What To Do While Serving The Nation?

Where have we been?

We've been pretty stagnant for the past year after the release of the ACJC Counterstrike map sometime last December. Since then I'd have to admit that we've been thoroughly blessed considering that all of us have had pretty good postings and are 'working' in relatively comfortable environments in the Singapore Armed Forces.

For the uninitiated, all Singaporean males are subject to either 2 or 2.5 years of National Service, where we're conscripted into the Army. Not everybody in the Army is assigned a combat vocation, and we're quite fortunate that although Sephyre and I are on the combat side (Sephyre is in an infantry battalion while I'm a signaller working in an armour brigade), our best brains Sojourner and Reaperman are a clerk and a member of the band respectively.

I haven't been updating the site regularly after finishing my basic military training earlier in the year, but our team has since been brainstorming a lot on what we intend to do for the rest of our time in National Service, which ends sometime mid-2003 for all of us. Sojourner and Reaperman do have some time on their hands everyday, while there isn't too much for me to do in my current position except during certain periods of the year. Sephyre by far would be the busiest among all of us, but he's still very forthcoming with his ideas.

So far most of our ideas have been centred around a massively multiplayer RPG to the likes of Diablo, but although Sephyre developed the concept pretty well we don't have any real 3D renderer to show yet. Personally, I would refer to something like this as vapourware, but our limitations in terms of time and resources didn't help our situation very much.

Gamersutra and gang approached us a few months ago asking us if we wanted to work on a Day of Defeat conversion and base it on the war in East Asia between the Japanese and the British. Time was an even more scarce commodity for us then, when both Sephyre and I were still engaged in basic military training, and Sojourner was still trying to adjust to his new surroundings as a clerk in his current camp. Due to these issues we couldn't really commit ourselves to such a project, and you could say we've been in a lull for the few months since then.