Furcadia - Development

Development

First opened to the public on December 16, 1996, Furcadia is developed by Dragon's Eye Productions, Inc (DEP). Its engine was developed in 1994, originally for a preliminary graphical MUD project called DragonSpires, which featured very simplistic real-time combat, and used a DOS-based client limited to the 16 EGA colors. At its public release, Furcadia featured a graphical improvement: art with a 256 color VGA palette. New support for 24-bit non-remappable portraits (the first art to extend beyond 256 colors), and Windows Vista support were implemented in the April 6, 2007 "Kitterwing Edition." On December 16, 2006, Furcadia became the first-ever MMORPG to celebrate ten years of continual service.

Furcadia was originally designed and programmed by Dr. Cat (known as Felorin in-game) and Manda (known as Talzhemir in-game). Two additional people have since been credited as part of the creative team for their work: game producer Katie Bazor (known as Emerald Flame), who developed (and still coordinates) the Beekin volunteer staff project, and Aleksi Asikainen (known as Fox, formerly sanctimonious), who created the game's editors and is now involved in coding the client and the server as the game's part-time programmer. Two others that assist with programming are Ryhn and Farrier.

The developers continue to make several minor updates to the code per year. Major updates to the code (such as the addition of new character avatars or improved DragonSpeak commands) occur approximately once per year. As of 2011, the game remains in a public alpha development stage.

The iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch client was released on July 19, 2010. Due to Apple's Policies and the rating the developers wanted, part of the game-world is unavailable to the iDevice users.

The application is no longer available, though there is some question as to why that might be.