Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #50 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



Happy (early) New Year! Wow, another year of development! It has been an incredible one, with great progress, and it’s been capped by a highly productive December.



There is so much goodness to share with you in this newsletter, so I’m going to keep this opening very short and sweet. First, there’s my presentation of The Depths™ board game, with art by the amazing Kara and Michelle. Not to be missed, we have a Dose of Design from Ben on sieges, and an interview with Wylie to round out this epic issue. To end the newsletter and the year, we have Mark’s State of the Game article, which you should really read if you want to know where we stand in the development of Camelot Unchained®.



Well, I said I’d keep this short and sweet, and I’m making good on that! From rainy, cold downtown Fairfax, Va., we thank you for your support and interest in our little (but with big results!) game studio called City State Entertainment®. Bear with my reminder to click on the “View this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole newsletter, and read on for presentations, updates, news, articles, discussions, interviews, art, and more goodness, and please enjoy this, the fiftieth issue of Unveiled. Presenting... The Depths Board Game! -by Max Porter Introduction

Hey, folks! As some of you may know, I have been spending some time working on a board game based on Mark’s vision for The Depths™, an RvR dungeon in Camelot Unchained®. After years of design, development, and playtesting, the time has come to present it to you, our Backers, and to see what you think!



First of all, I want to say: “thank you!” When I was first hired at CSE, I was brought on as a Stretch Goal in “The Writer Cometh.” That means I have been writing for this game at the behest of our wonderful Backers from the very beginning of my journey with CSE. At that time, I had no idea that this journey would lead me here, to creating a board game steeped in the lore of Camelot Unchained. I’m so excited to share it with you all! Who worked on this, and when?

Let me start things off by explaining that this board game project has not slowed down the development of Camelot Unchained or taken one bit of productivity away from that game. In the beginning, I only spent weekends and off-hours working on this at all, and as the board game project grew to take up more of my time, other folks at the company only played or discussed it with me during lunch hours and evenings. Almost no time, other than my own, was taken away from Camelot Unchained’s development for this board game. If anything, it’s been a fun thing for team members to relax and blow off steam with during off-hours! Here we are playing after work hours back in the day. This was a very, very early prototype version with scrounged pieces! My primary job as the writer has always been the lore of the game, and the board game has helped to develop and enrich certain aspects of the lore. Without it, we wouldn’t have the rewrite of the epic Silverhands Becoming™ tale, or The Great Depths Raid story, which serves a dual purpose as the lore of the board game.



Some years ago now, I pitched Mark the idea of a board game based on some of the ideas for CU, and he gave me the green light. Twists and turns of design and development followed, including contributions from Mark from early on, playtests and discussion in the studio, more playtests with some awesome Backers, and now, incredible artwork by Kara with contributions from Michelle. These special people have helped develop the board game into a far more refined (and fun!) creature than it was when I first talked to Mark about it. I’m truly grateful for the chance to present the current status to you.



Of course, all of the art I’m going to show you is subject to change, and nothing is final. However, I think it’s looking pretty dang good already! Massive credit to Kara, who created it, and to Michelle, who worked with her to make it happen! As above, any work they do for Camelot Unchained takes priority, and the board game has been absolutely a secondary project. All along the way, the board game has supported and assisted the development of lore and ideas for Camelot Unchained. Purpose of this Presentation

What are we doing here? The intention of this presentation is to give you a clear idea of the board game’s feel and direction, and to show you some of the cool stuff that there is in it. We’ll look at some of the art that has already been created for the game, talk a bit about future plans, and show you some of the neat things about the board game.



This presentation won’t contain a super deep dive into the games’ mechanics, or detail all the ins and outs of its development, but should serve to let you know if you might be interested in the board game. If you’re into fast-paced tabletop gaming, I hope you find this battle game cool and fun! Okay, tell me about The Depths board game!

Here’s how the current iteration of the rulebook opens. Keep in mind that this text and especially the title is subject to plenty of change on the wording, but the spirit of the game is there:



***



The Depths: Eternal Adversary is a desperate battle for 2-5 players against a terrible evil that plays out within the ever-shifting place of horror known as The Depths. On one side, the Delvers seek to destroy the Servant of the Depths, a fallen Delver that has been corrupted and transformed into a terrifying monster. On the other side, the Servant seeks to slay all the Delvers and enslave their bodies and souls to The Depths, its master.



The Delvers will have to work together to achieve victory, while the Servant has the power to win all by themselves.



In The Depths, all must kill or be killed!



***



This game distills the Lovecraftian, H. R. Giger-esque horror that inspires The Depths into a fast-paced, murderous, beer-and-pretzels good time. If you aren’t hip to that gaming terminology, Wikipedia says a beer-and-pretzels game is “any of a class of tabletop games that are light on rules and strategy, feature a high amount of randomness and a light theme.” Sounds like fun, I think!



Developing this board game into a quicker, more focused and murderous confrontation was one of the things Mark had me prioritize along the way. Those who followed the development from the beginning will remember what was called the “full version” of the game, with multiple boards and slowly creeping corruption.



The game now is focused on the final, epic battle between the Servant of The Depths and the Delvers, which used to just be the climactic end of the game! Mark has an idea about the possibility of us doing something with those previous mechanics and rules in the future, so who knows? Kara playtested the game on her kitchen table using the art she created! How do you play?

To begin with, you’ll choose and build a deck of cards! As a Delver, you choose a Race and a Class - just like in CU - and each of those contributes cards, which you shuffle into a single deck to play with. It’s a fun yet very simple way to let you make choices about what you’d like to play, and make some strategic decisions at the start of the game. Some folks call this mechanic “shuffle-building,” a simple method of deck-building that lets you create a combination of cards that is your own. Although you can mix and match as you like, some combinations will be stronger than others. “Choices matter,” right?



You also get some Armor, a Health dial, and Wound tokens. I think Kara did an amazing job with these! To win, you’re going to need to burn through your enemy’s health and armor, flipping their Wound tokens until they are completely destroyed. That might sound like a lot to get through, but you have the tools to get it done, with powerful cards and potentially devastating combos. Let’s dig in! The Action Cards and Components

You play Action Cards to do things in the game. These cards cover everything from movement to hurling fireballs to smashing your way through the walls of The Depths! Some cards are always available to you, but most get discarded and eventually shuffled back into your deck. These are some of the cards you might shuffle into your deck, depending on your race and class archetype choice: Notice the symbols across the middle of the card? Those keywords drive the thematic deck-building (or more specifically, shuffle-building) and combo-creating mechanics of the game, allowing you to flex your strategic muscle and figure out ways to maximize your damage. They’re called Components, as they’re inspired by the ability-building mechanics of Camelot Unchained. Components in The Depths board game are simple and easy to use, but give you plenty of strategy to chew on as you battle. The Blood Cards

See that blood symbol in the upper corner of the Action Cards above? That’s the Blood Cost of the card, as your actions in this game are powered by your blood, appropriate both for a CU-inspired game and one set in a place as terrifying as The Depths. Your Blood resides in your deck as well, and here’s what those cards (plus Blood Pool token!) look like: Here’s one mechanic that really drives home the true horror themes of this game: When you die as a Delver, you’ll continue to be useful to your teammates. How so? You become a kind of “Blood Bank,” able to contribute your Blood cards in a last desperate attempt to defeat the Servant as your heart pumps its last. Such are the horrible measures you must resort to in The Depths! The Servant of The Depths is the Eternal Adversary

Meanwhile, one player chooses a Servant of The Depths deck and sets that up. Because they’ve become a horrifying monstrosity in service to The Depths, they have a bunch of monstrous powers and special pieces, like these: Pretty appropriate for a transformed creature of this dark place, don’t you think?



The Servant has their own Action Cards as well, and depending on which monster you choose to play, has their own unique powers to deal with a multitude of Delvers. For example, The Merchant (a memorable villain from CU’s lore), one of the Servants you can play, strikes with a multitude of tentacles when he attacks, writhing and lashing his enemies. His punches hit in an AoE! The Terrain

And there’s more. The battle takes place on an ever-changing board that interacts with players’ cards and provides all kinds of opportunities. Here’s what a board looks like: The terrain system drives the game’s unpredictability and variability; it’s different every time you play. That is a big part of what makes players keep coming back and playing this board game again and again. Here’s some of the strange and mysterious terrain of The Depths that might be revealed as you move across the board! The interaction between your cards and the terrain is key. There are lots of nasty things in The Depths you’ll want to avoid, but on the other hand, there are things that can help you…though often at a terrible price. Using your powerful cards, the shifting terrain, and The Depths itself to your advantage, you’ll maneuver, attack, and put together mighty combos to destroy your enemy! Are there going to be awesome minis?

Yes! As soon as it makes sense for Jon, our 3D modeller, to work on them (he’s been focused on CU work, after all!). The Depths board game offers some really great opportunities for spectacular Depths-themed miniatures, from strange Delvers to weird and terrifying monstrosities. What about Lore?

For those interested, The Depths board game is set in a time before the current conflict between the Realms that takes place in the MMORPG Camelot Unchained. Although distrust and difficulties between the Realms always existed, they have been known to work together on more than one occasion (check out the Silverhands and Great Depths Raid stories, for example)! In addition, there’s lots of room to expand and enrich CU’s lore through the board game. Okay, sounds cool, what’s next for the board game?

The mechanics of the game are pretty much wrapped up and done! Playtesting has proven that the game is indeed quite fun, although of course there are always tweaks and improvements still to make. We’re now working on art and pieces for the game, and have begun looking into production and manufacturing and such.



What does this mean if you want to try playing the board game? Well, we will most likely do a Kickstarter campaign specifically for the board game, but only when doing so will not impact the development of Camelot Unchained. If you’re interested, and we hope you are, you’ll be able to get a copy then. For those who have been wanting to buy some Camelot Unchained-themed swag, of course we’ll be doing more of that as well, but we’ve been saying that for a while now. This board game is most definitely a cool physical thing, and will look gorgeous on your shelf as well as giving you a good time at the gaming table! Thank You

Hey, if you’ve made it this far, hopefully you’re excited and interested in The Depths board game. If not, and you’re just a fan of Camelot Unchained, thank you anyway! Your support and interest are greatly appreciated as we forge onward.



I want to say a very special thanks to the Backers, local and otherwise, who have helped me to playtest this board game. Some of you drove very far indeed to play the game in its infancy, which was amazing! You all have given incredibly useful and constructive feedback, and helped to make this game much better.



A big thank-you to Mark, who has supported this endeavor and nudged me on the right development path now and then. If not for Mark’s ability to see this game’s potential from the very beginning, it would never have gone anywhere, and I’m truly grateful for that. It’s awesome to be able to contribute to the Camelot Unchained body of work in this way!



Thanks to all and anyone who reads this presentation. I hope you liked what you read, and happy gaming to you! Hot Topics



We're looking for feedback! If you're a Backer, join the discussion on our Forums via our website and chime in.



Hot topics on the forums right now include discussion on our latest tests and the classes of Camelot Unchained! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Breaking Buildings Badly

As many of you know, we’re going to great lengths to create a free-form building system for Camelot Unchained, which allows the creation of highly customizable structures, from personal houses to giant fortresses. Part of the fun of having player-created structures in an RvR game is the ability to destroy them. How exactly that destruction happens is very important to the overall fun of the game, and we’re currently putting a lot of development time into this aspect.



Destroying buildings involves siege engines, of course. A lot of games have used siege engines of different types for a variety of purposes in the past, but as with many things about Camelot Unchained, we’re looking into ways to do things a little bit differently. One of the main problems with siege engines in many games is that they aren’t all that fun to use for too long at a time. If a siege battle were to take an hour from start to finish, spending twenty to thirty minutes standing next to a trebuchet just pushing the fire button over and over again would probably get pretty boring.



Our basic philosophy for siege engines is that they should be fun to use, even in an empty field with nothing particularly interesting to shoot at. We plan to implement siege engines that can be operated by just one player, a few players, or several players, each of which offers its own challenges to maximize the siege engine’s performance and maintain its durability. There is a lot to go into when it comes to the details of what we’ve got planned for siege engine operation, which will be shared in a livestream presentation once our upcoming siege engine system has been prototyped and made ready for initial testing.



We’re also trying to make siege more interesting by including a wide variety of siege engine types, many of which are unique to Camelot Unchained. Some siege engines are planned to be largely physics-based, throwing whatever players are creative enough to drop into their loading slot. Others are more ability-based; those siege engines have functionality similar to that of player characters, and use magic effects to produce powerful attacks specially suited for taking down enemy structures.



There will be a variety of protective options that defenders have to fortify their structures against the attacks made by these massive engines of destruction. Firstly, players will want to consider what they’re using to build their castles, since the blocks that make up structures can be made from a variety of substances, which each have various properties that determine how well they hold up against different types of attacks. Building defenses can also be bolstered through use of additional objects placed on a building plot, as they can limit the effectiveness of incoming attacks and provide other utility features that aid defenders in protecting their structures. Siege engines themselves can be used defensively as well as offensively. Not only can siege engines target and destroy other siege engines, but in some cases they can attack the projectiles used by enemy siege engines, destroying them in flight before they strike their targets.



Right now, we are only in the very first stages of designing a lot of these features, and so a lot can change as we move from theoretical design to rough first prototypes, and eventually to the polished form that siege engines will take by the time the game launches. As we start our first pass of siege testing, siege engines will mostly be using the archery system, rather than the true siege system we have planned for the future. This is so that we can test our building damage model early, before we’ve built a prototype for how we want siege engines to actually function. Later on, as building damage gets optimized and the new ability system reaches completion, we will be able to build out and start using our intended design for siege engines, and will schedule Beta tests to gain feedback on how much fun they are to use.



Though we’re still a ways off from putting these siege engine concepts into practice, we’re always interested in what your opinions are. Feel free to let us know your thoughts on future siege engines on our forums if you're a Backer, and if you’re active in the CU beta, keep an eye on your email notifications letting you know when you can start using the basic siege engines we already have to try knocking down some buildings. Developer Quote “Blowing stuff up with trebuchets is so much more fun than blowing stuff

up because the game itself exploded” -- Mark Jacobs Developer Spotlight -by Brian Ward with Wylie Rea Our Community Manager Brian interviewed one of our fairly recent hires, Wylie! Let’s get to know him! This was recorded in Seattle, WA where they both work in our West Coast studio.





Wylie Rea, Junior Engineer



BRIAN: How’s it going? Who are you and what do you do at CSE?



WYLIE: Okay, who I am, my name is Wylie Rea. I am a Junior Engineer. When I arrived here I had the opportunity to spec into whatever I’d like to try and experiment with stuﬀ. I had decided I would like to experiment with rendering programming, so that’s what I’m doing.



BRIAN: Cool! So tell me about sort of your background: How did you get into games, game dev — like, where’d you come from? Are you from the area? Give us your background a little bit.



WYLIE: Okay, what got me here, basically. So I am one of four brothers, all of them are older than me, and every single one of them before me was playing video games. So that was an insanely huge part of my childhood. Every single one of them has fallen oﬀ of it, but I’ve gotten more deeper into it. It’s a[n] infuriating situation, but yeah. So, you know I was always like studious with math and stuﬀ like that in school and I’d never really thought about what I was going to do. I was thinking like some kind of engineering stuﬀ and then my dad, after I had gotten my high school degree, he was basically like, “Yo! You should… learn to program.”



BRIAN: (laughter)



WYLIE: I was like, “Yeah, that seems like a pretty good idea.” And that worked out extremely well. So I had still, like an idiot, no idea what the hell I was going to get into, so I was like, “alright, let’s go to school for design,” ‘cause I’m… (laughter) And so I spent four years trying to learn game design — well, in school for game design — teaching myself programming pretty much. It was [an] interesting scenario, so like all of my peers were design guys and I was like, anyone who has a technical question, I’m like, “Yeah, I think I taught myself that at some point, let’s try and step through it together now.”



BRIAN: Tell me about, just sort of a sidetrack, was it mostly — was your focus mostly through academic — like school projects, like that process or did you like do game modding, or that kind of thing? What was your sort of path into [that]?



WYLIE: Yeah, that’s pretty a cool question. So basically our school would give us projects. They would assign us general goalposts for making a game — our own games. They had to have their own full gameplay loop and everything like that, and so I would always want to design my games around technical challenges around things I don’t know how to do yet. While everyone else was trying to do gameplay stuﬀ, I was like, “Yo! I’m gonna remake that tank game on the Wii — that was a cool game!”



BRIAN: Yeah! So you kind of picked things that had things that you wanted to focus on and were like, “I’m gonna ﬁgure out how to make that!”



WYLIE: I was like, “Yeah, I don’t know how this pathﬁnding stuﬀ works. Let’s make a game that has to have pathﬁnding through the entire thing.” And so I would always have extremely short, technical games that — and so for that reason I would always go for multiplayer versus stuﬀ because it’s less content-heavy; it’s more technical stuﬀ, so it was a good time.



BRIAN: So, fair to say your dev folder just has lots of small projects that get you like — learning through a speciﬁc concept and then you understand that concept.



WYLIE: Pretty much, yeah. A pretty good example, I’d say is like just before I started working here, I spent a couple months making a puzzle game. And the reason I did that is, I wanted to, one, work in 3D matrixes, ‘cause it was a puzzle game where everything’s broken up into a grand 3D grid and you’re trying to navigate around it. And I wanted to do that; I wanted a 3D grid map and I also wanted, two, to do a level editor. ‘Cause I was like, “I wanna make my own tool,” and also I really like level editors. Worms Armageddon was a cool game, let’s try and do that. (laughter)



BRIAN: I like how it went from, “I wanna make this game,” and then, “Oh, I need to make a level editor for it too,” and then you learn how to to make that too — that’s pretty awesome.



WYLIE: That’s pretty much how I motivate myself. I’m like, “oh, I like F-Zero! Let’s make a racing game! I wonder how they did the did,” like I dunno, “the good physics for F-Zero, that seems like a pretty cool game.” And so I made an F-Zero game and it was awesome, but I gave up when I had to make maps, ‘cause I got really annoyed.



BRIAN: So of all the things you’ve ever made, what’s your favorite thing you ever made?



WYLIE: Ah, man, as far an enclosed game, I’d probably say there’s a stupid game called Slimeboxing and it’s based oﬀ — every single game I made in school ﬁrst oﬀ is based oﬀ an existing game. It’s based oﬀ of the meta mini-game in Fusion Frenzy 2, where you try and punch out the other guys with your stupid, little, extremely infuriatingly-bad attack to try and steal orbs they are collecting and then if they get hit [and] you dropped all of yours. The entire thing is collecting these orbs, and doing this risk-reward thing, and getting as many as you can without getting smacked in the head — and bringing them to like a universal point, so it’s like this weird King of the Hill dynamic. That was a tight game. Man, Fusion Frenzy’s awesome. We should be playing that.



BRIAN: (laughter) Well, maybe we should sometime! Alright, so you’ve been working on a lot of things here. What’s your favorite thing that you’ve done this year at CSE since you started that you are super-excited about — Is there something speciﬁc that you’re super-excited about? You mentioned graphics programming, you’re kinda getting into. Tell me about the thing that sort of has excited you most this year since you started?



WYLIE: It might be, just because I’m working on it right now, but something I’m really excited about — and I think I am the most I have ever been to this point — is doing the particle attachment. Because that lets us scale particle eﬀects based on your weapon in this weird way and we’re gonna have to eventually integrate that with, “Oh, here is the Ability Builder,” which may or may not aﬀect your particles also, so it’s a huge, data-driven, basically — pile of shenanigans.



BRIAN: Is that the thing — this is totally [a] side-topic — but is that the thing that, you know we had the giant swords [bug]? Is that related to that or not?



WYLIE: Yeah. No I —



BRIAN: (laughter) I heard that and I was like, “hmm, this sounds like this could be related!”



WYLIE: I asked Mike C. to attach something to the model — and the pipeline, when you build the model, builds the skeleton as well — and it had been scaled a hundred times.



BRIAN: So giant swords; it was pretty awesome. Well, thanks for stopping by and taking a couple minutes to talk about what you’re doing.



WYLIE: Sure thing, I hope the show gets picked up!



BRIAN: (laughter) State of the Game -by Mark Jacobs Folks,



First, I want to wish everybody a Happy Holiday season, a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year in advance. May you, your family, and your friends enjoy a safe and fun end of the year!



Second, let’s talk about where we are and what we did or didn’t do over the past few months. To start with some not-so-good things: We didn’t complete everything we hoped to this past fall. Now, we didn’t miss by much, but we did deliver some things slower than we hoped we would. For that, you have our sincerest apologies. We have always owned up to our delays and their causes, and this time is no different.



However, that’s just the bad news. Let’s also talk about the things we have accomplished over the last five months, and about what is coming in January and beyond.



Here’s a list of the big things we did accomplish this summer and fall: Conversion to a 64-bit client; it is complete and working, yes, as intended. As we talked about, this is an important and necessary step for us to unlock all the memory on Backers’ PCs. Having done that, we now must unleash the artists to add more stuff to the world and make it look better. Our engineers can also look at adding things to the codebase that we couldn’t before the changeover. George, for one, is quite excited about having the 32-bit client in our rearview mirror. And unlike in Jurassic Park, the 32-bit client is not closer than it appears. Our destructible block-by-block building, with a true physics-based stability system, is in and being networked across the servers. While this is still a work-in-progress, we’ve been happily destroying structures in the game and watching player-determined chunks fall off buildings. What I mean by player-determined is that we are not using a template-based system where the buildings are just a bunch of pre-built pieces (that’s easy). Instead, if you are attacking a building that is made up of a million blocks, individual blocks and chunks can result from the damage that has been inflicted. As far as we know, we are the only MMO that has created a system for successfully doing all of that across an MMO-networked game. Update of our character system, including our animation system. This is a really big deal for us, as it improves the look of our characters and makes them perform even better. On the animation side, Andrew’s animation system is being updated with new features, fixes, etc. As Andrew said on Thursday morning to me, this system is now at a point where we can easily add new and unique animations without needing to add more code (more code is coming though, along with more features). Repayment of “tech debt” has moved along nicely. Anytime a team is working on a game, things can change, in terms of game design but also in terms of software architecture. After we got into Beta, we wanted some additional time to clean some things up that had been there since forever, or things that we wanted to re-factor. While there is always more tech debt to be repaid, we made a ton of progress on doing so with a variety of systems and mechanics. For the past week or so, we’ve been working on delivering a new siege-based scenario for you folks to play in the next year. We’ve been running around, firing siege weapons (note the plural) and dropping explosive little packages of Xmas joy around the Builder Brigade-built keep. So, say goodbye to the old castle models: Going forward, we will be using more C.U.B.E.-built structures in the game! Server stability continued to be excellent overall. We might not be the fastest team in the history of the industry, but the stability of our servers has continued to make us proud. Even at this stage, we can still throw tons of ARCs/Bots at our servers, and usually they don’t go running home crying for their mommas! We’ve had lots of unstable build tests (usually when we are adding a lot of new things), but even those have usually been crash-free. This will be a continued point of emphasis for us as we start the new year. We said we needed to staff up some more, and we did. In the last six months, we’ve added three senior programmers to the team (a tools programmer and two gameplay engineers) and hopefully we have more incoming early next year! We also added one of the most experienced Customer Service/QA leads in the industry, who will be working as a tech producer for us.

Now, I could continue to add things to the list, but when you look at just those items and think about how CSE had only about a dozen engineers this past spring, and less than thirty people total, that’s quite the list. Especially when that team stated during their Kickstarter campaign that they wanted to build their own engine to drive the 500-person battles. Oh, I say “500-person” not to suggest that’s all we can handle—we are already past that! I’m just referring to what we said we could do during the Kickstarter, not to what we can handle today, which is a wee bit more than that. And by wee bit, I mean like double that number. 😊



Having said all that, what do I think the new year will hold for CSE? As always, our focus is on delivering Camelot Unchained to our Backers. While this newsletter talks about our board game, and I’m working on some non-Camelot Unchained themed graphic novels (as I have been doing for years), the entire engineering team is focused only on the game, C.U.B.E., and our engine. This is a promise I made to you, our Backers, and I always keep my promises.



In terms of specifics, expect to be jumping into our new siege scenario as the new year dawns. There you’ll see the first, and definitely an embryonic, sample of what sieges will be like by Beta 2, let alone once we go LIVE. You’ll see the expected, albeit tropish, siege weapons firing on Backer-built buildings, and you’ll see the buildings taking damage and collapsing in real-time. As we move through January, you’ll see more abilities added to the game, and after that, the return of ability crafting.



As a wintery blanket descends on much of the world, you’ll see graphical changes to the game, as Characters 2.0 hits the builds, and we can begin to add both code and art that takes advantage of the largess afforded by the move to a 64-bit client. And as the temperatures continue to drop, so will classes, and our game will continue to get closer to resembling a real, honest-to-goodness game. After that, more siege stuff, and a Battle Royale game with Lootcrates will also be added, to improve immersion/sense of accomplishment to your in-game experience!



Just kidding, wanted to see who was still paying attention here. 😊



Well, I was just kidding about the Battle Royale game, but I wasn’t kidding about the additional siege stuff. We have a lot of interesting things coming, some of which I believe will be both unexpected and fun for our players. Expect changes to C.U.B.E. and lots of other things as we move through the winter and into the spring. While our engine isn’t yet a “fully armed and operational Battle Station,” we will continue to invest more in making the game and less on building the engine, especially if we can get some additional engineers on the team.



Having said all of that, I want to extend, as usual, my thanks to our team at City State Entertainment, our generous and wonderfully patient Backers, our teams of volunteers at the Builder’s Brigade, Mod Squad, Community Mods, and other helpful people who have put up with our delays, re-factoring, fixes, mistakes, moments of glory, epic faceplants, and other things over this past year. It’s been a tough and exciting year, and we are ending it the way I hoped we would: strong, unbowed, and blowing up stuff (on purpose) in our siege scenario.



With that, and from everybody at CSE to everybody who reads this, Backer or not, friend or even enemy, we wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a very Happy New Year.



-Mark Final Note -by Max Porter Hope you enjoyed this issue of Unveiled! It’s a nice round number fifty! That’s a lot of newsletters, and I’ve enjoyed putting together each and every one for you. Here at the end of the year, it’s my absolute pleasure to say I’m looking forward to another year of working on these wonderful games, and to talking to all of you, our awesome Community. That’s all for now, so until next year -- Max out!

