Greetings Fellow Avatars!
Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:
- New Designers Join SotA Dev Team
- Desolate Hills on the Perennial Coast
- Architecture of the Obsidians, Part 4: Desolis Underground!
- Thou Art Invited to Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 20 Postmortem
- Player Owned Towns: Snowy Mountains
New Designers Join SotA Dev Team
For the past several months we’ve been searching for world builders to help us crank out more content, as well as game system designers to help flesh out some of our systems. Our search has been fruitful and we’d like to introduce you to three recent additions to our Shroud of the Avatar team:
Keith Quinn joined the SotA team 3 months ago, and hit the ground running starting with Release 18. Keith has worked on massively-multiplayer games since 2001, starting in community relations for Ultima Online and most recently as a level designer for Shroud of the Avatar. Along the way, he’s been a game designer on several MMOGs for PC, mobile, and PlayStation, including DC Universe Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. As a level designer, Keith helps bring adventure scenes to life by adding interesting visuals, harvestable resources, exploration rewards, and, of course, challenging bad guys all along the way. Born in New York, Keith currently lives in Texas with his pets. He sometimes creates comics in his spare time.
Esteben Zaldivar aka “Steve”, joined us three weeks ago as a junior Level Designer, and is one of the youngest chaps on the Shroud of the Avatar team. He graduated with Honors from the College of Communication at the University of Texas with a concentration in game design. Throughout this time his research spanned open-world games, educational applications, and virtual reality games leading him to be awarded the ESA Video Game Innovation Fellowhip. During his studies he interned at Team Chaos where he was a game designer on several of their titles.
Jeff Mills joined our team this week as a game system designer/programmer. Jeff has been making games professionally since 1996, at such studios as 7th Level, Terminal Reality, and Red Fly Studios. He has spent his career as a facilitator among the various disciplines within the development studio structure. Part programmer, part artist, part scripter, his experience gives him valuable insight into all of the processes involved in developing video games. Jeff is diving into the SotA crafting system, so look for enhancements to that system in Release 21 launching in a few weeks.
Desolate Hills on the Perennial Coast
Esteben Zaldivar and Keith Quinn have been working on the new Desolate Hills scene for Release 21 (launching August 27). Esteben is laying out the terrain and points of interest while Keith focuses on the game play elements. The Desolate Hills, corrupted by the Necroplis, have been reduced to a ruined graveyard in the North, abandoned settlement in the South, and a Shrine to the Lich King in the East, an inhospitable place for travelers. Here are a few screenshots of the work-in-progress:
Architecture of the Obsidians, Part 4: Desolis Underground!
[Continuation of A Dev+ Forum Post by Scottie Jones]
This week I made significant progress on the base layout for the Desolis Underground map from beginning to end (featuring all of this new Obsidian architecture). This has been, by far, one of the most difficult scenes to create simply because of the number of unique rooms and props it has required, partially due to the need to make it match the descriptions in Blade of the Avatar, and partially because of my desire to make the Obsidian architecture unique compared to the generic dungeon environments of an earlier age.
Of course, the fact that this complex is meant to represent the former seat of the Obsidian government also means it’s quite huge as well. Above you’ll note there are quite a few areas that are unfinished, but at least now I’m able to walk through it from start to finish. When you first enter this complex through the passage in the rock face of the Epitaph (a huge plateau of earth and stone thrust up by the cataclysm), you will travel through a huge passage deep into the earth flanked by carved stone dragon heads which act as sentinels, and which match the huge ones on the outside of the entrance (dragon heads designed by our awesome artist Andy Cortez for the Dragon Pass region).
The passage opens into a vast cave called the Cavern of Night, where the Old City’s basement layers are exposed around a funnel of ruins leading to the edge of an enormously deep shaft that descends into the heart of the plateau’s inner core. Currently, this space is dim and somewhat empty, waiting for me to populate it with ruins, rock, and earth.
Though the above image gives an impression of scale, and an initial glimpse of the balcony leading to the Acolyte’s Stair, this next image gives a better view of the same area from above the great depths it overlooks.
Here you can see the stairs beginning to descend into the terrors below. Over two centuries ago unfortunate prisoners were led by the dozens into this place, around the walkway to the right of the stairs, and into the upper dungeons on the opposite side of the great shaft. After they were processed they would be taken down the second staircase, known as the Long Stair, on a singular path that would lead down into oppressive darkness to only one terrible destination, the dreaded subterranean laboratories of the Reshapers.
In the present days of our game’s fiction, the desert people that dwell outside the walls surrounding the Epitaph throw their criminals and captured rivals into the ruins beyond the wall, and some of them seek shelter from the burning sun in the Cavern of Night. Those that have survived have claimed the old upper prison ruins as their own, and use the two stairways as choke-points to slaughter the many insane and horrid creatures that rise up from the depths. In the image below you can see the iron-doored gate on the opposite side which opens on to the Long Stair. That is my starting point for the rest of the upper dungeon prisons which I’ll be building behind it, under a covering of ruins and rubble which the Obsidians would have incorporated into it.
Players will be able to choose which path they’d like to use to descend, and will eventually be able to take either path back up as well, assuming they live through the quest that takes them to the Pool of Destiny far, far below… The shaft of the stairs will allow for a few harrowing fights with ascending monstrosities, while simultaneously enjoying the view of the Obsidian Falls (which plummet into the caves below), before finally getting to the bottom. In the image below you can see the path that leads down the center of the cave toward Fate’s Lake, beside the arcing end of the Long Stair. Here, visiting dignitaries and members of the Obsidian Court once looked down to their left and saw the majesty of the Cascades where the falls pour down toward the lake (currently not built-out yet), or gazed down to their right upon the poor souls being led to their doom.
And lastly, we have nearly the same view you saw a week or so ago, but now nearly complete and fully built-out! Once again you can see the entrance of the Obsidian Keep, the courtyard, and part of Fate’s Lake, but this time from atop the straight stairs on its path back toward the bottom of the Acolyte’s Stair…
Ah well, it’s been another evening of burning the midnight oil for me… Time to head home for the weekend! I do hope you enjoyed this week’s work in progress… There may be one or two more postings in this thread before I wrap up this scene… Take care!
Scottie ^_^
Thou Art Invited to Hangout of the Avatar ~ Release 20 Postmortem
Please join us Wednesday, August 12th at 3:00 PM Central (20:00 GMT) for the next Hangout of the Avatar! Richard, Starr, and Chris will be chatting about Release 20 and looking ahead to Release 21. And, of course, FireLotus will be taking your questions and feedback live in the chat-room and also in advance in the OP comments section.*
The dve team will be giving out some prizes during the 90 minute extended Hangout, and all you have to do to qualify for one is to come hang out with us in the IRC chatroom during the broadcast. And, some very special guests will be joining us to close the show. As always, the link to the hangout will be posted here directly before the hangout begins.
*Please keep in mind that questions and feedback related to Release 20 specific topics will be given priority and really verbose questions may be skipped, as they can be a challenge to shorten and summarize live on the air. In brief… please keep your questions… brief. 
Player Owned Towns: Snowy Mountains
Michael Hutchison has been working on the Snow Mountains Player Owned Town template. Any new PoTs added in R21 that select the snow mountains biome will be able to use the new template. Any PoTs already in the game that originally designated the snowy mountains biome will have their current template replaced with the new one when we do our next data wipe. Here are a few work-in-progress screenshots:
