Hail, my fellow Elyrians!

Shiny time is upon us, which I’m supremely glad for. Thanks to the American holiday last week, I didn’t get to share a shiny but, this week, that’s not a problem!

It’s been an interesting week what with folks coming back from a vacation, however short. When you work on a project like this you “get close to it” thanks to the amount of time you spend working on it. Especially when you’re laser-focused on a particular part of a project. You get so focused on the details that you miss the whole, sometimes.

I’ve mentioned that before, and I've mentioned how it’s good to stop and take stock now and again. But sometimes, you step back to look at the bigger picture and you miss the small details.

Take this week, for example. I’ve been mostly working on Domain and Settlement Selection (D&SS) stuff. I’ve spent the week. on the one hand, with my nose pressed against my monitor, examining every pixel the process uses to render the game map you’ll all see when D&SS begins anew. On the other hand, I’ve also been working with the rest of the design guild on advancing some of the story telling work being done in the Soulborn Engine this week, which means I’ve had my eye on the game client in a sort of general sense.

So, color me surprised when I saw this in the wilderness this week! It’s some sort of ancient ritual site, or a set of markers. I recognized the imagery, so I get where it would have come from, but I had no idea that it existed in the region, tucked away from prying eyes.

For a few moments, I had exactly the sort of experience we’re striving to make possible with the game’s mechanics: I was surprised by what I encountered in an area I thought I was familiar with. In fact, I was a little scared. I wasn’t expecting to run into anything like it out there and I started to wonder if it was still in use; if there was a hunting party watching me, even then.

And it encouraged further exploration to see what else one might find. I’d some sense, I'd been looking at the forest, but I’d forgotten to look at the trees.

Of course, once I did look deeper and discovered more, I didn’t really feel any safer. Those are manacles, right? Why would you chain someone up in a… well? Pool? I mean, to be clear: I know why. A site like that really only has one use. Knowing that didn’t make me feel any safer.

Thankfully, as you can probably imagine based on the names, these are old sites. Ancient, even. Abandoned and a little overgrown. No one sacrifices people anymore, right?

Right?

Stay shiny, my friends!

P.S. No really; no one sacrifices anyone anymore. ;)

P.P.S. For those not in the know, the low-poly "low-fidelity" art style you're seeing is a screenshot from our pre-alpha client. We use this style for our implementation work because it allows us to iterate quickly on mechanics and features without forcing the art guild to continuously rework high-poly high detail models while we work out certain pipelines. This is not indicative of Chronicle of Elyria's final art style.