Mimesis Online from Polish Developer Tannhauser Gate, is a role-playing game which transports you to a world where the borders between reality and illusion do not exist. An unimaginable catastrophe on a cosmic scale transformed this world, playing havoc with the natural order of things, twisting everything, even time itself, wiping out civilisation as we know it. For the Universe itself, everything changed and nothing changed - a new order was established, one where entropy rules, without intelligent beings working to hold it back. The beings who survived the catastrophe have tried to rebuild their world, each in their own way. They once again want to enforce on the natural chaos their order, their ways - authority, money, prejudice, cruelty and conviction of their own superiority. Once again, they are showing the unlimited ability of intelligent races to adapt and survive. The forgotten civilisation is waking up and slowly but surely emerging as the "new" civilisation - and how similar it is to the old one.

On a regular basis we will feature a developer's diary made by the Mimesis Online development team. In this diary Derek Handley, on of the staff writers tells us how it all began.

Part 1. "The Book of Exodus"
This would be so much easier to do if it was an interview. With an interview, someone guides your hand and thoughts. Here, you're on your own.

Okay, starting's the hard part...

My name's Derek Handley, and I'm one of the staff writers at Tannhauser Gate, the studio which is bringing you Mimesis Online, a new, online role-playing game. I'm not just a staff writer here - I work on the RPG rules of the game and collaborate on the creation of creatures and races. My qualifications for those two tasks are the twenty years as a game master which I have on my CV - I bet my mother never thought that the Dungeons&Dragons sessions in her garage would end up qualifying me for anything. Take heed, mothers everywhere - role-playing games can get your kids jobs...
Anyway, staff writer is as good a title as any, and since it is my title, I was chosen to write these articles for our developer's diary, at least now at the start. Some of the other team members will be along later to add their thoughts and ideas.

For those of you who haven't read any of the interviews which the Tannhauser Gate team has done, here's a quick introduction to the studio. Tannhauser Gate is a relatively small graphics studio operating out of a city called Wroclaw, which is in southwest Poland. The whole team is Polish, except for little old me - I'm from the Republic of Ireland, but I've been out here teaching since 1996. I got involved with the project over a year ago. The project (that's Mimesis Online to its friends) is an MMORPG which is now nearing the final phase of production - we're almost at the Beta Test phase of the game, and still as excited about it as Artur, Marcin and Waldek were when they started work on it a few years ago. There was no studio then - each of the guys worked at home, getting together once a week to put material together. There was no game either. And the word Mimesis was still in the encyclopedia waiting for someone to use it...

1997, and the aforementioned three friends were finishing their Master's degrees in architecture. They had a plan, call it a dream, and the dream was "Exodus", the first entirely Polish-produced fully 3D computer-animated feature-length movie. The world that it would be set in was thrashed out in a series of meetings and discussions, and the first steps were taken in this brave new world.
Earth, the distant future, and humanity are spreading out across the cosmos. New lines are being drawn, new allegiances are being formed. The old order is beginning to break down as conflicts spring up, conflicts which the Earth government had not forseen. "Exodus" was to focus on the fate of the human race as war develops and it becomes clear that...ah, but that would be telling too much. To find out some things, you'll have to be patient.
"Exodus" never got made - the economic reality of making such a film in this part of the world killed the project with only a trailer for the film having been made. But the project didn't die, it just evolved into something new.

2001, and the aforementioned three friends, along with the team that they gathered and moulded are nearing the end of that evolution. Mimesis was born out of the ashes of "Exodus", and in later diary entires, I'll tell you how that came about, and other stories from the development of what we know will be a very different online role-playing experience.

Till next time,
Derek.