Playable Worlds

Have you ever needed to test a build quickly with a group of people? We needed to validate a crash bug fix and we needed enough people to make sure it would have occurred. So we turned to our Discord and asked for volunteers. It worked great. In fact, it worked twice in one day. Read the devblog for details. https://lnkd.in/gYh9SJSK

SCOUTING ALIEN WORLDS IN STARS REACH Remember, Stars Reach does not have classes. Instead, you can start learning any given skill tree, which we call a profession. Sometimes, one profession unlocks another. This means changing our mindset a little bit when we design special abilities. As developers, we might have a natural inclination to say “learning knives plays well with stealth abilities, so I’m going to put some stealth powers in the knives skill tree.” In a system like ours, it’s better to think of stealth as a profession in its own right, that might pair up with knives, but also might pair up with mining, botany, or xenobiology because players want to avoid combat while hunting for rare samples. We end up grouping together these “ways to play” into the professions, and testers are going to get to try out two parts of the overall Ranger tree in the test this weekend. Rangering is big! It’s actually made up of five separate professions arranged like this diagram. Each of these bubbles specializes into different activities. Full devblog is available here: https://lnkd.in/gidaf2Dw

"Let’s say you’re learning to be a Ranger, and you learn the skill to set up temporary camps in the wilderness. Do you get XP for setting up a camp that just sits there idle? No, you don’t. But you do earn XP when that camp is used by you or other players to rest or re-equip. "Or maybe you’re becoming a Weaponsmith and you start making weapons. Do you get XP from making weapons? No, but you do get XP when those weapons are actually used by you or other players. The more the weapon is used, the more XP you earn." Read more here: https://lnkd.in/dUcebkc3

Raph was invited to speak at the Unity developers conference last week. I was surprised at how much he revealed. https://lnkd.in/gTqexqMx

Our goal with this playtest was to test out World Simulation, both from a design perspective and from a technical one. On the design side, we wanted to see how long it takes for a world to look less like a tropical landscape and more like swiss cheese. And on the technical side, how well would the simulation keep up with two hours of constant mayhem all across the map? Devblog continues here: https://lnkd.in/g35-ysmn

We've been updating the visuals of Stars Reach and it was time to show folks the before-and-after of our progress so far. Check out this devblog and video. https://lnkd.in/geV_75pT

In this video version of a devblog, Raph explains the in's and out's of the Stars Reach camera and movement systems. All of these systems are things our testers got to try out in our most recent playtests. In fact, you can also check out some excerpts from our most recent test, courtesy of one of our testers, Alimber.

Let's talk about movement and how the camera works in our new sandbox MMORPG Stars Reach. https://lnkd.in/gF9Kq3G8