Hail and well met, Elyrians!

In the last couple weeks, the team has been split between two major areas. The engineering team has been piling on the website to bring improvements and to prepare for the backend architecture needed for V3 and beyond. The content side of the team has been cultivating their creativity upon Titan's Steppe, developing breadth for the Prologue through visuals and animations and other effects.

Weather on the Steppe

Now that some new systems are in place to handle the environmental effects in the world, Heat has been providing some visual targets for our Environment team to hit. Last time I showed off the night sky paintovers, and this update I have a couple more to share. Keep in mind, that Chronicles of Elyria will have a weather system and seasons that will produce what you see below as you play. Of note, muddy roads and snow banks will affect travel and increase strain on people and vehicles that dare to venture outdoors...

Sometimes it rains and sometimes it pours

Snow accumulation in New Haven

Website Version 2.7.0

Work on the website continues! We've made a couple releases over the past couple weeks that have brought the following fixes and improvements:

Bounties Collected

Sometimes nefarious elements need to be brought to justice. We've tracked these ones down and their days of menacing the populace is over!

• Bullets and numbered lists should be indented more
• Editing a post with markdown causes error message
• Deleting the last post in a thread doesn't update the topic information
• Fixed avatar size issues on mobile...mostly

Contracts Completed

In an effort to improve our community, we've also built new features that are sure to delight!

• Support for reporting if a post or comment needs to be moderated
• Ability to change your Email Address
• Ability to set avatar pictures (animated gifs supported for 10k influence and above)
• A place to do Signature Preview in your Account settings
• Ability to Preview prior to posting
• Ability to change your user name
• Shop item to purchase user name change - only visible if you have used your one-time, free name change
• URLs and avatar pictures can't be set below 250 Influence in order to remove spam/troll accounts
• URLs can be posted below 250 Influence if you link to our wiki or http://chroniclesofelyria.com
• Temporarily disabled the Monarch package (layaway users can still complete their purchase)
• Added spiffy moderator/admin backgrounds

Silver Run Mine Slowrun

After we did the speedrun of the PAX Demo, we talked about doing a slowrun so folks that weren't at the expo could enjoy and appreciate the progress we've been making on this area of the Prologue. I'm pleased to say that it's now available to watch! Hopefully it provides insight into our design philosophies and the features we've been working on for the last few months. Ultimately, all the gameplay you see could be in any area of the world. The environment you see boasts improvements to our lighting and atmospheric effects, along with what kinds of challenges you might find in a dungeon-delving expedition.

Open Topic Q&A on April 27th

We've done a lot of topical Q&As for the last six months in order to dive in a little deeper on topics that we were ready to expand on, beyond the Design Journals. There are always a lot of unrelated questions that come up that don't get answered because we want to make sure we provide depth on the topic-at-hand. This time, however, we are going to do an Open Topic Q&A so anything goes! That burning question that you've been saving for the right topic can be unleashed!

While many of the questions you have are going to be related to the gameplay, I wouldn't be surprised to also get questions about the studio, members of the team, what we think about the game industry or a specific game, how Caspian takes his rum, or other curiosities. Like I said, anything goes! 'Anything goes' doesn't mean we will have an answer for all your inquiries but, as always, we will do our best! To that end, I'll try to have more of the team in chat and on reddit to help field questions, even if not on camera.

The Q&A will take place on our Twitch.tv channel on Thursday, April 27th at 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT / 11PM GMT. We will be taking questions primarily from Reddit on this thread. Head on over and post your questions or vote up the ones you want to hear answered in the Q&A.

For those who miss it, the recording will be watchable on Twitch.tv for a limited time afterward and on our YouTube channel forever. So even if you can’t make the live session, your question from reddit may still be answered.

Please follow these rules when posting questions for the Q&A.

RULES

1. Please limit questions to 1 question per post, so it can be easily up-voted/down-voted
2. Please limit yourself to 3 posts for a maximum of three questions per community member
3. Keep your question brief. That makes it easier to read, and quicker to answer
4. Make sure to upvote the posts of others you're most interested in hearing the answers to

Don't forget, many of the most common questions about CoE can be answered by reading over our design journals. If you're new to CoE, there is a wealth of information to begin with there.

We hope you'll join us Thursday, April 27th at 4PM PDT / 7PM EDT / 11PM GMT!

Pledged to Your Continued Adventures in Life, Both Actual and Fantasy,

Vye