Achievement Unlocked: Parenthood – Friday, April 27, 2018
Folks,
Welcome to your friendly, informative, and entertaining weekly update from us at CSE! We’ve been very busy this week, working on some great things like improved performance in the building system, new class-specific animations, and even updates to the scenario system to allow you to queue from different servers! And that’s only the start of all the items we’ve been working on this week!
If you missed this week’s robust wrap-up stream with Andrew and JB, you can catch that HERE.
Before we move into the Top Tenish for the week, and the art as well, let’s talk about this weekend’s testing details!
This weekend’s test is an UNSTABLE BUILD test. What that means is there’s a lot of new stuff in there and some issues we’d like more testing on that we are aware of. More info to follow for IT and Alpha Backers.
When: Saturday and Sunday, April 28th and 29th, 2018
12PM EDT – 2PM EDT/9AM PDT – 11PM PDT/4PM UTC – 6PM UTC.
If you’re confused about the times, you can go HERE. We’ll have another follow-up email going out with more info as well.
Where: Nuada Prep
Who: IT and Alpha
We will send out a separate test email later with more details. Let’s move to the Top Tenish for the week!
Top Tenish:
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Testing: This week we began testing and bug fixing on a new build on Nuada Prep. This build had several new things, including working traits, updated health UI, art updates to the zone, new animations, and several bug fixes. Thank you very much to those IT Backers who jumped in to help us find issues!
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WIP – Tech – Multi-server Scenario Director: Colin began work this week on some changes that will allow players to queue from any zone into a scenario. Each server will have a “worker” that will communicate with the “director.”
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WIP – Tech – Buildings: Andrew and Matt continue hammering away on the update to building improvements. This week, Matt got C.U.B.E. in Hatchery, or “cube=1,” working again, minus undo/redo and blueprint, and handed that off to Andrew. Andrew in turn pushed all his CUBE architecture changes through all the client code, and worked with Matt on connecting things back to the UI. Placing blocks now happens as fast as you can press the mouse button!
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WIP – Tech – Skill Effect Debugging: Rob is creating a UI for debugging skill effects on the client. Currently, it displays what the skill thinks it should be playing, as well as what it is actually playing. This will help us debug issues with skills much faster!
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WIP – Post Office: This week, Caleb is working on standardizing our entity creation so that all entities can work with the Post Office properly. When everything is hooked up to Post Office, we’ll be able to do a lot more fun gameplay-related things, such as our capture the flag mechanics in the Dragon Fang scenario.
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WIP – Patcher Variables: This week, Dave has been adding a new feature to our patch client that will allow the game client to request and receive custom data aside from the usual game resources that it patches. This gives a lot of benefits to the developers, and some useful ones to the player, such as being able to reset game config settings from within the patcher if you’ve royally messed up the client config and are unable to fix it in game!
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Tech – Various: Christina hit several different items this week, which require a list!
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Documentation and planning of an updated crafting UI.
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Building plots now display on the map, allowing players to quickly find their personal plot and which faction owns a plot.
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Upgrades to slash commands involving resource nodes to make it easier for admins to make changes in a live game.
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WIP – New item actions in relation to the Vox, allowing users to easily find it and replace one if lost.
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Support for VFX and SFX triggers on the Vox.
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WIP – Design – Banes and Boons (Traits): This week saw the return of the first pass of new working traits from Ben, supported by Rob. Ben will continue to flesh out this list of traits. These allow Backers to add a bit more variation into their characters during the creation process.
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WIP – Art – Animations: Work continues on the new class-specific idles and updated animations.
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Sandra is wrapping up the Forest Stalker work, incorporating a new class-specific idle. This will be in next week.
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Scott finished off the Black Knight’s jumps, and has quickly moved through the Fianna’s new ability roughing out a new spear pierce and slash.
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WIP – Art – Environment Art: This week continued focus on the Dragon Fang map, which is our second scenario. While we continued to add more assets to the map, we also began work on collision, performance, and gameplay. You can see my (Tyler) environment art stream HERE.
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First pass design placement of assets to affect primary combat areas.
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WIP – Improving assets to be easier to move over and around, and adding LODs and collision to existing assets to improve performance.
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First final pass on Arthurian starting spawn point, assets, and hand-placement of mods to define paths.
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First rough pass Viking spawn point mods set up.
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WIP – VFX – Updated Realm Variations: Using Michelle’s concept art we’ve previously shown, Mike is developing different techniques for generating sprites and new motion templates. This prototyping will next be put to use on the Blackguard and Black Knight’s new abilities.
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WIP – Art – One-Handed Hammers: The Mjölnir is getting an animation update that will give him his own unique idle, dual wielding one-handed hammers. Michelle concepted those this week, and the models have already been finished by Jon. Next up, these will go to Scott to begin fleshing out the new animations.
- Art – UI: James continued iteration UI styles and layouts for chat settings, and began work on the tab styles for fullscreen. He’s also assisting AJ with the UI assets for trading and containers.
- WIP – Art – Updated Character Creation Renders: Jon finished a first pass on several renders this week. As we create these, they will be handed off to Michelle to integrate into the updated visuals of the character creation process, replacing the old concept art.
For art, let’s start off with a static image of some of the work Scott is doing on the Fianna. This represents the new special ability, “Enduring Onslaught.” The Fianna raises his weapon over his head, drawing life energy down along it, and his body. This is followed by a looping, elegant strike that spreads magic around the Fianna, healing him and his nearby allies, and greatly increasing their damage resistances, while striking nearby enemies and causing them to be disoriented.
Next up, we have the Mjölnir, one-handed hammer concepts from Michelle. 
Jon created these assets quite quickly!
This week, we also have some sound concept from dB for the Place of Power area. You can click HEREto listen to that, and I’ve pulled up Michelle’s original concept art below that inspired this work.
Dionne worked on the assets we’ve called “rock clusters” this week, so Ben could begin placing them about the map to impact the map flow. Once we have these glowing, with lights and VFX, it will add a lot to the zone!
To wrap up art for the week, we have a birth announcement from our new animator Joe and his wife Wendy. They created their own art this week, with the announcement of baby Madilynne Lee! Congratulations to both of you from all of us at CSE!
It’s really nice to wrap up the week, not only with lots of progress but on such a great note! We treat this team like a family, so it’s great to see it growing!
We also received some gifts this week, first from our “Rich Creepy Uncle” who sent a pizza lunch to both the Fairfax and the Kirkland office. Thank you so much for the generous gift, which was devoured quite quickly!
We also received some amazing mugs from Ludovic, opened on today’s stream. Clearly, he wants to make sure we get all the fluids and caffeine necessary to hit the start of Beta 1 strong!
Okay, now we’re actually all wrapped up! Have a great weekend all, and thank you for your patience, enthusiasm, and generosity as we get closer and closer to the start of Beta 1.
-t