Hail Elyrians! It was another playtest day, though I must admit I didn’t participate this time. As the playtest window opened for the team to jump in and play, I found myself hard at work in a meeting discussing Parko--- ahem locomotion mechanics. But the meeting wrapped up in time for one of the environment artists to stop me on the way back to my office and say, “If you haven’t seen the new rain Raevantiel put in, you really should.” So, I checked my phone, saw there was 10 minutes left in the playtest and ran back to my desk to capture the rain… or at least, that was the goal.

I don’t know if there was some sort of bandit related raid in progress or if I just was in bad part of the neighborhood, but the place was crawling with bandits. They kept running out of the woods at me. And, as anyone that has seen any other raw videos I’ve captured can tell you, I’m not the team’s best combatant. In fact, between you and I, I’m not great at the combat in our game. So… I got dead. A lot. At one point, I was even like, “Good lord am I even trying to throw the right attacks here?” I mean I was fighting an untrained and unarmed opponent and missing! That can’t just be me, right? (Spoilers: it was so just me)

So, I backed away from the fight and pulled up the combat codex to get a look at the attack trees. (Thankfully for me, the raider in question knew he was in over his head and backed offed when I stopped pressing the attack) Anyway, for those that haven’t heard me mention the combat codex before, the combat codex is a piece of UI in the game for looking at the martial styles you know, and even for creating your own martial styles, once you’ve mastered a few of the styles you’ve learned. It’s not fully implemented yet, and there’s only placeholder debug UI created by designers to see it with, but it will tell you about the various attacks that are in each stance of each style, and it will show you the attack trees for each stance so you can see which combinations of quick and heavy attacks to use to throw any particular chain of attacks. In this case, I could see that no, I was throwing the right attacks, my timing was just terrible, as usual, and my blade wasn’t going where I wanted it to be, when I wanted it to be there.

In my defense I was playing with the target lock toggled off, which isn’t something I usually do (again, not the best combatant on the team, that’s Souzou), but even so, I was using the style I thought I was and I was, in fact, just whiffing my sword through the air most of the time.

But look, my combat prowess – or lack thereof – aside, take a gander at that monsoon rain! Even in low fidelity our artists continue to amaze me. Thanks to them I get to work on game mechanics in a realized world, instead of a sea of white or gray rectangles the way I would be doing this on most of my past projects. I cannot stress enough how this approach to production has been useful to me. Usually on a project the “game” comes together at almost the last possible moment. I’ve worked on big-name MMOs that were unrecognizable in comparison to their launched clients even just a month or two out from launch. Here we’ve got a game world, and when we put our mechanics to the test, they aren’t just “does the button press do what you expect” tests, but fully playable first rev iterations that feel right. Or, at least, they do when we get it right. We don’t always get it right, but thanks to the way we do things, we can see those failures fast and move on to finding a new solution.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s look into the game!

Stay shiny my friends!