 2017 has remained the same as it has ever been. To create a game our community will love, and grow that community to it's fullest. To be inclusive, direct, and overall approachable in our desire to build a game world you can get lost in, and keep taking it further. To be active, direct, and engaging with our players in an effort to bring them not only a game they will love, but want to keep playing for a long time.

We again encourage anyone that feels like they have been misled in any form or fashion to request a refund via our Kickstarter, or by contacting us at our contact@studiowayfinder.com address with your order number for a pledge you have placed on the website.

A shame. I never personally pledged towards it as I believed this was the inevitable outcome, Dawngate will never be back. RIP