Hey everyone,
A very happy New Year to you all! Since the release of Inside Chronicles of Elyria - Episode 1, many of you have written in with both words of encouragement and well-wishes. Thank you so much for your continued support! We've also received plenty of questions and seen even more on our social media. That's great, and completely anticipated.
As we promised in Episode 1 of Inside Chronicles of Elyria, we'll be taking a deeper look at what we've been working on and what's coming up in 2021 in Episodes 2 and 3. The first of which will be out in just a few short weeks and focuses almost exclusively on important changes to our production roadmap that are necessary to make forward progress. I'll also talk a bit about design and development work that's been happening. The design work, which I think will be particularly exciting to our backers, will be followed up with new Design Journals throughout 2021, accompanied by opportunities to alpha test and provide feedback.
In addition to the upcoming episodes, I also wanted to take this opportunity to address a couple common questions that arose from the latest video. In some respects they're an extension of our fairly lengthy FAQ, but we wanted to take the time to answer them.
Has Chronicles of Elyria's Art Style Changed?
I regularly get asked about Chronicle of Elyria's art style and why it appears to have changed over the years. While you'll see two aesthetically different versions of the game, the art style for Chronicles of Elyria hasn't changed. During early-stage development it's common for designers and engineers to work with low-polygon, low-fidelity assets referred to as "gray box assets."
These assets provide the designers and engineers something to work with while they lock in the design and mechanics of the game, without overtaxing the artists and animators by having them work on production-quality assets that are necessarily going to change or be discarded as development continues.
As a crowdfunded game, we wanted to show people more than just gray-box assets at the start. We wanted to convey our long-term vision for the game and so began our Kickstarter and early development stages by using high-fidelity, high-polygon assets.
However, there came a point in time where the energy and effort required to put out high-quality assets was counterproductive to our goal of rapid iteration. So first with VoxElyria in 2017 and then Prelyria in 2018, we shifted our development pipeline to the more common practice of using low-poly, low-fidelity assets while we continued to work on client-heavy mechanics. Additionally, we postponed "Prologue: The Awakening" until near the end of development when we'd already be working with production-quality assets. In some regards, our desire to show you the "final" visual style at the beginning creates a feeling of regression, when in reality, the low-quality, low-fidelity assets you've seen more recently is ultimately building up to what was seen in the earlier stages of development.
Will Discord Be Returning?
Undoubtedly the most common question asked by all those who watched Episode 1 of Inside Chronicles of Elyria, is when Discord will return. The simple answer is that the intention is to get our Discord community back up and running as soon as it makes sense to do so. Managing any community space is particularly time consuming, and we want ours to be a positive environment for all those who support Chronicles of Elyria. That means not only finding the right moderators, but also the right channel structure to encourage healthy discussion. That said, we are currently in the process of fine-tuning social tools that will enable communities to engage, organize, and roleplay in ways they were previously unable to - we think you'll be super pleased. We will be sharing more information in Episode 2.
As always, if you've any burning questions, don't hesitate to get in touch via insidecoe at soulboundstudios.com. For those that already have, we're working to get through the emails as quickly as possible!
