WIP Screenshots of AVWW Crafting Workbenches

[x4000]

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/08/wip-screenshots-of-avww-crafting.html

New WIP screenshots to share! These ones including some new art by the awesome Phil, who you might recall as the artist behind Tidalis, AI War 2.0, and The Zenith Remnant.

Phil has mostly been working on freelance work with other indies since Arcen hit financial difficulties last year when Tidalis got off to a rocky start financially (despite rave reviews).  We've long since clawed our way back out of the hole we'd found ourselves in a year ago, but a renewed sense of caution (as well as experience doing all the new art for AI War 4.0 and Light of the Spire) has meant that I'm doing the art for AVWW using my talents as well as various commodity art (a way outdated post on my pipeline here).

At any rate, when it comes to some really specialized things in AVWW -- like the workbenches and wind shelters -- I was really having trouble coming up with anything that would look special enough.  These are really tricky concepts to get across, since it's not like just showing a black smith's shop or a wizard's tent or whatever.  We have no less than 9 different kinds of crafting benches, and making them look distinct, interesting, clear, and in keeping with the theme of the game was really sending me in circles.

So I called on Phil -- and I think the results are pretty awesome.  Here's a peek at them, with screenshots I took out of the Unity 3D editor (so there's an extra bar at the top of the screens, and the bottom are cut off -- that's just because they're straight out of the editor, don't worry).

Left To Right: Disenchant, Socketing, Memory Archive

 Left To Right: Spellgem, Architect, Crestsmith

Left To Right: Scrollmaker, Spellshaping, Enchant

About The 9 Kinds Of Workbenches
Not all of these are actually crafting benches, I should clarify.

For instance, the memory archive is a place where you can deposit memory crystals to try to piece together various mysteries in the world.  Sometimes this could be  the background of the local evil overlord, sometimes it's a piece of the  world's backstory (which varies from game to game), etc.

And when it comes to the enchant/disenchant benches, those are for applying permanent affects to yourself, or taking them off if you want to replace them with new enchantments.  We'll explain more on that later, but it's something that's a bit more advanced and that you probably won't be doing until slightly later in the game (as with crests).

Then we have the socketing workbench, which is all about configuring what spellgems and spellshaping gems go in your crests.  It's not so much about crafting something new as it is about configuring something new with stuff you already crafted.

That leaves us with the five actual categories of crafting that we talked about in the previous diary.

[Kronic]

sometimes it's a piece of the  world's backstory (which varies from game to game), etc.

This really caught my attention - how much of the world history (pre-player) is random?

_{Oh, and nice shiny pics too.}

[x4000]

Glad you like the pics.

In terms of the backstory, it's more of a branching sort of thing rather than pure-random for the major backstory plotlines.  There are I think 3 different "pivot events" with three each possible options, some of which are duplicates in a few cases.  The net effect is that at the moment I think there are 27 general possible backstories for the game, or thereabouts.  And that's something we can build on with time, although backstory isn't a hugely major focus so having too many options is something that players wouldn't even really see or appreciate since it's unlikely you'll create 27 worlds (we hope you'll create closer to 1 world, and weave a really more interesting world history that is "current history" rather than backstory, if you see what I mean).

There's a lot of different levels of story and lore in this game, and various parts of it are randomized in different ways and to different degrees.  What I'm describing above is just the most coarse, big-picture sort of events in the prehistory of the game.

It's really complex to describe, but as you're playing the main effect is that your world is different from anybody else's worlds in ways big and small.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, it's not really random, it just branches.  So when you link to a memory archive describing the time leading up to the pivotal event and it's talking about the 4 great hero characters that are part of all 27 possible branches, you don't know exactly what it's going to tell you they did and/or happened to the world.

We're not sure how far we're going to take all that, but the whole "piecing together mysteries" is a nice activity to have in the game; you can just enjoy it as a side thing, or ignore it, or make the finding of the archives (and crystals to unlock their contents) one of your main pursuits if you really want to figure out stuff... we'll see how much is there by 1.0, and how much people want more of that kind of thing

But some of the memory archives (probably most, dunno) will be very-recent-history, so it's not all "archaeological".

[x4000]

Of course, since the game plays with time so much a lot of the stuff that is "archaeological" is actually recent-history for some of the characters.  Not that that fact manifests itself in the game yet, but that's something I guess we should bear in mind.  All backstory in this game is "recent" to someone, even if it's millenia prior to the ice age.

[Ixiohm]

The work benches look very cool Now, I just wonder what the things in the ground with the orange circles on are?, they look like ventilation shafts, do they have any function?

[x4000]

Those are vent shafts, and at the moment they don't have any function aside from being a small object that you can seize or do other similar things with.  They've been around in the game for ages, but this just happened to be a settlement chunk that had a bunch of them randomly.

[Kronic]

Thanks for the answers; sure, they throw up so many more questions, but I can get the answers to those when I play.

I've been following AVWW since announcement and this revelation is actually one of the most hype inducing in me - I love collecting lore in games and franchises, and the knowledge that it's not all fixed means I can always be left wondering what could have been. Fortunately, current plans involve at least two worlds for me (Solo and Coop), so I can get a bit of variance there. :3

Looking forward to the next announcement.

And as an afterthought, is multi-clienting the game feasible? _/tangent

[x4000]

Glad that's sounding good to you.

When you say multi-clienting, what exactly do you mean?  If you mean running two clients on one computer, then sure you can do that without any issue.  The model for that sort of thing is basically the same as AI War (so, as with AI War, you can't effectively have two copies fullscreen, just windowed).  The main difference in how AVWW does things from AI War when it comes to basic multiplayer set up is that you can't be a client and a server at the same time in a single process.  You can run 1 server and presumably n number of clients on one computer, though.  If you've got a multi-core machine, it won't even blink at running the client and the server on the same machine.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Its interesting and the look of the benches is also different.  How it all meshes together will be the tricky part. Just make sure its a good crafting system so that every time we see these workbenches, we don’t groan.     

I really can’t say much as this is more of a playing-in-BETA-conversation.  But the pics are really nice and shiny!  Get sucked into them way too much.... o_O  And the different parts of the crafting system sound interesting enough to be engaging, I just need to play with them before I can really say more!   

Very nice stuff

King

Oops, Blog post here: http://kingisaaclinksr.wordpress.com/2011/08/03/thoughts-on-latest-avww-blog-post-wip-screenshots-of-avww-crafting-workbenches/

[x4000]

Glad you like it, and thanks for the kind words on the art.

In terms of the crafting system, it's incredibly simple and quick.  When you want to craft something, and you are at the appropriate workbench, you'll be done inside of 30 seconds unless you're really spending a lot of time head-scratching and weighing options.

But the best way to look at the various options will be through a different interface other than the crafting interface, most likely.  And since you have to unlock new techs as you go, you get eased into it all anyway, so there's not a super large amount of new info at any given time.  And the way that we segment things by materials and profession helps with that, too.  Keith came up with a really good crafting system, I have to say.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Glad you like it, and thanks for the kind words on the art.

In terms of the crafting system, it's incredibly simple and quick.  When you want to craft something, and you are at the appropriate workbench, you'll be done inside of 30 seconds unless you're really spending a lot of time head-scratching and weighing options.

But the best way to look at the various options will be through a different interface other than the crafting interface, most likely.  And since you have to unlock new techs as you go, you get eased into it all anyway, so there's not a super large amount of new info at any given time.  And the way that we segment things by materials and profession helps with that, too.  Keith came up with a really good crafting system, I have to say.

That's great to hear, sounds like my kind of crafting system.  Simple, easy, and doesn't give you info overload.  I find that some crafting systems just overload your brain as you try and figure it out so glad to hear your trying something else .  And I really am serious about the art, I must be lacking colorful games (exempting Tidalis ofc ) because I'm getting sucked into this one's art badly.



King

[Kronic]

*Snip*

Ah, spiffing: that covers pretty much everything I'd considered.

[x4000]

And I really am serious about the art, I must be lacking colorful games (exempting Tidalis ofc ) because I'm getting sucked into this one's art badly.

Much appreciated.   After so much time in the "meh" territory, I'm finally starting to get that feedback from a number of different professional artists that I've been talking to, as well, so my confidence is a lot higher with it now.  One of them works at Pixar, too, which is particularly cool to have a compliment from.

*Snip*

Ah, spiffing: that covers pretty much everything I'd considered.

Great!  One thing I should mention, though, is that each player on a server will need their own license key.  The server doesn't need a license key, but each player's license key includes a unique ID which lets us avoid having any sort of central servers or login system.  BUT it still will make it so that every time you connect to a server, the server recognizes you and remembers what your character was, etc -- even if you're connecting from a completely different computer, for instance.  It doesn't send your whole license key to the server (so rogue servers can't harvest your key, you can connect without fear of that); just the unique identifier part.  Not needing a server login system in order for people to uniquely identify themselves to one another (without us having servers in the middle in any way) is something I'm really pleased to be able to do.  It won't stop piracy or keygens, but it does really make things more convenient on players and server admins in a variety of ways.

[Magos Mechanicus]

Those memory archives sound intriguing. Reminds me of playing Morrowind and collecting every new book I encountered into the giant library in my house. Then I'd spend ages poring over them, trying to tease some truth out of all the conflicting histories and creation myths.
Combined with the quite interesting idea of a backstory that branches, I could see myself putting a fair bit of time into that in this game as well.