Today is one of those defining moments in my career in digital media – we have just switched on a new world called the Echo, which corresponds geographically with the surface of South Africa. It is the culmination of 16 months worth of work on what I believe is the most innovative and well-executed project of my career, thanks to Vodacom and a brilliant team.

What is Legends of Echo?

First let me explain what I just said: Legends of Echo, the product of the last 16 months of my time and the last 11 months of its director, Nic Haralambous, is a massively multiplayer location-based mobile online role-playing game (try make an acronym out of that one!). In short, we remapped the whole of South Africa into a steam-punk-ish world and packed it full of weapons and other items that people can pick up and use against each other.

The players are divided into 5 bloodlines – Earth, Water, Fire, Air and we added Industry. Each bloodline has two allied bloodlines and two mortal enemies and as players try to thrive in the Echo they will need to make complex political alliances to get the stuff they need – Elements. Elements are the lifeblood of a bloodline. You need them to build weapons, buy weapons, gifts and other items that you need to survive.

The game world has an in-game newspaper called the Echo Enquirer where players get the latest news – for example a massive stash of Fire Elements laying near the Spar in Wendywood, or a shift in the Eastern Cape bloodline domination, or a general call to arms.

And underlying all of this, a location-based system that knows where you are in the real world and hence where you are in the game world. There are over 60 000 real locations in the game, excluding every single suburb in the country. You can tell your friends to meet you on Signal Hill for a massacre at 5PM, or that your Arcanium (your house) is near the Engen Garage in Ventersdorp.

South Africa looks different in the Echo

Your Arcanium is also a shopfront, so if you find stuff in the Echo you can sell and trade it for Elements. Passers-by can enter your house and buy directly from you, even when you are not online.

The Artwork

When we started this project our goal was to make it as visually rich as possible without breaking the bank. Have a look at some of the graphics below, our creative director Rob Van Zyl from Pleasant Company did a fantastic job of translating and augmenting our vision. Our agency Cow Africa have done a fantastic job of keeping us all sane (unusual for an agency) and have done some amazing things with our launch media, the cinema ad, the radio campaign that will go on air soon and our AWESOME t-shirts.

There are lots of different kinds of weapons, powers and items that you can pick up by moving around the country from city to city, province to province. Each one gives you a slightly different edge in battle.

Each screen has been meticulously designed to look as good as it can on a mobile phone and there are tons more game graphics, wallpapers and other cool stuff available at legendsofecho.com.

Nic and I story-boarded every single screen in the game, every single menu item and all the paths a user can take. There are just over 190 screens in the game with many permutations depending on the context.

Some background – LoE’s precursor was a SMS game called OpenSeason built by RetroRabbit and Afrigis in 2004 and our script-writer was one of the original team who worked on that game. Things have progressed really far since OpenSeason though, as you will see when you look at the UI.

Social Vs Battle

One of the most entertaining things to do in the Echo is to find a completely random person and challenge her to a battle. The battle is fun and is greatly affected by the weapons and health items that you carry around with you. It’s not all about battle though, you can also chat with other users using intant messaging, or go to their Arcaniums and leave messages on the walls of their houses.

There is a Players and Chat section in the game that keeps a list of your contacts, shows you who is online (so you can teleport to them and fight them) and a section for chatting with each other.

The Technology

Our development partners, Afrigis (who also work on The Grid) have done an outstanding job of getting this game as scalable and bandwidth-light as possible. As it’s a mobile game one of the main objectives was to keep the volume of data transferred between the client and the server ultralight and we have got it to the point where it will cost you about R2 (out of bundle) to play for an hour which is really good considering the richness of the experience.

The backend is build on Darkstar, a project initially by Sun Microsytems and now RedDwarf at Oracle. Darkstar is build for this kind of thing and it works really really well. We have made some modifications to the code to optimise it for the mobile experience but we’re all quire sure the people at Oracle are going to be stoked to see what we did with their tech.

Kudos to Nic

Although I am the executive producer and started the project, the person who really made this thing cook is the director, Nic Haralambous. I hired him because I knew he was the only person I could trust with a project like this and he has delivered. He took this thing in his stride as if he’s been developing games for decades and he shielded me from some of the headaches – there is nothing more I could ask of a good product manager and he has excelled. This is his first major delivery of a digital product and what a delivery it is. Thanks Nic, for all the time and effort, you deserve the kudos you’re going to get from this.

Kudos to Vodacom

I say this from a completely personal standpoint – Vodacom have shown some serious vision by getting behind me, Nic and this project. This is the longest I have worked on a product before launching it and I want to thank Vodacom for giving us the backing to make our idea a reality. The whole Grid team has pulled together to give us the support and assistance we needed and for that we are very grateful.