Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #42 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet +1 Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



Happy end of January and start of February! Allow me to present a newsletter in the process of changing its style, a new newsletter, if you will. This Unveiled is shorter and more focused than many of our previous issues, intending to provide a more on-topic look at the month. Consider this an experiment in a gradually changing style as we charge toward Beta. The newsletter will still have some of your old favorites, but will be focused on keeping all of our Backers informed about the fun, frolic, and yes, even the eff-ups that happen during what will be a very interesting Beta process.



Here at City State Entertainment™, we have continued our weekly schedule of streams, showing you everything from impressive creative work by our artists and programmers to our latest updates and news. The streams are fun for us, but they are also very important, as we always want to be as informative as possible for our Backers and fans. If you want to catch up on any missed streams, they can always be found on our Twitch and YouTube channels. For a good read of our news, as well as our weekly Top Tenish updates, check out the News section of our website, and our User Stories to check on our progress.



We’re all feeling very motivated in the office as we bring on some new folks and recalibrate our weapons to really attack the next phase of development. Let’s head on into the rest of this thing! Don’t forget to click on the “view this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole newsletter! Please read on and enjoy this, the forty-second issue of Unveiled. Updates and Announcements -by Max Porter

We had some important things to tell you about this month in the development of Camelot Unchained™!



To begin with, we added a new animator, a new community manager, and a new producer to the team! You may have noticed their positive impacts already, and regarding the new producer, we had this encouraging Top Tenish item from last week’s update (1/26/18): WIP – Production: This week continues the onboarding process of our new producer. We’re maintaining our progress on the current milestone, while continuing a full audit of everything we’ve planned for Beta 1, not only to bring him up to speed, but to make sure we deliver as solid a Beta 1 date as possible. But the biggest announcement of the month, and one that has put the studio and all of our Backers in a quite enviable position, is what MJ has been working on for the last six months. I’m referring, of course, to the news that we got a major cash infusion! It’s going to mean a lot for us, for Camelot Unchained, and for our Backers. You can find the press release, plus links to multiple interviews with Mark HERE, and here’s the Top Tenish item from the week of the announcement (1/19/18): BizDev – CSE Lands $7.5M To Accelerate Development: For the last six months, Mark has been working on an investment deal for our studio. The deal closed late last week, and as a result we are now on an accelerated hiring program. Our main goal is to be able to speed up development, have an even more enjoyable Beta than originally planned, and reward our Backers’ long-time faith and support. The livestreams where Mark talked about this can be found here, here, and here, and the information on our website can be found here. This infusion gives CSE the opportunity to add more talent to the team that is creating our game. It is our goal to use that talent to attempt to speed up the delivery of Camelot Unchained, not to add new “bright shinies”, and MJ, as always, was happy to go on record and promise just that. It’s been almost nothing but seven-day weeks for MJ over the last two-and-a-half months, but it was worth it, as the studio maintained the complete independence that is so important to all of us, Backers and CSE alike. To shamelessly borrow from MJ (who always shamelessly borrows from movies), a laurel and hardy handshake for his efforts to protect our Backers and CSE team members alike with this deal!



I’d also like to point out that those livestreams, linked above, each had their own full Q&A session where many questions were asked and answered! It was a real marathon day for Mark, but we sure put out a lot of information. Thanks to him for that! Hot Topics

The latest topics of discussion on the forums right now include our latest announcements, of course, as well as Backer rewards and support spells.



Backers, come and join the discussion on the Forums on our website to bring your thoughts and ideas to the table! The latest topics of discussion on the forums right now include our latest announcements, of course, as well as Backer rewards and support spells.Backers, come and join the discussion Look What You Did Check out this Realm Holiday fan art concept from Brand, created in response to last month’s contest! Looks like the Arthurian Realm knows how to celebrate: And for our next contest, a word from our new CM: Artists, we’ve got something fun for you! For the entire month of February, we’ll be running a Weapon Design Contest. Submit your concept art, 3d renders, sculptures, etc., to us via the Backer Forums (see the Fan Art section) for a chance to get your design in Camelot Unchained! This will be at our discretion, of course, and we may need to make changes, but we’d love to be inspired by your work. We’ll be re-posting all the accepted submissions publicly to our Flickr at flickr.com/citystategames, so be sure to check it out! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick The Best-Laid Plans

Having just started a new year, and having also hired a new producer here at CSE, a lot of planning has recently been taking place. While we try and share what new features we are working on here at the studio in our weekly updates and through other means, we don’t often talk about what goes into mapping out tasking week after week to make each new feature happens.



From a design perspective, I tend to think of my time as being spent in one of two ways: either on actual design or on implementation. I consider design to be time spent researching, coming up with ideas, and formalizing them into documentation. Implementation, on the other hand, is taking ideas and--using whatever tools are appropriate--making them into something playable in the game. While these two categories encompass the vast majority of my time, there is also some amount of planning what needs to be designed and implemented.



Planning for design needs often starts by reviewing high-level project goals and breaking them down into manageable parts. The broad overarching goals are for Camelot Unchained as a whole are pretty well known, but when we start to look at some of the more specific aspects, there are lots of questions that have to be answered. While in the planning stage, the goal isn’t generally to answer any of these questions, but rather to categorize them into related sets that have interdependencies that make up some functional feature of the game.



Ideally, designing and implementing one of these features will produce something that is playable, has a clear path for testing, and adds something meaningful to the game. When trying to plan out the scope of a feature, it is important not to try and do too much at once. Sometimes it becomes necessary to include placeholders, like raw text output or temporary UI, in place of the eventual end goal. This is done in order to keep the scope small enough that a particular feature can be completed and tested in a reasonably short time frame, rather than becoming so large that managing its entirety all at once becomes impractical.



Unfortunately there is no assured way to determine exactly how difficult and time consuming a task will be. Estimates are typically made based on past experience, with some amount of built-in overage to account for unexpected difficulties, but there is no way to guarantee estimates will be accurate. Fortunately, limiting the scope of each task helps significantly in limiting how long each task could potentially take, and the more tasks are completed, the more accurate future estimates tend to become. Thus, as major feature sets near completion, it is possible to say with relative certainty how much time is left to complete the remainder.



As we near the completion of our initial feature set for Beta 1 testing in Camelot Unchained, there is still a bit more tasking that needs to be done, but also an increasing amount of confidence as more and more of the major requirements for starting our first round of Beta testing are met. Having another producer is definitely helping us to make sure our tasking is on track, and moving into Beta 1 and beyond, there will be a lot of new and exciting features in store, which we’re all looking forward to sharing with you. Developer Quote “Speaking on behalf of Town State Leisure, I just want to enunciate that all of our band branches are hysterical about this declaration. We are beholding towards the posterity extremely hungrily. We be indebted you for your substratum! ...How’s that for my scraped (synonym substitution) thank-you?” - Mark Jacobs Click the above image to go to the MassivelyOP.com article about this joke. :) State Of The Build -by Max Porter In this section, I grab a few of the biggest items from our Top Tenish highlights, which we publish each week. This is intended to provide a view of where we are at with the build in a somewhat larger sense, and represents the cream of the cream, if you will!



Dev-side UI Progress (1/5/18) Progression Dev UI: The DevUI is our first step in the process of displaying information before we sex it up with some art. Christina’s new DevUI will show progression info on the client, including: Collecting progression: View statistics about what you did as a player during a game day and what item, stat, and skill part rewards you gained as a result. All time player summary: View statistics about what your player has done since the ‘beginning of recorded history’. Skill progression: This is the same skill progression Dev UI as before, just moved into this new UI. Stat progression: See how many bonus stat points your player has earned through the progression system and the experience needed to gain the next point. Realm stats: View statistics about what your Realm has done since the ‘beginning of recorded history’. NOTE: Stats are not updated in real time. Progression information is updated and rewards are given out only after your efforts have been examined and recorded by your Realm.

The DevUI is our first step in the process of displaying information before we sex it up with some art. Christina’s new DevUI will show progression info on the client, including: (1/5/18) Tech – Updated Ability Buttons and Patcher UI: Following up the last week of the previous year, AJ is wrapping up both the updates to the patcher UI, as well as feedback and bugs in the updated ability buttons. Players should see these changes soon, improving both combat readability and experience in the patcher.

Following up the last week of the previous year, AJ is wrapping up both the updates to the patcher UI, as well as feedback and bugs in the updated ability buttons. Players should see these changes soon, improving both combat readability and experience in the patcher. (1/5/18) Tech – Floating Combat Text: Dave has completed his initial implementation and had a little bit of time to improve the readability of the text. The overall look is certainly a work-in-progress and at this time, is mostly to “prove” the tech will improve combat readability. We were able to successfully test it yesterday in a quick office playtest, and it certainly helped in debugging combat testing.

Dave has completed his initial implementation and had a little bit of time to improve the readability of the text. The overall look is certainly a work-in-progress and at this time, is mostly to “prove” the tech will improve combat readability. We were able to successfully test it yesterday in a quick office playtest, and it certainly helped in debugging combat testing. (1/12/18) Tech – 3D UI and Input Performance improvements: Dave made several updates to the 3D UI we showed in previous updates, making it easier to read and a bit more professional-looking in its first pass. Additionally, he’s been helping George out on his upcoming change by looking for ways to make sure we don’t see a UI performance regression. George’s branch now runs, on average, 2 to 2.5ms faster per frame, as they discovered some low-hanging fruit that was eating a fairly consistent chunk of time.

Dave made several updates to the 3D UI we showed in previous updates, making it easier to read and a bit more professional-looking in its first pass. Additionally, he’s been helping George out on his upcoming change by looking for ways to make sure we don’t see a UI performance regression. George’s branch now runs, on average, 2 to 2.5ms faster per frame, as they discovered some low-hanging fruit that was eating a fairly consistent chunk of time. (1/19/18) 3D UI and Input Performance improvements: Dave’s updates are now largely complete, and integrate with the gameplay systems and combat log. Dave has added some changes to 3D UI, and has cleaned up some locking issues as well. This work will be very meaningful in providing good combat readability during testing. This is still very much a work-in-progress in terms of styling and art. Gameplay Systems Progress (1/12/18) Tech – Engine Gameplay Systems Improvements: George–and recently, several other teammates as well–have been working on a large commit that rewrites the game loop and input logic to facilitate a lot of current and future improvements. This moves us more to a separation of engine and gameplay code, so we don’t have to manually thread the two together everywhere. This is the work mentioned in one of our update emails for Backers who may be using Hatchery for their C.U.B.E. creations. When this large update goes in (likely next week), we expect quite a bit of follow-up work as we have some regression in gameplay, like manual aiming feeling off. What do we get out of this? Check out this list: Believe it or not, this work began with a fix to the “reload UI” button and various other UI loading issues. Better key remapping (Keybinding not yet in). Client runs in the background safely and comes back without stutters or stopping. Client continues to run when dragging and resizing the window without disconnecting from the server or crashing. Reduce latency on input to under 1 frame. Reduce the cost of processing input and remove it from the main gameplay loop. Reorganize gameplay logic surrounding UI, windows and player input, so that it is done in the appropriate places and separated from engine code. A fix for a number of small threading bugs and asserts. Much quicker systems for collecting entities in an area on the client, Affects targeting, etc. These items combined create a significant speed boost and latency reduction for the player.

George–and recently, several other teammates as well–have been working on a large commit that rewrites the game loop and input logic to facilitate a lot of current and future improvements. This moves us more to a separation of engine and gameplay code, so we don’t have to manually thread the two together everywhere. This is the work mentioned in one of our update emails for Backers who may be using Hatchery for their C.U.B.E. creations. When this large update goes in (likely next week), we expect quite a bit of follow-up work as we have some regression in gameplay, like manual aiming feeling off. What do we get out of this? Check out this list: (1/19/18) Tech – Engine Gameplay Systems Improvements: George, alongside several members of the team, have landed the large commit that rewrites the game loop and input logic to facilitate a lot of current and future improvements. (See last week’s update.) Now that this work has landed, we continue to test and verify that there are no new issues or regressions, as well as finishing the keybinding input integration.

George, alongside several members of the team, have landed the large commit that rewrites the game loop and input logic to facilitate a lot of current and future improvements. (See last week’s update.) Now that this work has landed, we continue to test and verify that there are no new issues or regressions, as well as finishing the keybinding input integration. (1/26/18) Tech – Building Performance: We did a lot of work this week to get some metrics in to test building performance. We’ve refrained from much, even internal, building testing because we needed to dig in there and figure out not only what was performing poorly, but what needs to be done to get us to large scale siege battles. This week Rob and Dave added a lot of metrics, fixing some low hanging fruit, and providing Andrew and George with insight to plan a path forward for Beta 1 and beyond.

We did a lot of work this week to get some metrics in to test building performance. We’ve refrained from much, even internal, building testing because we needed to dig in there and figure out not only what was performing poorly, but what needs to be done to get us to large scale siege battles. This week Rob and Dave added a lot of metrics, fixing some low hanging fruit, and providing Andrew and George with insight to plan a path forward for Beta 1 and beyond. (1/26/18) WIP – Permission System: Christina has been busy this week testing and improving her updates. She’s added item permissions defining if a player is allowed to add contents to a container as well as remove contents from a container. With this we can do things like not allowing another faction to steal the ammo out of your siege engine during a scenario and, long term, having chests to safely store items in. Scenario and NPC Tech: (1/12/18) Tech – Scenario Results Screen: Christina supported the UI guys this week, exposing information out of the progression system to be hooked up to a scoreboard. The first iteration will show Overall team scores, and for each player it will show: Name, Faction, Kills, Deaths, Assists, Damage Dealt, Healing Dealt, Damage Received, Healing Received, Score/Points Earned.

Christina supported the UI guys this week, exposing information out of the progression system to be hooked up to a scoreboard. The first iteration will show Overall team scores, and for each player it will show: Name, Faction, Kills, Deaths, Assists, Damage Dealt, Healing Dealt, Damage Received, Healing Received, Score/Points Earned. (1/19/18) Tech – New Entity Types: Caleb has finished the first pass of new spawn point entities, and can now use this as part of the gameplay scenario system. This will open us up to build gameplay around locations and events, like capture points, which we’ve begun testing in the next scenario zone. NPC guards successfully spawned upon point capture, guarded their area, and moved to the next capture point.

Caleb has finished the first pass of new spawn point entities, and can now use this as part of the gameplay scenario system. This will open us up to build gameplay around locations and events, like capture points, which we’ve begun testing in the next scenario zone. NPC guards successfully spawned upon point capture, guarded their area, and moved to the next capture point. (1/26/2018) WIP – Tech – Stand Alone NPC Server/ Unified TCP and UDP Entity Networking System: This one’s a two-parter, as Colin is handing off the former item for review this week, and addressing review feedback for the latter. Once both of these are complete we’ll get: NPC Server: This work will make it easier for us to diagnose performance issues related to NPCs. In the long term, having a stand alone NPC Server lets us offload the AI to a separate server for scalability, increasing overall performance. Unified TCP/UDP: This work began with a nasty bug but has allowed us to also simplify the code, making future changes much easier.

This one’s a two-parter, as Colin is handing off the former item for review this week, and addressing review feedback for the latter. Once both of these are complete we’ll get: Art: (1/12/18) WIP - Art - Weapons: Jon has been busy creating several new weapon models this week. He’s completed a modeling pass on nine new weapons, and is currently working on the materials for them. Part of Jon’s goal was to even out the number of the different weapons players had available to them. 1 Viking one-handed sword 2 Arthurian one-handed swords 1 TDD one-handed sword 2 Viking one-handed hammers 2 Viking two-handed hammers 1 Viking one-handed sword

Jon has been busy creating several new weapon models this week. He’s completed a modeling pass on nine new weapons, and is currently working on the materials for them. Part of Jon’s goal was to even out the number of the different weapons players had available to them. (1/12/18) WIP - Art - Place of Power/Scenario Map: Tyler created five new materials this week to begin roughing out the terrain. All the separate Place of Power models are imported and placed in the map. Dionne is working on the large “rock wall” assets, which will join her previously-created dead trees, grass, and rocks, as well as new materials to improve the look of the Place of Power model. The next step is bringing this all together on the map.

Tyler created five new materials this week to begin roughing out the terrain. All the separate Place of Power models are imported and placed in the map. Dionne is working on the large “rock wall” assets, which will join her previously-created dead trees, grass, and rocks, as well as new materials to improve the look of the Place of Power model. The next step is bringing this all together on the map. (1/19/18) WIP - Art - Character Assets in Maya: Our new animator had a good opening in standups: “Scott and I have birthed a baby this week!” No, we haven’t hired a doula instead of an animator. Scott and Joe have been moving all our assets into Maya to make use of some better animation tools and move us more to Maya instead of splitting between that and Max, which required more upkeep. The “baby” was the human male skeleton with a full character mesh, and animations successfully imported into the game from Maya. They began working through the female rig today. As always, these are just a few of the items from our weekly updates. Onward! Bonus Images! -by Max Porter Check out this awesome castle that the Backer Swazi built in C.U.B.E., inspired by our upcoming Saturday Night Sieges! And also, because I couldn’t help myself, I wanted to show you how Njalvar, an awesome Backer, made the hilarious TSL logo in C.U.B.E.: Thank you so much as always for reading through our newsletter. It’s great to start off the new year with the pleasurable work of putting together a new Unveiled for you all. Until next time, Max out!



