Project Eternity Post-funding Update #62: State of the Project

The latest post-funding update for Project Eternity is decidedly more rich in content when compared to the one from two weeks ago, and includes an update on production, a small write-up on the team’s new hires, a new creature concept and description, a screenshot of the WIP dialogue window and a link to a recent J.E. Sawyer video on real-life knowledge and its importance for game designers. Without further ado, here’s a snippet:

Characters

Creatures

The Concept Artists, Animators, and Character Artists have been burning through our creatures. We are taking a different approach in Project Eternity than we have on other projects. Instead of taking a creature from concept to a final, polished product, we have been taking creatures to a blockout stage before moving to the next.

This allows us to get creatures into the game much more quickly. It also lets us be more flexible with how we spend our polish time. Overall, we think it will lead to a better experience.

Even with this short amount of time, we have been able to get about eight different creatures into the game.

Since it would be pretty mean of me to talk about the creatures without showing one, here is a small taste of one of my “favorites” – the wicht.

I think Josh’s description says it best: “Wichts are the bodies of children that were born without souls, grew to adolescence, and were then possessed by a malevolent lost soul or soul fragment that has been artificially inserted through animancy. This process arrests their physical development and transforms their outward appearance, leaving no doubt as to what they are.”

Items

In addition to the creatures, our Character Artists have been filling out the remaining armor sets that are left. We have all of our basic armors in place for all of our races. This is a pretty significant feat this early in the project. Now that we are done with the base item and armor sets, we can focus on making magic and unique variants.

Features

Journal

We now have a fully functional quest journal in place that allows players to see their quest progress. The UI is currently being implemented, but it is looking great.

Conversations

While we have been getting more and more Alpha UI into the game, I was particularly happy with how the conversation UI came out. Take a look for yourself, though. Even though this is still a work in progress, I think everyone did a great job. Let us know what you think of the conversation UI in our forums.

Stronghold

Tim went on a tear and got most of the backend systems for the player stronghold in place. There are a ton of really fun things you can do with your stronghold like sending companions on missions, buying rare loot off of merchants, building upgrades, and even purchasing hirelings to defend your keep from attack. Watching Tim’s stronghold get robbed blind because he has low security and high prestige never gets old.

World Map

Eternity now has a fully functional world map. When the party enters a qualifying transition, the world map appears. Players can then select to travel to a location by selecting that icon on the map.

Fog of War

One focus for this milestone was to get our Fog of War system in place. Beyond a few tweaks, Adam is pretty close to slaying that beast. It’s a really robust system he created that takes some inspiration from rogue-like games. Using Adam’s tool, designers can quickly create a fog map, edit it, and set locations that should only be revealed at specific times.

AI

Steve, our AI Programmer, has been putting work into spellcasting AI this milestone and it is coming out nicely. Enemies are more crafty than they were now that they are casting spells intelligently. There’s going to be even more AI work – roles for our enemy AIs, for example – put into our next milestone.