Hail Elyrians!

It is that most shiny of days, a day I enshrine every week as a holiday. That's right, it is SHINY TIME.

So what's on the slate this week? The last few shinies have, barring the rare diversion, been about the process of making the world, because that has been the primary preoccupation of my mind of late. However, today I got the chance to review the design guild's work, which put in me the mind to show off the world as seen from our pre-alpha client (what we've nicknamed prElyria). Unfortunately, I didn't have the free time I wanted to capture some video, so I thought I would instead take a moment to show off some set ups and locations we haven't shown off before.

So, let's start with the location that has been on my mind most often, lately, the semi-arid desert. And, actually, while we're at it, let's talk a little about one of the game's mechanics that I am most often asked about: How does tunneling work? Or more broadly, how do basements and caverns work?!

The first thing I usually mention when I'm asked, is that you can't just dig into the soil of the world and create new channels. Nor, from the world's exterior, can you simply just walk up to the side of a mesa with a pick axe and begin carving away a cavern or a cave. While Chronicles of Elyria will allow you to mine out tunnels and dig out basements, the game engine won't let you make those changes to the base exterior terrain. Out in the open, you can only build on the terrain, you can't remove or reshape the terrain itself. So how do you get to an interior space to start mining or digging?

You build an entrance:

This is what we call a reference target, built out of our game assets by Heat to show us the visual fidelity we're aiming for as we implement these features, but it still illustrates how the process works: The entrance to the mine is actually something constructed on the side of the rock wall where you want to begin mining. (or in the case of a natural cavern, the cavern mouth serves the same function as the entrance)

When you build an entrance you cut a hole through the terrain and replace it with the entrance you build. Once the entrance is in place, you can step through, enter the interior of the mountain, mesa, or what-have-you, and get to work mining, carving, or otherwise constructing your interior space.

Of course, Elyria is a world that's been around for awhile, so you'll find ancient, old, or just abandoned versions of the mines, catacombs, dungeons, and caverns that pre-date the activities of players. The game systems create these based on a few rules we've laid out with the aim that, together, the collection of such spaces in the world will silently and immersively tell you some of the history of the world. You may find an old and dusty mine entrance in the desert, walk inside, and find a long neglected, but well worked, mine like so:

Here you see a mine where the Waerd have been working a natural cavern for awhile, having long ago transformed that natural cave into a mine, until it could yield no more useful material, at which point they moved on, leaving the bones of their old enterprise to dry in desert air, sheltered from the cycles of scorching heat and nightly cold that would have splintered and shattered what they had built.

Of course, not every interior space will take the chambers and voids left by natural processes and turn them into something like a mine. Some will be hewn straight out of the rock itself, creating the space used with each swing of the pick axe or strike of the chisel:

In the end though, what you do with the interior of the world is up to you, your tools, and your determination.

Stay Shiny my friends!