Greetings Elyrians!

This will be a shorter shiny, I’m afraid. In much the way that last week was an exercise in planning ahead for me, this week has been equally busy, but that work has been mostly “outside the client.” The team is hard at work, working on two different fronts: Tuning the advanced traversal mechanics/building interesting traversal related gameplay we can with these mechanics is one front, and putting the dungeon generator through its paces/iterating on the dungeon generation algorithm to produce better and more interesting layouts of the various ruins, tunnels, tombs, and hidden places of Elyria is the other. I’ll have more to show on these fronts next week, once I’m back in the client myself.

But for me, this week has been all about you - yes you! – and how you’ll actually interact with your avatar in the world of Elyria. But, before I explain, let me show off today’s shiny, because I know it’s something folks have wanted to see.

I’d been holding off sharing these for a bit for a couple of reasons. The first is that we’re not presently working on them in-game and I wanted to wait until we had come back to them. The second was that I wanted to try to convince Heat to do another mood piece in full color for me in his spare time, so I could share that with you as well. We’ve made a couple of changes to Kypiq architecture since Heat’s original concept art. In fact, some of the images in today’s shiny are actually new because of it, and I wanted to share a big lush color piece of Heat’s amazing art to go with this. However, Heat’s a busy guy, he really doesn’t have spare time, and he’s working on imagery related to some new animals that we’re introducing to the ecosystem, so he couldn’t afford me the time it would take… this time. Still, you’ve all waited long enough, so let me share his sketches featuring some of the new changes I mentioned:

Click here for the large view

Now, getting back to what I’ve been doing lately. You saw a few weeks back that we were taking another look at the advanced traversal stuff – this includes parkour mechanics such as wall climbing, vaulting, and sliding. Well, part of the reason that we made the decision to look at this stuff again was that our movement model had changed since we worked on the mine run that featured these mechanics originally. Our animation rig, the player model’s complexity, and even the way the mechanics themselves were operated by players had changed in the interim to make things more accessible and smoother for players to operate.

When you’re working to make player skill a thing, you need to ensure that your mechanics aren’t “clunky” so that the types of optimizations that players make as they gain skill have room to be useful. If, for example, climbing a rope requires walking up to a rope, putting one end of the rope in hand and then using your left and right hand controls to pull yourself up the rope, that interface constrains what a player can do and how quickly they can do it, perhaps even to the point where the only way to express player skill is in maintain the right cadence of button presses. We want more room for players to benefit from their own personal skill than that, so it’s on us to make sure we find control interfaces, but keyboard/mouse and gamepad, that feel right for players without robbing them of the ability to self-optimize their use of those controls.

So, most of my week was spent reviewing not just the mechanics of traversal and locomotion, but their interfaces and their “atomic units of motion” to make sure that there’s room for players to… if you’ll excuse the pun… S H I N E. Unfortunately, a lot of that work involves updating specifications and crawling data files or code. The rest of the design guild got to do the fun bits, where they were designing death pits, traps, pools of acid, breakaway floors and other devious ways to mess with you all as you try to make your way through the more dangerous spaces of the world.

Next week, I think, I’ll do a video of my review of their work creating “obstacles” for you all! :)

Until then,

Stay Shiny My Friends!