It is that most shiny of days, isn't it? I have to admit I almost didn't notice. It's been a very busy time for us here at SbS, and this week was no exception. I've spent a good part of my day today reviewing some of the refinements and changes we've made to combat to see how they effect the way game feels. I want to sneak in discussing the less noticed bits of what we do, so like last week, this will be a mild diversion.

First, let me throw up a couple of screen shots of what I'm looking at today. It's not a shiny without an image to look at, right?!

OK, now I can explain my day. An incredibly large part of what makes CoE a MEOW is how it feels to play. I actually touched on it when I was speaking with the folks over at TheoryForge last week; there are two layers to any game experience: the underlying math/logic, and the user's actual experience - the presentation of all that background calculation and simulation, essentially.

We've always known that we wanted a particular feel from combat, and thanks to all the skill rework we did last year, we have a pretty good simulation of the combat's mechanics. But the job's not done there. We also have to consider how best to marry those mechanics and their sims to the feel we want, which is a little trickier than it may seem at first. There are a lot of different factors involved. Even things as simple as "where does the camera go when you're in this situation" can make a huge difference to how a game feels and, in turn, how you think about the game.

The first screen shot there is a pic of me having a go at a dummy over in the barracks' training yard. I'm deliberately backed away here so that my camera abuts a tree that's just off-frame. I was checking on how it feels to have the camera move up to give you a better view when you're backed up like that. Would it be better for the camera to move over your shoulder instead? That's what we do with archery and it seems to work pretty well there, as you can see in the second screen shot.

Of course, while that's clean and keeps your primary target in view, doing something like that feels claustrophobic and it cuts you off from the rest of the world, which would be dangerous if you weren't in a one-on-one fight. But when the camera moves up, referring back to the first screenshot, things start to feel more game-like, more like something you might find in a console action game, which isn't necessarily the feel we want.

So, long story short (I know, too late), there's an ephemeral piece of the job that often goes unspoken. Typically, when we talk about UX design (User eXperience) we tend to think of menu navigation flows and control schemes, but there's a lot more to the job. Some of it is knowing when to tune a number in systems down to fractional values, so things respond at just the right time. Other parts involve fiddling with a camera all day to make sure it never makes your game feel like some other game. Sometimes it's scrubbing your way through dozens or hundreds of combat animations to make sure that they can interact with the combat and collision systems without any hint of latency or lag. It's all tiny little things, thousands of them, but those are the tiny little things that make a good game great, and they're just as important to focus on as the big systems or the innovative mechanics.

Which is why that's what's on my mind as we work today. Even at this stage, we keep stuff like this in mind, because it can also change how we think about the game, if we're not careful. We're players too, after all.

Thanks for indulging me as I talked about it; I hope you enjoyed it!

Shine on, Elyrians!