Illyriad’s celebration of the game’s 2 year anniversary

Illyriad Tournament V in celebration of the game’s 2 year anniversary is now live!

PRESS RELEASE: 23rd FEBRUARY, 2012

Illyriad, the online strategy game, has launched its fifth in-game tournament. The launch of this event coincides with the 2 year anniversary of the game’s first launch date in Alpha. During this in-game event, players will bind together with their Alliances in order to capture and hold territory on 37 land squares spread among the expansive world map. At the end of the tournament, March 21, the total time will be tallied and Alliances ranked based on the total amount of time holding the squares. Competition should be fierce as the potential prizes for winning are quite substantial. The Illyriad development team is proud to team up with sponsors Enjin and Typefrag to provide some amazing prizes that will help foster and grow communities within the game.

Sponsored by:

Enjin             TypeFrag

The first place Alliance will win:

1 year free Ultimate Enjin service package provided by Enjin

This includes:

  • Enjin guild website, CMS and forum hosting
  • File storage and gallery for hosting images
  • Individual user profiles
  • Membership recruitment system with custom emails
  • Deep website customization with visual editor
  • Instant messaging and chat
  • 50 user Mumble server
  • Custom domain
  • Premium, fully branded themes
  • Unlimited site modules
  • and more!

The first place Alliance will also receive in-game prizes including: an Alliance tournament statue to be placed as a permanent tribute on the world map, 50 Elite Praetorian guards and 50 Scribes of Allembine for each eligible player within the winning Alliance.

The second place Alliance will win:

6 months free TypeFrag Ventrilo or Mumble server hosting (32 person capacity) provided by TypeFrag

The second place Alliance will also receive in-game prizes including: an Alliance tournament statue to be placed as a permanent tribute on the world map, 35 Elite Praetorian guards and 35 Scribes of Allembine for each eligible player within the winning Alliance.

The third place Alliance will win:

6 months free TypeFrag Ventrilo or Mumble server hosting (32 person capacity) provided by TypeFrag

The third place Alliance will also receive in-game prizes including: an Alliance tournament statue to be placed as a permanent tribute on the world map, 20 Elite Praetorian guards and 20 Scribes of Allembine for each eligible player within the winning Alliance.

As well as prizes going to the top 3 overall Alliances, each Alliance that holds an individual map square for the longest period of time over the month will receive: 25 Prestige and 10 Praetorian guards to each eligible player of the square-winning Alliance.

More details on the tournament can be found in the official Illyriad forums and in this video of Illyriad’s developer chat held on Feb. 21.

A comment from Enjin on the sponsorship: “Enjin strives to support all games on our social gaming website platform, and we are thrilled to partner with Illyriad for this tournament. We’re excited to provide the Enjin 1 Year Ultimate prize to the winner. Good luck to everyone in the tournament, and may the best win!”

A comment from TypeFrag on the partnership: “With so many providers of Ventrilo servers available, customer service is becoming the critical aspect for success, and therefore a core business differentiator. TypeFrag handles all aspects of voice communication servers from network maintenance to customer support. This support will enable Illyriad Games Ltd to focus on the success of the tournament and growth of their community.”

About Illyriad:

Illyriad is a browser-based Massively Multiplayer strategy game, in which players take control of cities, engaging in city-building, quests, diplomacy, warfare and trade. Developed by London-based Illyriad Games Ltd., Illyriad went live in 2010 and was officially launched on May 16th 2011.
https://www.illyriad.co.uk/

About Enjin:

Enjin provides top of the line guild website hosting for over 100,000 guilds across thousands of online games. The fully featured, easy-to-use platform lets you create the perfect, customized website for your guild. Voted best by PC Gamer.
https://www.enjin.com/

About TypeFrag:

TypeFrag is the leading provider for voice communication among online gamers. They currently are host to over 50,000 voice servers, servicing millions of social groups, families and guilds worldwide.
https://typefrag.com/

What the Press Say about Illyriad: https://www.illyriad.co.uk/blog/index.php/category/press/

For further information, please contact: press@illyriad.co.uk. Screenshots and logos are available via anonymous login FTP at ftp://ftp.illyriad.co.uk . Interviews and further information is available promptly on request. Journalist accounts are available on request for any journalist writing for a major, relevant magazine or website.

Second Anniversary Funding Round, New Appointments

Please note that all board appointments referenced herein only become effective once filed at Companies’ House in the United Kingdom.  Until such time these appointments should be regarded as provisional statements of intent.

Second Anniversary sees completion of successfully fundraising and welcomes new appointments.

PRESS RELEASE: 21st FEBRUARY, 2012

HTML5 browser-based game developer Illyriad Games Limited announced today the successful completion of a fundraising round, and several key additions to the Illyriad team.

“This is the second anniversary of Illyriad first hitting the web as a beta version,” said James Niesewand, CEO and original founder of Illyriad Games Limited. “And so we’re delighted to confirm that we were oversubscribed on our first external fundraising round. This gives us the cash we wanted to accelerate the development of Illyriad, and allows us to bring several key people on board as well as to increase our investment in R&D.”

The funds raised in this round value Illyriad Games Limited at a shade over USD $1.75M.

Following this, Illyriad Games Limited is delighted to welcome several new appointments:

Ben Adams joins the board as Chief Technology Officer & Executive Director Ben has 15 years of development experience as Head of Innovation for two FTSE-100 companies: Sky IQ – part of the BSkyB group – and Experian plc. He specialises in algorithms, user interface design and highly concurrent systems. Ben joined Illyriad in the early development phase to provide expertise in developing the technical architecture, as well as writing the cross-platform Open Web code-base.

Lynn Brunner joins the board as a Non-Executive Director Lynn has 20 years’ experience in customer experience management and marketing, with a strong focus on bringing technology to the art of marketing. She has worked in both the US and the UK, across a broad range of companies, including National Westminster bank, Experian, Coca-Cola and Orange Telecom. She is currently in a SVP role at a consumer goods company in the US, managing marketing and strategic development. She brings her extensive expertise to the table, helping interpret player needs and shaping the Illyriad offering to meet these needs. She is also a strong contributor to the strategic development of the business, helping drive profitable growth.

Alan Dragovic joins the board as a Non-Executive Director Alan has experience as a writer, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. His first career as a securities analyst with UBS took him to Sydney, London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, then as Vice President of Citibank Global Asset Management, to New York. Timing his transition from banking to publishing before the dot-com down turn Alan established an online and print publishing presence in Latin America, Associated Argentine Press. The flagship magazine, The Traveller’s Guru, had a total print run approaching 1m copies between 2004 and 2009. Alan is currently specializing in free to play browser games as a venture capitalist and advisor, providing Illyriad with an investment banker’s perspective on future development and growth strategies.

Kevin Hassall becomes our full-time Executive Producer Kevin has 15 years’ experience of running production and development projects and programmes of work, focusing on web and games development. During the dotcom boom he was Projects Director for On-line plc (an AIM-listed internet business incubator), and subsequently spent 5 years as Publishing Director on the board of Oxygen Interactive Software Ltd (a privately held game publisher). From March 2012 he brings this experience to Illyriad, driving the delivery of code, art, audio and content updates to our players.

Franck Sidon joins Illyriad as Company Secretary, and Edward Daniel as Legal Counsel.

Emphasising the key role that new technologies will play in the evolution of Illyriad, Niesewand added: “We are also delighted to welcome a number of new development staff to the existing Illyriad team: Simon Hopkin & Richard Hemsley join us on the code development side, the aptly-named James Bell is kickstarting our audio projects, and we’re thrilled to have the renowned game economist Tibike Cosmin on board as game designer.

The ‘Year of The Dragon’ is an immensely exciting time for both the corporation and the Illyriad players themselves, and we can’t wait to see what lies ahead.”

About Illyriad
Illyriad is a browser-based Massively Multiplayer strategy game, in which players take control of cities, engaging in city-building, quests, diplomacy, warfare and trade. Developed by London-based Illyriad Games Ltd., Illyriad went live in 2010 and was officially launched on May 16th 2011

What the Press Say about Illyriad: https://www.illyriad.co.uk/blog/index.php/category/press/

For further information please contact: press@illyriad.co.uk. Screenshots, logos and other art assets are available via anonymous login FTP at ftp://ftp.illyriad.co.uk . Interviews and further information is available promptly on request. Journalist accounts are available on request for any journalist writing for a major, relevant magazine or website.

Illyriad Website Redesign

Illyriad is coming up on its 2 year anniversary since the game first launched in Alpha. In that time the external game website has been through a few versions. For 2012 and as we move into the third year of Illyriad’s existence we are happy to share with the community a new and improved website.

Why a new website?

One of my main goals as community manager at Illyriad is to make sure our players are having the best user experience than can have. In part this means that our players should have easy to access information about the game readily available. The current (now former) website just wasn’t doing that very well.

As most of our players know, Illyriad has a small cross-functional development team. This means, at any time, one of us may be working on a project that seems like it falls outside of our more formal titles. So in true Swiss army knife fashion, I set out to give the website a new coat of paint. My background (aside from community development) is in graphic design. So it’s really not quite as much of a stretch as you’d think.

Goals:

  • Give the website a fresh look
  • Create an easier to use navigation
  • Add a community section
  • More detailed information about the game
  • Add FAQ and support section
  • Better social media integration
  • Have dynamic content and news on the front page

Process:

The first step was identifying the basic layout of the website and what sorts of content would be inside. I did this by creating a series of very rough wire-frames and a pagemap. After looking at a few options the team chose the one below:

From there I went about laying out a mock-up of the homepage in Photoshop. My philosophy with the visuals was to retain the key elements that relate to our brand but still give a clean, updated visual look. Familiar elements like the character art on the backgrounds, the parchment paper texture and red buttons relate to the former website and game while still giving a new look. One of my favorite parts to update was the treatment for the logo. The Illyriad logo has a pretty unique look and the former implementation of plain flat black wasn’t really giving it the attention it deserved. So I experimented with a few treatments and landed on a subtle silver 3D lighted effect. My biggest struggle, however, was with color. The game and former website use a lot (seriously, a lot) of beige and brown tones. I wanted to retain some connection to the game through the use of the parchment texture and beige color, but I felt that the site overall needed some more contrast and depth. I was inspired by the mottled dark blue-grey sky that was used in one of the character portraits. So after much layering and experimentation I came up with the rich blues and dark browns that are used in the new design.

After settling on the overall design and laying out mockups for the rest of the pages, we began the process of making the designs come to life. Through an amazing partnership with Illyriad CTO and technical wizard, Ben Adams (aka GM Thundercat) all of the things I imagined actually turned out to work, often times even better than I thought. The account creation and log-in pages for example are so much more slick and interactive than I thought they could be, due to some amazing HTML5 technical wizardry. The real hard work was coding and I consider myself quite a lucky designer to get to work with someone who when I asked “can we do that?” always said yes.

Overall, I am so pleased with how the website has turned out and I hope the community is as well. At some point soon™ we hope to be giving the forums a dev blog and new look as well to match the new website.

Make sure to hop over to the homepage to check it out for yourself and stop by the forums or leave comments on this post to give your feedback on the new site! I look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts.

GM Luna

Review: Vagary.tv

Ryan Kenward from the gaming blog Vagary.tv has reviewed Illyriad.

“Illyriad has a great niche. It’s a simple and fun game that is easy to keep running in a separate browser tab for most of the day. There is plenty to do and I would suggest that everyone with a few minutes goes and checks it out.”

Read the full review here.

 

 

Free for All: Comparing the payment models of Runescape and Illyriad

Illyriad was mentioned in Massively’s Free for All column this week in a discussion about different free-to-play payment models.

“So how does real money work in Illyriad? Simple. You spend cash to buy prestige and then spend that prestige on a few things. You can slightly buff your defenses and the output of your resources. You can even buff the combat effectiveness of some of your troops, but as James Niesewand told me in a live video interview this year, the amount is very small and is only one of many, many factors in combat. You can also spend prestige to speed up building times on buildings. Even with all that, a player cannot speed up skill learning. As in EVE Online, players nominate a skill that is learned in real time. One skill can take days to learn. These skills are often needed to build certain buildings or to perform certain tasks. As in other PvP games, items mean nothing without the skills to use them. Illyriad‘s payment system is easy to understand, it’s cheap, and it doesn’t significantly affect gameplay.”

Read the full article here.