Before Liquid Rock Games was formed, we were just a couple of guys ( Pang Lih Hern and myself Yap Chun Fei ) with dreams of creating the greatest and uber coolest games on the planet! (a dream shared by thousands of other indie developers). Undeterred with no money and a lot of love and passion for developing games, we decided the best way for us to realize our dreams was to work on our game projects full time. After many nights of brainstorming for game ideas , it was decided that our first game had to be a sci fi racer being fans of wipeout and post apocalyptic game genres such as Fallout, the idea for Project Aftershock was conceived. 

Not only was it a cool racing game idea which we think is achievable (afterall how hard could this be its only a racing game right?btw-the game's original production timeline was supposed to be 12 months and a year later on we're still not done with the first track :P)

When Project Aftershock was first conceived, one of the earliest tasks which we've had to think about was the development pipeline which fit out budget. Now before venturing in as indie developers, the both of us were from game companies which has the luxury of commercial tools such as 3ds max and so on. Funding our own game meant that we had to cut down alot of production costs and one of them tools. Fortunately OSS software has matured enough for us to use it for our own production.

The tools which we've decided to work with were Ogre3d as our rendering engine, Blender3d for 3d assets and GIMP for 2d assets so basically in short almost everything is open source software. The initial plan for Aftershock was just to create a sci fi co op racing game where the whole level will be built in Blender3d.

Not an easy task unlearning all your skills gained from years of using commercial packages such as 3ds max and Photoshop and learning Blender3d (not recommended for the faint of heart). But I guess it was a necessary adjustment we had to take.

However while building the first track in blender3d after a few months (also the artists's first time in learning Blender3D as I used to be a 3ds max user) , we realized we've hit a very important development snag. Not only was this method unwieldy it was impossible for us to iterate on the level designs fast as we're just a 2 man team with only 1 artist.

All track modelling work in Blender was stopped during its early stages.We went back to the drawing board and decided that the best way to speed up our iterative process was by building a level editor.

The first level editor prototype has to be functional enough for the artist to import objects into the editor as well as check for material settings. At this point of time the level editor only has one source of directional light (aka sunlight) with ambient lighting and lipsm+pssm shadows.

But it was good enough for us to do early tests and to build a rough race track. The whole idea is that all track blocks are built in blender and then reassembled in the level editor. This has proven to be particularly useful as it was easier to manage the art assets than before.