Talk:2019-05-30 Livestream
Raw transcript
[Music] hello everyone welcome to our Ashes of Creation livestream today we're going to be switching things up a little bit and we're gonna be kind of going over our game development and giving you guys an update on everything that we've got going on so first things first as Steven will go over the studio update and then we're actually gonna have some guests on yes just on first Jeff will be talking about design and then we actually will have someone coming from a vibrant team as well as the character team to be discussing what those teams are up to if you like this format convinced do you know I'm on this side now I know it's freaking me out actually it's still I'm a creature of habit yeah but yeah so we're gonna be doing that it's gonna be a little bit interesting each team has maybe some asks some steps if they're gonna share with you so that's really exciting and you know if this works out we might be doing this in the future and bringing on other people on other teams so I want to do some quick updates quick and then we'll go we'll let Steven touchchat all about the studio so quick updates are that we put out a new dev Diaries it is with Carson steel our senior weapon a harvest senior welcome guys it is amazing he makes so much art he's also working on his first character which has been really cool yeah he's working on the warrior warrior which was one of the pets that was back in July 2018 so you might get to see some sneak peeks at that I don't know not necessarily in this stream but on the discord or something P I was the only one who got to see that so far but that's a lesser little that's there a little bit but you'll be able to see that once it's kind of a little bit more complete once I get the animations and all of that we'll probably do a little spotlight of them we've also got the know your nodes economic node type articles out so if you want to check that out you definitely get all the nitty-gritty details of that on there we also have divine notes coming up soon so keep your mind we also put out a law of the Hippogriff so if you're interested in the Hippogriff and seeing how kind of like our bestiary stuff is going to work because you can see that yeah animal husbandry is going to work because that creature is different than yea it has the hind body of a horse and forward body of a Gryphon instead of a kiss wait what what I think a lot of people thought that was the Gryphon and we're like no two different things for people so yeah it's kind of giving you an update on those things so we'll be adding a lot of interesting little pieces to creatures that you're gonna be seeing coming up people don't like that I'm on this side I know it's weird but the problem is that otherwise people have to walk through the camera to get to get on the street I'm blinking twice we also fixed the summer shop images so if you were seeing those we're weird on the shop though they're all fixed now and the last thing that I have for a quick update for you all is the pilgrimage of the diviner cosmetics will be swapping over on June 5th 4th in Akua cosmetics so that's all I got um so tossing it over to Steven it was that studio update all the goodies yeah we are continuing to have a very successful hiring rounds going forward we have believe we have seven new engineers starting between now and July 1st yes which is great because they're all seniors yes they are real good deep MMO experience I won't have their images and their stuff for the creative directors letter that's coming up but I do have a group of other seven people I think it ended up being five because two people didn't remember that I even sent out a meeting we continue to we continue to grow and keep spreading the word on social media if you want to about Ashla creation the project the company inter up studios and direct people to interpret is calm your favorite developers I'm not ashamed we're always looking for talent we have our job listings up there so if you know anybody who's looking and if there's if there's somebody who's really talented and they there isn't a job that's listed there you can have them email us as well yes added trumpet studio calm yeah so things are going really good it's turning into a little bit of a sweatshop here at the studios well you know we don't have corners anymore couch in you know we're going over couch we're losing our second meeting space which is like yes yes so it's getting a little tight but progress is being made and they in the interim for a new studio so that's good I got to finally see with that oh yes so that's starting out well yeah we're doing good we have some announcements that we'll be making over the next probably a month or so I think so stay tuned for that like so that's that and then also I think we have a newsletter that's coming out doing we have a newsletter that's coming out we have a creative directors letter that's coming out we've got a few other things that we were probably gonna be chatting about so keep that all in mind um some good stuff I always get to you never know what's gonna come out of us yes yeah so um I guess let's go right into design stuff Ben so first run us through what design has been working on as a whole like well before we get into that and let's make sure that we preface well I'm not necessarily nervous but as we've said in the past right things are works in progress if you go back you know a year and a half of our two years ago and take a look at some of the early videos on YouTube and then take a look at the most recent ones that we've released with apocalypse or with the MMO footage over the past six months you'll see there's a considerable movement change changing from the art direction and the world itself you know the mechanics that are present from the first videos we've shown to you know more recent ones so keep in mind that with this new format of kind of showing you guys work-in-progress stuff that you know there's considerable change from this point until launch this is not an end game kind of look at stuff you know this is a work in progress in the very essence of that phrase they see a lot of these are first passes you know they are they're things that you're going to see that will be changing for the better and especially we're talking about design for instance we're talking about are we showing a lot of prototype stuff and that prototype stuff is definitely not we're going to see in the final game they're there to kind of give us a sense of like what buttons are we gonna be pressing how can we make something better or more interesting you know we do kind of a rough version pass just to kind of get something in the game and playable so that we can start getting data and start making decisions about things so you know the stuff you see from design especially it's gonna be all prototype stuff yes I think generally all of our teams are if we continue with this format it's kind of showing you the progress of development and so even every month when we have new people on or we have maybe have the same person come back on in this show like the next iteration of whatever it is that they're working on you're gonna see the difference between each of those things and I think that to me sounds like a really fun thing to be able to share with you guys as a community not a lot of other companies do this so it is definitely you know and just to give you guys tonight just give you as an idea with regards to you know from a project management standpoint you know we operate on a more agile base type of system with Sprint's that last about two weeks and traditionally at the end of those Sprint's you know our team kind of comes together and we have what we call our sprint review and each department kind of goes through and gives an example of what they've been working on for that you know past two weeks and you know the progress that they've made or the systems that they've completed features artwork whatever it is we all come together and we show it on the big screen everybody gets an opportunity to kind of discuss you know what they did that way the team gets kept in the loop with each other and they get to see what's going on this isn't as raw as that type of setting but it does bring some of those elements up to you guys to get you to see you know what they are being worked out yeah the programmers just talk to us in binary though yes I make like a little PowerPoint for our who's like yeah words I'm like here are words so yeah with that preface talk to us about what the design team as a whole has been working on and then we'll get into the little bits of pieces of things that you are wanting to share with the audience yeah so as a whole as we kind of walk towards the last 10% of apocalypse we've been generally working on prototyping a bunch of abilities for both the MMO and castles age we have also retooled the melee combat system and a POC entirely so one of one of the big problems that we had with it is that it's very floaty it kind of kind of feels slap fight II and so we wanted to kind of dig down make it a little bit gritty err make it a little bit heavier make sure that our weapons have real impact because it's something that we're doing that's different than most other out there or just a combat in general right you know part of the big aspect of design and moving into you know the apocalypse mode was that combat was a central focus for them and design logs that you received from players actually experiencing great combat that we've created and we never mean obviously we knew you know there needs to be changes that are made for the MMORPG but from an action standpoint we wanted it to feel substantial when you impacted a player when you swipe with a melee weapon you know something that was actually feeling cohesive and not just a you know player floating around with legs and that's right also so you get the feedback you know as the player being hit that kind of thing is on top of the player be taking the action right um so yeah so we've been doing a lot of work on that side we've also been doing a lot of work on the data side pulling out logs making changes based on kind of the data we get from that so you know we've been super busy we also doubled our team size design so we've got a bunch of new faces on that side and the trade experience yeah and then the other a big thing that you know I think design has really been focusing on is you know some of the objective gameplay that's going to be president castle sieges and other type of objective based battlegrounds in the MMORPG that we've talked about in the past in our design features having those systems you know be able to take over a control point with proximity-based you know player is being able to channel on you know a castle sieges final relic you know being able to kind of utilize those systems from an objective based gameplay to kind of shore up the end gameplay of those systems right and those actually give you objectives for quests and things oh yeah yeah all these systems are super modular I mean that's how we've built them is so that you know we can take them from one piece change a few things and use them in another piece so you know once we have a system basically we can apply that system to just about anything and so it's it's it's a great we're basically getting our toolbox set up so that you know as we start moving forward on the Alpha side of things we can just grab all those things and start implementing really quick right the big push and we can actually probably roll video as we're kind of charged the first thing that we're going to show is the motion animation yes now so we move from sort of splits body weapons system to having a full body root motion where the and so what that does is it kind of gives you that sense that you are carrying the weapon and that that weapon has weight and that your momentum is driving you forward all those things kind of help to give that sense that that you are in the game rather than on top of the game which is kind of you'll see that we also have some new impact effects and some a little bit of camera shake there to kind of really highlight the fact that you are making contact and all of this goes towards as we begin to implement kind of the hybrid combat system in Ashes of Creation the MMORPG we want to take into account some of the designs that we have for weapon progression allowing players to kind of dictate certain types of skills and/or passive abilities that might be present on weapons some of those abilities might be control effects on the opponent that you're impacting you know writing a successful strike there's an opportunity to put a CC effect on the opponent or a staggered condition that way the person can't just get away from you very easily and there's actually some capability on the mailing side right right and then so that's the root motion hopefully you can kind of see the difference if if you paid attention to some of our other eight pop videos the difference is pretty palpable and it feels a lot better so I'm super stoked about it you know we're still doing like I said a lot of prototyping on this but we're getting that system finalized and so you know then it'll be up to animation to kind of bring up those effects and really make them pop right absolutely and then the great thing about you know apocalypse prior to the MMORPG is that we get to get you know in feedback from the player base from the community on this type of interaction of melee combat in a more controlled setting and then we get to prototype and change based on that type of feedback as we've done already right and we're gonna steal all that stuff and putting me in my absolutely I think we have to steal it it's gonna be exciting to be able to do another play test with everybody yeah yeah and I know the designers have been really having a good time with testing on all the new animations and setting up those with all the different weapon types what do you think has been the most challenging aspect of that umm well I think I mean from a technical standpoint the most challenging thing is the movement of the character with the root motion we had to do some really kind of clever acrobatic things in order to make that work because the server does not appreciate the animation moving the character and so we have to kind of run both of those things in tandem and and have the movement happen on the server while the animation is happening on the client and so there is you know a lot of interesting technical problems with that in order to reduce the sense of lag and make sure that this stuff feels really responsive and and rapid and I'm sorry for snapping but but that certainly was kind of the hardest thing to wrap my head around because you know in a single-player game room ocean is is relatively straightforward though you're dealing with you know a server client kind of architecture it gets a lot more complicated I mean it's important to note like you know root motion and and when we talk about impact and control effects or stagger conditions on the opponents that get struck by these native weapons we're not talking about a lockdown or you know where it's cumbersome or doesn't feel good for the player we want to make sure that our polish for this type of combat is reflective of not locking characters in place but I want there to be high mobility we want there to be of the availability to get out of combat as well but it needs to be tactical in that sense right you're really going to be thinking about your actions and that's what we want players to do being locked down sucks because it's not actually playing the game right like you have been removed from the game right and so it's more about you know control and positioning and making sure that you know you know what your character is going to do when you hit and that you know what your character is going to do when you do get hit so yes all those things are things to consider when you're playing the game yeah absolutely and I think you have another video for us we have a new effects person who has joined the team and he's been making some updates on things yeah that's Jim Sanders work he is a phenomenal artist and he has also a very sharp technical mind and so he's been able to both improve the kind of fidelity of our effects give them a unified look and also improve their performance so I mean you'll see that some of these abilities here will be darkness or the miasma arrow and you'll see tentacles coming out and this effect looks so much better than our previous effect and yet it is far more optimized yes it is far more optimizing not only that but you know these effects again are kind of first passed they're still going to get additional passes before the MMORPG where you know we'll take into consideration you know in an MMORPG you're gonna have potentially 500 players on the battlefield casting these types of effects and we don't want them to be very exposed or overwhelming exactly not only to take into account that the way we're structuring our effects is going to have some scalability on the player on the client side that they can scale down the back say they want to as well so that's something important to notice you want to talk about that one specifically because it shows some what it's like a beacon huh yeah so this is part of the Marquand if you guys have played apocalypse it when we were in beta or alpha the the effect is basically a mark that allows you to see the player that you've targeted from across the map basically and before it was this giant column of yellow light it was super cardi red well but it also didn't have a lot of personality and now we kind of get that sense of you know a divine light coming down and hitting the player this is also right here what you're seeing is part of the intro when you drop in we know that our previous effects there were quite up to par and this is Jim's first pass of kind of cleaning that up and making this whole experience tell a story as opposed to just being this giant portal that you kind of sort of falling out of and this is you are actually coming through the portal you are shooting into the map and then eventually your comic breaks up and you turn into your Gryphon form yes so yeah so I mean a lot of that stuff is kind of what design has been working on I hope you guys enjoyed that yeah so anything else you wanted to share with us before we swap on over to an expert I think that's me okay I have a special treat for you all everybody has been asking me to get Michael Bacon back on and guess what you're gonna get some bacon you're gonna get some bacon bye guys and Bacon's gonna be talking to us about the environment team and what they've been up to [Applause] I have like my mom Bowl it basically has like allergy medicine every hit everything you need in there so first introduce yourself or people who maybe don't know who you are no people should if they don't they should alright well I guess I'm Michael bacon and lead environment dude drunken the Sean Bean haircut his head chopped off okay they can tell us a little bit about what the environment team has been up to um we're like basically waging the war on three fronts so yeah so we got like the MMO and then we have you know both Castle siege in a park that were you know working on so yeah it's a lot of development work it's just working on the tools stuff and I we've been making a lot of progress with that you know getting all the construction tools and that kind of really showed some dev Diaries videos on those things so if you haven't gone to check those out definitely check them out there on our Ashes of Creation YouTube channel yeah so that a lot of refinements to a podcast you only move forward as we were starting to move towards launching that thing and yeah I mean just it's hard to wrap around my head around like any one particular thing bracket them into specific in gotcha okay so like we did like that recently we did like an erosion pass which actually put a lot of new detail you know into trains the things which is uh which was really cool talk about how that erosion passed really in the MMORPG is going to just bring the ground kind of the leveling that's on the ground and make it more realistic well yeah because like you know when you have before words like lumpy and ice like the standard you know nineteen nineties yeah kind of terrain looking things so yeah this thing actually on the grates a lot of detail until I cliff faces a lot more detail yeah and it gives some really cool kind of like gameplay aspects I'm probably miss Johnny Winter aspects because it presents the players with unique terrain that they can utilize so tech that you guys have been kind of creating I think Devon's in a lot to you know applied in a pot but that's a testing ground for when it gets moved into the end yeah it'll be a lot more refined than ammo so yeah so yeah kind of doing that we got that approve it yeah rivers oceans you know the beach stuff would just look kind of a work in progress but it looks it's looking really great Devon's been you know kind of hitting that and doing a really good job on that front yeah and uh you know the new grass stuff which will show today which is really cool and yeah I mean just there's a lot of stuff but Castle siege stuff the whole destruction system yeah yeah so we're not at the point yet that we're gonna share video of the destruction stuff yet yeah so Nate our technical guy who's been doing a great job sort of the funnies what have you found to spend like the thing that has been exciting and working on them it's always exciting right China's like blown and that's part of one of the depth all right that'll be later down the line but yes it is one of the well think was cool about that as I can really talked about how he would do it and it was like oh think there's some giant piece of mash and then you kind of have a damaged States and that kind of thing and you know worked its way into a point where we can do more dynamically it's not completely dynamic because you know on a server you know if you shoot the wall will fall backwards and fall forward on the other player so there's some kind of magic and some implement to try to get that problem but it's no long let's first play I think our first video that we have is the oceans and the moves in the grass details so showing that we can kind of talk over this yeah yeah so there's that yeah so things that there's a kind of ocean beach shader that's kind of still work in progress but yeah we got those waves are going to come in you know we had the sand surface it goes from like a wet I mean that the key the key point here when you guys are looking at this video is this is all in-game okay right right now this is in the a puck level but again the a puck in the MMO are synonymous they are they are the same yeah all this type of stuff absolutely well I mean technically are using it in the end of oh it's right but right now we're showcasing it in and this is a cool of some grass stuff I think that it was a tad working on the grass yeah yeah winter rolling wind in the grass yeah so you got like the regular grass motion that he put and then he basically put like this sort of pulse wave that kind of runs through it kind of like a baby kind of wave is blowing through it yeah I noticed people saying what's the type of ring will need to run this at this type of beauty the great thing about you before and what's being done from an optimization standpoint on the environment team is that this stuff will run on you don't need a supercomputer to run this stuff your help is good I mean it is something that well Ted's gross is like actually a weight we're optimizing there's not a lot of output looks better and performs better yeah for sure yeah I'm sure yeah so that I mean part of what you're seeing here and this in this level is is really us fine-tuning the environment team and and and the great thing is you know when you have when you have a team that's creating an MMORPG from scratch you know you fine-tune this stuff in the MMO we get to fine-tune it in a POC and it's done for the end of oh yeah yeah kind of weird because like we're breaking ground in the MMO and then we're you know on the tail and refining stuff and yes Johnny pockets and everything that we've refined in a pod gets moved over to the MMO so and it also makes for a really good experience in our alpha is like well movie turns out the one with the MMO you guys are building the a the alpha world kind of map mm-hmm and you know traditionally in some alphas that you'll see out of the projects they're very barren from a visual standpoint right because they are they're essentially testing course systems they're standing up those core systems I don't have the time necessarily to put towards establishing a visual environment and the character our set assets being complete the great thing about what is being done for our alpha one is that visually it will be up to a par that is respectable and will be beautiful for players to participate in that alpha one and that's kind of the experience we want to give players we want you to not just experience the core systems which are being worked on by engineering design but also allow the head start for the environment seeing the character team to get in there and make stuff beautiful for you so that when you do play that immersive quality which is such an important aspect of an MMORPG is present at every stage of testing it's one of those things where you like standing in a location you're like I just want was my dream yeah you see this place that you created and they're like I love this place so much I wish I could be here oh of course of course yeah so far what has been your favorite thing to work on and the environments oh my favorite thing like me specifically um destruction no just cretin world and yeah you know I'm just spelling that out I've been having a lot of fun working with Steven and the concept art you know kind of you know spelling out the you know the design them look at the world everybody doing a lot of work with the conceptual stuff expecially with the structures and things probably racism and trying to make something new and different which is I think a great segue to our next video from you all which we're gonna talk over but if you want to kind of walk us through what all of this is yeah so this is like the concept stuff that we work in our had been working on or was this Imperial stuff so we have the period stuff but this is it all over a POC and then this is kind of moving into this the Empyrean kind of race mm-hmm so these are this kind of structure is going from the node one kind of 10th level all the way up to you know kind of the metropolis and some of the structures that will that you'll see really getting from there and you guys have seen in a previous developer diary with Devin you know the building tool that's going to be utilized to to kind of create a lot of these different structures you know we're going to put that to the test we're really gonna be stressing that to see you know what amount of modularity it can accommodate in these types of concepts there's different curvatures and changes I think one of those things that people had seen had said was that when when Devin was showcasing the tool that it was he's only showing like boxy things yeah we can make things that are more curved and yeah it just takes a lot more pre-planning yes yeah but like some of the like the long sweep Don that building you know from the rooftop the left that will be particularly difficult to do with yes I mean I think from you from your guys's standpoint at least with the tool you're going to categorize you know the types of features and slopes and architectures that are present in these buildings in a way that makes sense from a modular standpoint being able to accommodate as much as possible and so these concepts might adapt in order to accommodate but the important thing for you guys to know when you're looking at these types of concepts and buildings that you're seeing on on 2d representation is take a look at the quality of environments that we have already created in game and now project what is going to be created from these concepts and how that's going to look the intent behind Ashes of Creation is to create a visually stunning world and part of that visual stunning this is is really it is to have architecture that reflects the different cultures we have nine different cultures and ashes so there is a wide variety of architectural influences that go into creating these different buildings let us say that's been the keys and and the you know some of the challenges like you know we have dude all right we have two different types of rays you know races like so yeah like you know humans are something there they've got the split operations right so yeah it's like you want to make them different but yet still have a footing yeah like they still kind of fit within the same world as the as their counterpart yeah and so these guys right here which is the niku dwarves and these are these have actually been super challenging because we were discussing this because we were chatting about it whenever I came by your desk and you were saying how like there's some parts that just aren't quite there sometimes yeah these ones are still kind of in development you know it's still kind of injecting more I think if it's we're injecting more of the door and classic you know kind of motifs and sounds and stuff and again but still being able to yeah organically work you know look like it works together so you know so I think they're a little bit more kind of another native you know kind of side of things Island their kind of side of things right now or kind of poems a little bit more towards the Dwarven but I mean the structure that he did like look really interesting and really cool I'm excited to see those so I think whenever we're able to show those in kind of the tool that Devin was making you know being able to see all of that stuff yeah I think the Klingon particularly with those those that races yes you got like you know the tents and stuff are they initial smaller structures in node one but then what what you know what does that type of stuff look like when it reaches metropolis you know so that's been you know kind of challenging as far as you know taking what that you have which is very Islander look and they go and this gigantic metropolis Sidious you know but I think what you and that is where you're finding the challenge to be is like yeah thinking about the metropolis version of that yeah exactly you've got the the tents down but then when I think it's just the the progression of the architecture right I mean there is a definitive moment between village assets and city assets exactly and you know that transition is oftentimes difficult to maintain while keeping the same type of influence that was present in the early stages so you know as as the concept art is being directed you know you want to make sure that it is coherent it is cohesive and players will be able to tell throughout each stage what culture is being represented yeah and then but then at the same time we kind of balancing standpoint they still got to look like they can square off with some of the other races you know what I mean to get like the imperiaz or something in there but Travis is gonna be you know you ain't stone and yes you know exactly do you think that like you know oh yeah you think the metropolis versus and also trying to make it performant and optimize in the sense that you know each of these races we don't want to have a vast library of materials and shaders that have to be represented every time because these nodes can pop up anywhere in an area who's right and you know making sure that there's consistency there as well from a performance and performance there's a lot that goes into the environment art that I don't think everyone always understands or sees um so yeah that's a rabbit hole those are out of all the vast technical problems down the rabbit hole I think what's funny to me is a lot of people think like Oh an environment artist is just an artist I'm like I'm no baby as well especially bacon Bacon's not just no artist he's a Renaissance man that means that you have skills in many areas like a Da Vinci The DaVinci yeah your musical the cool things about bacon yeah I just like get my hands and lot of stops so yes yeah this makes this job particular to be fun and you know be cool because you know we were a lot of hats and you know that is the thing about working with a smaller team too is you get to do a lot of fun things sometimes you can get stuck with doing one job where you're just doing it every day and it gets monotonous yeah like we get the variety of choosing what we want to do it yeah but I mean the whole team's like that it's really beyond the environment team I mean you know tad was working on the character shader stuff for instance you know helping him out with that you know because he's very technical minded yeah he was helping other departments other guys mad mad skills in the technical department so yeah thank you so much for coming on here I know it took a little bit of convincing - yes hi guys my bacon how do you follow bacon no way to do it all downhill from here come on I do I get a red one the goal is red but it tastes so good well thank you for inviting me it's so great to actually be able to stop working and come down and talk about what we're doing by champion yes first introduce yourself for people who make my nose my name is Brad Constantine and I'm a senior artist here at intrepid on the character team senior meeting I'm really old experience as an animal I do this is my ropes I have on some of the previous projects right and I gotta say that this project out of all of those mmo's that I've worked on this has got to be the coolest one well you know at the beginning of this you know Steven came to us and and and we're setting up the character team and we're say okay Steven what do you want and he says I want everything well that's just my negotiating starting point no pressure right yeah you got to start at the top so that you end up where you want exactly so we're trying to do that we're trying to give you everything that you want Stevens vision is so clear and so precise that it's very easy to go down that road well we have we have a clear vision and part of you know the character team and then the team in general is that we all share this vision for the project right we have a passion for it you know a lot of people have done MMOs in the past so they've been through you know the type of challenges that we're gonna be facing on this project and have based on this project so far so it's great to have that experience to kind of address those issues and come out the other end with some success well I can understand from your perspective - I worked on a lot of teams where you have a creative director who maybe isn't very good creative director and you're you're in a situation where you're like what is the vision and I don't understand it whereas here we really do understand it because we all want it to his players so I think that that's the exciting part about it I find the players find that too that that in the industry in general the MMO genre there is a real lack of vision you know everything sort of became repetitive and you know stale you know and how do you get how do you well talk just a little bit about what the character team has been working on recently in general I guess so the character team involves a whole lot of different disciplines right so we're talking everything from creating characters to doing the meshes we're doing the rigging the skinning the animation all of that that's all you know encompassed under the character artists umbrella so there's a lot going on on all fronts just like bacon said everything from fixing up the combat to modeling and designing new mounts and and weapons and things figuring out stuff under the hood all of the technical things you know how we're gonna go down the road of character customization and all that great stuff ya know everything happening at one time yeah and part of you know a big big component for the character team you know not just from concept to model to rig to animation to effects to whatever is that you know an MMO is a very large world it has a lot of different pieces and it has a lot of population that needs to be present in order to make it engaging and diverse and something you want to explore so now part of one of the big tasks that the character team has is kind of categorizing creatures and NPCs and races into in to compartmentalize groups that can share as much as possible without looking the same across the board we wanted to look visually diverse but share a lot of the the core work that goes into creating these different lines of creatures and our players right and that's a difficult task but the great thing about having memo's in the passes this isn't your first rodeo and this is how things are traditionally done in order to create successfully an MMORPG and I think to give an example of what Stephens saying for example on the simple simplest side of that would be like you have a horse right you can make a zebra from a horse you know that kind of thing so being able to create lots of different types of creatures based on like a base model of a creature and share some of those animations so that we can move forward much faster and quicker that's true with the world as large as ours is going to be and with as many creatures and different characters that you're going to run into and deal with we have to find ways of making it all work making it all run we can't just do anything that we want to do right so there's a huge technical we can how long it's gonna take right so on our end on the character end there's a lot of fakery going on on a professional level so meaning that everything that you see on the screen in the course of the game is a combination of a lot of different technical things all going on at once for example so once the character gets a certain distance away from you we're gonna start swapping out that character with smaller versions you know levels of detail and that sort of thing all set all sorts of technical stuff that's going on under the hood we're doing all kinds of work on iterating on the new combat yeah new route motion stuff going forward which is great as an animator because it frees us up to be able to do all kinds of cool dynamic things that you see in like single-player games and that sort of thing and a lot of so much of what you guys are working on with regards to that combat is is basically establishing the route animations that are present on a character model right I mean these are these are diverse animations that are going to be present for the characters in the MMORPG and it's gonna have a wide range of applicability movement directions you know all that stuff that's present for players kind of utilized it's got to be fun it's got to be cool right it's got to be replayable right it's something that you want to do every day and that's also its own challenge too is finding a movement style and a motion style that works for that long-term replayability I've worked on a lot of MMOs and you know when you're spending hours and hours and hours inside a game or whatever it's very important that the visual presentation that you get is not jarring disturbing you know does it make you tired and all that all sorts of little things that you wouldn't normally think of with other types of games become a real challenge we could show stop is the Dawnbreaker and I think Steven actually leaked a little leak of this a little leak of the Dawnbreaker that's something that one of our character artist Jin C was working on shout-out to Gen Z shot a job the dog breaker the Dom wrecker as you guys know is a braver of worlds mount so you're starting to see the pipeline now incorporating some creation of the Kickstarter assets these are again work-in-progress these are first passes but you can kind of see it's the wings might be moving a little fast there they do they do but that's the whole point of iteration is you can you create something you get it into the game on you look at it you you move it around you play with it and then you make a lot of notes and then you go back and you get every can iterate and make it better and better and better he's kind of scary but in like an awesome way like that I love the concept art of him where he's like he's on top of a building holding on to it I'm like and this is absolutely first pass - yeah very important that you guys realized that the animation for an MMO is a very iterative materials the materials need to be in just a little bit yes and there's still effects that get added to the wing there's some bioluminescence that we're gonna put very subtle very subtle but it will be on the wings and it was a part of all that kind of like you know when you see a moth and they have like that little dust I love that stuff that kind of detail and I know Jim's been like trying to figure out how he wants to do that you guys have been trying to like work together on like what what you need as an animator in order to make that something that a FX person can attach to it agree we all work together you know we all sit down with design we sit down with the effects people and and that's the the benefit of having such a small talented teams that we can sit down and sort of bang our heads together and from our collective experience come up with something awesome yeah so we've got some more videos for you all we have some weapon variants that we're gonna show so you might have seen some of these on I think the video that we had with each artist which I think are just gorgeous but now these are like closer obsessed so that you can actually see each of them and the differences between them the different modeling a lot of variety that we want to have present in the in the weapons and armours that are available to players so that they have a distinct and unique look I know you know a lot of them of those that I've played you know there's there's kind of a status quo of weaponry that you're expected to have at each level and you know there's the vest and slot and the best in slot always looks the same so you know what a you know person has here we can we can have some variants so that you get the general idea of what another player will have at least from a threat assessment standpoint or understanding the characters build out but at the same time there are some unique aspects that we can play with to give that character more customization opportunity with their weapons so you're seeing that present in an epoch first but in the MMORPG the idea stays the same there is a diversity that players will have the opportunity as we spoke about in our last developer diary with Carson players will have the opportunity to distinguish their their particular build and and yet still have the same quote-unquote item per se so giving that kind of cosmetic you know dials to the players to to uniquely define their appearance is something that we really think is important to an RPG aspect of the MMO yeah and he's been having so much fun making these I know that every time I walk up there he delays just like this is my dream I'm living my dream right now I know I am I jump out of bed every day to come in it and the important thing I mean the other important thing about this type of diversity and customization that's available to players is that not everybody likes the same thing I mean that is true in life that is true in games so at the end of the day having this range of customization really allows the players to define their own like you know their own desires right and it may not appeal to everybody but that's why we want to have a wide variety so that players can have the opportunity to find what's right for them these are just amazing looking shout out to Carson for these these are just fantastic yes well done Carson Wow they look great I want to play this game right now when you're looking at creating you know weaponry like this and I guess that's gonna be - Steven - and you you're trying to make that diversity what is it that you think is going to make people excited to see that like well what I you know for these weapon sets in particular you know these were originally concept 'add by jeff delhi air and when I was sitting with Jeff and he's giving me you know different silhouettes of the weapon types and you know you can kind of see the components that are Kout from the core piece of that weapon defining I think a variety there is is really about finding what are opposites of each other right you want to kind of represent unique aspects of a weapon across the board and make sure that they differ from each other and not just have the slight variance so that's why you see some of these crossbows they have kind of like feathery aspects to them and the other ones don't they have more of a jagged edge on the on the hilt of the of the weapon I think that's an important part defining in concept first and that way that Carson can work from a clear and defined kind of representation of what direction these different weapon types will have and I think something to note too is that this is only just one style right there's going to be a variety of different types oh absolutely yes absolutely got a lot of people who are asking for like a different different - like medieval right so it's it's important to note that like you know as you guys are seeing a lot of this these these assets right and these all of these weapons you're seeing these are game assets right these are completed models they are right now being used in Apocalypse and our internal testing and being insured there so the important thing about this this process is that you know there's a crap-ton of art if there's a crap-ton of assets that need to be created to make an MMO feel diverse and fulfilling for the players to experience and all of those assets require first having set up a pipeline from the arts artists perspective so that they can make sure that not each asset is going to take as long as the next one that they can kind of cut down that time and share as much as possible get the process down and understood and they can move through the the master asset list that needs to be created for the initial launch of the MMORPG and get it done in a timely matter so that you know the product comes out and as each of these sets are being completed by Carson of the character team that is becoming more defined more finite more kind of optimized in a sense so that the later down the road as we get into the big master asset list you know that time is not as ballooned as the initial assets yeah and they've been doing a lot of optimization lately I know that they've done many many passes on these in order to make sure that you know even performance is going to be really yeah absolutely I think we had a question in chat requesting what kind of tools you use to create animations specifically okay we use two different 3d programs to do our animation our primary program is a program called motion builder by Autodesk they also create maya so motion builder is a program that was developed primarily to modify and work motion capture data but we find that it has an excellent suite of keyframe animation tools so we use that as our primary character animation thing yeah it's a fantastic program yeah you know even when Carson was on his video he was talking about how he just loves all the tools that he gets to use it's almost for him like he actually gets to you know model almost as if he's doing like it in real life which is really cool it's great and in using Unreal Engine 4 - there's a lot of direct raishin with some of these tools - so for example I can work on something in Maya I can take it right into MotionBuilder without you know having to close out of Maya and then reopen the other program then I can take something for MotionBuilder right into Yui for I can test it then go back into the animation program iterate on it test it again yeah and if you've heard me in the past I've always been a big proponent of the engine you know I'm real engine because you know as Brad just described there's a lot of integration with third-party software that is necessary for the construction of these types of large games I mean we had to create tools ourselves you know this would be a much longer process but there are a lot I mean we do have to create a lot of tools ourselves but there are also out-of-the-box tools that help to kind of move the production forward at least from an animation standpoint an environment team standpoint you know these types of things are present in the engine by default yes they can have some you know catering and unique aspects that we can then apply to them but that's another great aspect of Unreal Engine is that it's highly customizable great and just about anything that you would need to learn in Unreal Engine you can find on sites like YouTube and other things so it's it's it's a fantastic tool and we're digging deep into it to find out all of the things that that we can do with it and it's it's been really really exciting I think people are really liking the the changes and upgrades to the different weaponry pieces I mean you know what I would say is from my experience as an MMORPG player in previous MMORPGs I've always been underwhelmed by the diversity of weapons that are available in those games and/or armors and I think originally the idea behind the creation of this game is that - the character team their kind of mission statement was hey we want to be as diverse and as many items as possible so that players can create their own unique representation of themselves from an RPG standpoint and that's kind of what you're seeing here I mean this is a small taste of the type of weapon diversity that will be present in Ashes of Creation and you know the animations themselves will also have some unique aspects to them absolutely I mean the idea here is to make a world that is so diverse you literally get lost in it and with that in mind it's a very large creativity it's very easy to forget that with all of the talented and experienced people that we have here and intrepid that this is still Stephens first trip down the rodeo to the rodeo so so we are guiding him through this process of setting up pipelines and and iteration and all of this sort of thing the stuff I've learned in the past three years I feel like has taken more brain space than I've learned in my previous 30 years it's one thing to make a game right to make an MMO and already have a studio and already have a staff and have other team right available say oh okay we're gonna get next to pull all right we're gonna pull guys on for this or whatever you know I do want to ask the questions but this is more to you Steven sure because I think before you had said to people that you know you're not looking for the giant sword that's bigger than the person they came over so like you're looking for them more realism can you talk a little bit more about that specifically because people had follow-up questions too on that contest bonus is is fine and we will have a lot of fan at high fantasy aspects to the game however from a physics standpoint you know something that and this is just a personal taste stand but right people have different opinions on this is this highly subjective small person I don't mind winning right exactly and I've played plenty of games that were very fun and they're visually stunning and they had oversized weapons and stuff but from my perspective you know when you're playing a game and you're immersed in something there is something called that suspension of disbelief right I mean obviously your immersion factor is only as high as you can believe that you're in the game and and some components of other types of art styles don't help to suspend that disbelief they actually make it more difficult and I feel that one of the aspects of prop design or weapon design is that kind of oversized features I think don't make sense to me so it makes it more difficult for me to kind of suspend that definitely where you'd like to see it and I think this is a great transition is more in that diversity of changing items and things like that so I do
the next thing that we have is the backpack we know we showed a little taste of that on Carson's I want a backbone you know I want that in real life this kind of gives you a little bit more of like so you can look at all the little tiny details yeah and this kind of goes into what you were talking about a little bit worried you want that realism of being able to like if I am you know an alchemist person maybe I carry more potions with me right I mean you know a big component of the MMORPG that half of that you know acronym is RPG role-playing game and in order to roleplay you need to be able to represent kind of what your character is doing in that world and you know part of what animation is doing is creating these sockets on the let's say the belt or the back that you know can plug in certain types of props or items that are created by the character team like Carson you know might be a scroll tube it might be a potion it might be whatever those players will have the ability as we've discussed in the past will have the ability to select what they want to be represented in those sockets and then animation will make sure that they drive well in there like the little bottles jingling and stuff like that yeah we love that kind of stuff and it goes along the same lines of Steven wanting everything so basically the idea that any character can wear just about any sort of outfit and carry any weapon at any time and that sort of thing what a wonderful thing anything right now and I think players really want absolutely I think the kind of game that we're making that is so hard to make yes and so challenging and everything takes so much planning and so much time yeah it's what players really have one it's it's hard to express to people how long things really hate to do especially when you have to create an entire world from scratch I mean just looking at that backpack and all of the things on it I'm you know imagine having to start designing all of those things from scratch just to design it so the other component that you know you think about when you know as brad was saying wanting everything is you guys know this because you've been following for the past two years now just this month right those of you have been with us yeah this this month actually was our two year anniversary from Kickstarter May 1st so the cool thing though is that you know a lot of what we talked about in the beginning is you know companies are unwilling I think sometimes to take the risk that comes along with creating such a vast and substantial game like Ashes of Creation this is a very ambitious project and you know we part of hiring the team members we have here is making sure they understand hey this is a very ambitious project and this is going to be something that passion will fuel you to see complete right that is that is important partner and why it's been a major point for me I keep looking at that stupid microphone is why it's been a major point for me when bringing on board people is that I see in their eyes the passion to complete and do a project of this size right that's such an important aspect for me and I know you know along with that we have the seniors and the talent that's present and the experience that's here but there's a lot of stuff to get done and and and you know it's great to have a team like Brad and the other character team and everybody else on the team that's capable of actually achieving these things and don't balk at the idea of doing a backpack like this or doing this big list don't scare me exactly to show you this is one that Keith is working on I believe so the important thing to know about this piece and you know a lot of what you guys saw in a POC was very asymmetrical in its design creating the asset the armor sets themselves but there is a wide diversity of cultures in Ashes of Creation so there are nine distinct cultures and that's the major races that doesn't even account for you know the minor races that our president will have some influences on the designs there but this is a more traditional type of kind of plate set that is more symmetrical this is what Keith Kovacs been working on Keith actually being our first hire at the studio employee number one I think he's at the dentist right now but here you know there are absolutely some elements of asymmetry that are present you know on the boot on the belt strap on the Amish on the guards but traditionally this kind of set represents a more more western plate influence that's present so this is the this is the modeling of that of that particular armor set and you know you'll see that this is broken up into many different pieces that are actually attached to the character this can be broken down pretty significantly on an individual piece basis and that again lends itself to creating that highly customizable aspect that players will be able to influence on their character design so cool this is the coolest armor I've ever worked yeah I did a lot of armor skinning in the past few months and every day I'm going wow this is so cool who does this who does move skin-tight completely design are not just a texture right not just a normal map I mean they're actually building this geometry out on this stuff and it's super cool yeah it's bad well I think that's gonna kind of wrap things up for the character team unless you have anything last that you want to like say no I just like to thank everybody for their continued support you know we're all here working really hard to make an awesome game yes thanks for letting me out of my my stupid golf store hang on I know what I'm actually really excited to go get back to the combat that I was and we're gonna kind of wrap things up with a little bit of a Q&A so if you have any questions you can go ahead and toss them into the chat and we'll try to snag them up I know there was still some other questions in there but hopefully you'll like this you got a little taste of like what our different departments are doing on our teams the goal would be to maybe do this with some of our other departments kind of talking to maybe some of our other designers totally things talking to our programmers about specific things by the way I know we're going over a little bit but but I just Steven wants to do Q I want to I want to make sure we have QA so if you guys are okay with it we're gonna go longer than normal so that we can get some questions I don't think they're gonna probably I don't think there will
so the first question I see there is about weapon swapping what are you guys has thoughts on weapon swapping so we don't wash it we don't want players to be able to instantly swap their weapons in combat there should be some time between red and black for the MMORPG yes for the MMORPG we wants there to be some time between damage received or damage done before you can swap your weapon it's not going to be substantial if it will maybe do be a few seconds but Jim that's one of the things we remember that the weapon system includes a combo system that has its own exact you know skills and stuff associated with it so not just like from a gameplay perspective but also from like a technical perspective and making sure those things link together correctly we need to make sure that those things you know kind of live together they'll be no swapping at all actually when you equip the weapon will burn into your hands out of your body you'll just have a blade what we're exactly blade waiting for us to toss me the questions but I'll just kind of look at some of the questions hoes um so smoky a question that we had in mrs. or in regards to the 10% remaining on the on apocalypse and where we are on that as far as like what's left on that what supplement so right now we're mainly focusing on stress testing with certain customized tools that we've created in order to really hammer account creation hammer population on the map actually I was walking by Mitch the other day and I saw him spawning thousands no it's pretty fun Victor yeah around him is the server rate and and the clients really so how many of the were on his grade it was like literally my heart yeah I was like how many I think he had like three thousand character models that spawned sorry good so so basically right now the backend you know focusing on on really stress testing kind of the new architecting that was done in order to accommodate the number of players that we aim to receive and I am happy to report that I keep looking at that damn thing Susie to report that progress is is is substantial on that front so yeah so hopefully that gives you a good answer if you have follow-up questions you can always just message me and we can figure that out
in regards to content so a lot of people are curious about the MMO content specifically and I know Sam has been working really hard on a lot of the story content and things of that sort of the stuff that people are cheating me like play through and get their hands on turn my story yeah and I don't know if you want to not talk about details of that but talk about what you guys are working on in regards to that because I think we show a lot of art and stuff of that sort but they're talking they want to know about the content that they're going to get to play through yeah so I'm yeah it's one of those things that a it's still being yeah we don't want to show it to architected in terms of you know what's gonna go where and what pieces belong to what and you know as far as implementation of that stuff goes like we've got a you know gigantic lore Bible we've got all this stuff kind of we're holding on to you it's more about figuring out what pieces go where you know kind of the pace of everything and then once we solve all those questions and we start we'll be able to start implementing at that point right so as as the Alpha man alpha one map is being laid out from a design a population standpoint a lot of those NPCs that contain certain story arcs are story lines they need to be placed in areas that make sense that they connect to that they hook to and that they connect with other nodes in that sense as well right so that's a that's a big component of that we're not going to be releasing information on these story arcs we will not release them until probably beta when at that point it'll be you know difficult for us to even keep them under wraps so we may give some insights where people see the content like what kind of systems are gonna be attached to that like obviously doing quests and things of that sort of system every every sit right like all of the events are based around storytelling all of the the narrative quests are based around storytelling all the organizational quests are based around storytelling you know the game is built from a story basically so we want to make sure that there's context and relevancy for all of the actions that you're doing in the game even player driven mechanic right you still have story components there will be a reason why the player driven mechanic is available or required of the player so you know every every system that's created touches story yeah so I hope that kinda answer your question it's kind of one of those things where we can't really show it because if we show it then we're showing you all the story so it makes it hard but there's lots of people work being done on the content and we saw a lot of systems that need to be finished to you know as far as the questing system is very complex there's a lot of stuff that goes into it like objectives objective types that are being worked on - well I'm just just you know the entire node interface the quests and how they decide what NPCs to give them out to how that decides you know what happens when that NPC dies in a node siege right like all that stuff is is still being built and those bunch of questions are you all ready so the first one is every holes I'm not gonna say it's full name for the yep since already 70 before I never said jokes I said I wasn't here this was prior to me existing on this team for the melee sounds will there be different sounds when hitting Armour or flesh yes yes so we have basically material channels that we use to determine what sound gets played at any given moment and so based on what you're hitting you will hear different sounds based on that and I saw a question real quick that I want to make sure the answer is the referral system you know part of what we have been working on with the new website since December and making sure that all the platform changes are done to accommodate our very large player base already is to assume that the change is necessary on the referral system are being implemented right now they're being worked on and we should have them complete very soon they're going to incorporate some new features such as a code field so you don't only have to use a link you can also have a unique code that's assigned to your account and you can share that code with players and they can utilize it when registering for an account it'll also have you know a more in-depth kind of tracking system that players will be able to utilize to kind of see the performance of you know their campaigns or whatever as well but those are those those ancillary systems will come online after the initial law we want to get up and running as soon as possible the links and codes first and then we also want to make sure migrate the previous data right now it's dependent on players migrating we want to be able to migrate that for expenditures over to the new database and originally we were kind of hoping to do the code Redemption stuff at the same time is that so that it would all come up together but we decided that we would put out the code redemption for like Kickstarter and stuff like that right away so that you guys so you guys and gals them could do that right away because we knew we had some tickets in queue that were you know we couldn't solve those until those until that was available so that's been solid and mad props to RCS team who has been kicking some booty so if you've ever put in a ticket those should be all resolved please check your tickets hopefully that time has been much better for you well so we've Morgan hard on that end yeah I'm excited to get the referral stuff back on track and runnin and rolling
so our next question here is from mr. quantum observer wondering you mentioned private property sales certs is this like a landlord thing where you can rent your space will a wealthy enough Gill to be able to buy it the auction house or other interest sees interest buildings in a node so there's a few there's a few theories that we're going to be implementing behind that the most basic one is that this will be this will allow players to transfer real property goods so this includes freehold this includes static housing this includes apartments that they may own and they can sell those because those will have you know limited enter final quantity this will not allow you to go above your one allotment of freehold in the game so you will not you will need to not have a previous freehold if you're going to purchase that but it's something that kind of facilitates that trade between players additionally some concepts that we have is going to be rental or leases that could be had allowing players to kind of lease a property for a period of time where they will have control rights or you know yeah they'll have control rights over utilizing storage based on the area controlling the furniture or access point all that kind of stuff I always wanted to own a hotel an RP the travelers coming in and I don't know that weird it might be weird okay moving on
no penny gal wants to know how is the back end development going right now oh it's going extremely well I think we did Stephen kind of went over it but it is like like Mitch the work that mitch has been doing right like getting 3000 characters on to a screen at the same time is pretty incredible and we've got I think five or six people really focused on on really pulling out what we can in order to keep things moving good on the server so you know we had you over 200 people almost 200 live players on the server once we should be able to push that up now quite significantly we haven't got enough people to do one of those tests yet to see where our new cap is we will soon and I mean we have grown leaps and bounds on our server architecture in the last three months so I certainly have been super impressed
our next question is about auction house stuff how exactly does an auction house work in conjunction with player shop and rental styles can you buy and sell from an auction house or is it simply a place to list all the items an economic node is selling and their location is
there may be a taxation difference between auction houses versus player run things so auction houses will have a listing fee and auction houses can be accessible in order to list items from the economic node in which the auction house exists you'll be able to view items that are listed on an auction house from vassal nodes whether they are economic are not through the auctioneer that or the emissary that gets placed there you will make sure you can't list there you can't you'll need to you will need to travel to the auction house that contains resources and/or material using raw resources or processed materials you'll need to be it you'll need to travel to the auction houses location where it is listed in order to retrieve the store goods in that node and then if you want to move them elsewhere you'll need to move them via caravan or any other type of transportation standpoint the additionally player stalls higher in an in an economic note there is an area of space that's present near the unique building where players may put up a stall actually they'll be able to put up a shop and then in addition to that there will be rentable stalls that are capable of being utilized for a period of time based on your expenditure that will you'll be able to list any number of goods there for a period of time there will be an attendant that gets assigned to the stall and that stalls goods will be listed on a bulletin board that players can access from anywhere in the region and know where the stall is located to travel there and purchase when the economic node reaches believe it's a metropolis stage it will sell personal shop certificates now this allows players non-citizens and citizens alike to go to the metropolis they can purchase the player shop certificates and they can put up a player shop anywhere in the world with that certificate they don't have to be near the the economic nodes unique building and in a designated shop area instead they can go out in the real world and put up a shop if they wish somewhere in your inn perhaps maybe if you're running you know a little shop on the crossroads on your freehold you can put it there but yeah
all right and the next question I have is from trill Dom's wanting to know can you own chunks of land without developing on it Oh that'd be kind of cool if you could just own a bunch of people could own a bundle and then you just be like it's a reserve you could put down your freehold and not fit any building you could put down your freehold and just put a bunch of farm stuff yeah there's lots of things that are not explicitly buildings that you can put on your free of old and have it represent you know something along those lines sweet so yeah thank you all for tuning in today hopefully you all enjoyed listening and hearing from some new faces yeah if you haven't watched some of our previous content but exciting and I think important thing to note you know moving forward I'm definitely a proponent of this format I think it was good important thing to know for you guys is that as we kind of roll out this format in the future again this is work in progress so do not walk away from this thinking this is an end product that you're viewing and make sure they do the who you're getting under the hood look with regards to additional footage and game