Hail Elyrians!

This has been a hectic week! Earlier in the week we released the Domain & Settlement Selection site in read only mode for your review! It’s not a shiny, but it definitely is shiny, all the same. Check it out if you haven’t yet! With the D&SS maps finalized, this here Snipehunter has a little more time to review the game on this, the shiniest of days. I found a couple of things that… if you’ll pardon the pun… shone out from the rest. Let’s have a look!

I think my favorite cool thing from the week was probably seeing all the polish work going into combat. I’ve mentioned combat a few times in these here shiny posts, which I hope has hammered home how much of a focus it is for me, and for a big piece of the design team. We’re not building a game centered around combat, but the fantasy genre and sword & sorcery adventure go hand-in-hand. It would be hard to imagine the world of Elyria without the occasional buckled swash, you know? So, I constantly check in on the work being done to get combat up to snuff, just to make sure things are going where we expect them to. Lately our focus has been around applying things like VFX and audio cues to the combat experience both to “liven it up” and to make sure that folks have ways to know what to expect when they press the attack buttons.

VFX (Visual special FX for those that aren’t familiar with acronym VFX) are a funny thing; we have this tendency to think of them solely as eye candy, but in almost every 3D video game on the market today, I guarantee there is at least one instance of VFX being used explicitly in the service of game mechanics. CoE is no exception; while we want VFX to “punch up” the overall experience, they’re also often acting as hints and indicators. And, of course, for those who don’t pay much attention to the visuals, or who can’t, audio cues are just as important. Audio cues, input mechanics, combat animations, and VFX all work together in a complicated dance to make sure combat looks good and feeds your intuition so that it “Feels right” to use. We’re well on our way to orchestrating that dance now, and that makes me very happy.

You know what else makes me happy? Finding a basement entrance in a ruined church and clicking on it and expecting to transition into the dungeon generation test level, a stark white world of pure geometry, only to instead find myself in a dark hallway of the ruined basement of an actual church! Sure, there is still work to do, but from my perspective we went from nothing to playable in the blink of an eye. Talk about gratifying! Well, I think that’s it for this shiny day. I hope you enjoyed it everyone!

I’ll see you next week, but until then…

Stay Shiny my friends!