Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #49 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet +1 Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



It’s the end of November, and we’re getting deep into the holiday season here in the US. If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope it was a great one, full of family, friends, and delicious food! Here at the East Coast office of City State Entertainment®, the cold of winter is definitely upon us. Nevertheless (do I make this joke every year?), things continue to heat up for the game’s development!



It’s been another highly productive month for the development of Camelot Unchained®. If there was a theme for this month, it was a sense of being on the cusp (or in the process) of landing a bunch of different awesome chunks of the game, from some really important bits of code (check out our news posts mentioning the conversion to 64-bit!) to design and art in the process of making big strides forward. You can read about those things in this newsletter! Check Ben’s Dose of Design on class prototype design and Tyler’s Art It Up article on the Characters 2.0 changes for more details on our progress.



We are super focused on landing some large pieces of the game, so we’re not as focused on streaming as we have been in the past, but we still consider it our responsibility to continue to be open and honest with our Backers. For your viewing pleasure, we continue to put up raw, unedited, and unrehearsed 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, especially as Beta 1 ramps up! 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.



The holidays give us all good feelings, but one of the best feelings for me is to look back at the month and put together this newsletter for you folks! I really think you’ll like this month’s articles, updates, and art. Also, remember to click on the “view this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole thing! Thanks for your interest and support at all times of year, and please enjoy this, the forty-ninth issue of Unveiled. 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 equipment slots, fictional languages, and our in-process 64-bit conversion! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Class Prototype Design

Quite a long time ago, we here at CSE did a series of class reveals, presenting the basic concepts of several classes for each Realm. These initial concepts presented some of the lore and theming behind each class, as well as a few example ability components, plus Banes and Boons, to provide a general feel for the types of things each class will eventually be able to do. As part of starting the first phase of Beta testing for CU, we’ve already expanded a little upon these initial concepts for a few of our classes, using the Fighter, Archer, and Healer archetypes and making early versions of each playable in the game. Now that we’re a little further along into our Beta 1 phase of testing, we’re looking to build on what we’ve seen in initial testing for the classes we already have in the game, as well as add new ones that haven’t yet been implemented.



In order to add a new class to the game for the first time, we put together a basic prototype. Rather than fully design in abstract all of the precise details for everything a class will be able to use all at once, we instead start with only a basic set of core features. Classes tend to change over the course of testing, and a lot of work would be wasted if we started out with more features. Instead, it’s better for us to plan to discover what about the class works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments. Since we start with designing a relatively small set of features for a class, we don’t need to do a lot of work if we decide it all has to change based on our initial testing results. This lets us to stay agile with our class changes, allowing us to try out different options and figure out what works in the shortest reasonable amount of time.



Even a basic prototype for a class is still a lot of work to design and build. To get to that point, we have to look back at what we already have as well as forward to our future plans. Since we have some documentation from when we first assembled our class reveals, we can use that as a good initial reference. We also have some classes already in the game, so we can draw some conclusions on how those prototype classes perform, and can think about what types of existing features we could potentially reuse to make new ones.



One important consideration is the list of future classes we will eventually have in the game. While the current list of future classes we have doesn’t mean we won’t add even more classes in the future, we can at least make sure to prevent overlap with those we already have planned. Each class needs to be unique and interesting, and we also try to make sure each Realm is balanced for the capabilities their set of classes will have. There are also important things each Realm needs to have access to--such as particular damage types--although these capabilities can come from a variety of archetypes, depending on the Realm.



Another factor we have to take into consideration when designing new class prototypes is the current state of the ability system. Now that we’ve started Beta 1 testing, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t in our current process. Using that information, programmers have been working on making improvements to the ability system itself, as well as to the editor, which allows us to implement new classes with their ability components and Banes and Boons. We still want to keep our initial class prototypes small in scope, in order to iterate on them quickly, but if we want systemic changes we’ll need a wider range of examples that show what we want classes in CU to eventually be able to do. So, at the present time, we’ve been delving a bit deeper into class mechanics than would usually be necessary for a basic class prototype. More advanced feature examples, and an extended list of possible features, will help inform programmers of some of the general capabilities of the ability system itself. This will be important later on, in order to support the full version of each class that we are gradually working toward.



Mage classes are still getting most of our focus for the immediate future, though we’re also looking at adding more ability components for the Fighter, Healer, and Archer classes that are already playable in the game. Mages will be the first new classes implemented using our new editor, but once the first prototype for each Mage class is in, we should have a clear path forward to improve our new tools and get even more basic class prototypes into the game. As time and testing go on, these initial prototypes will undergo changes, and gradually gain more features, building them out toward becoming ready for the launch of the game.



Of course, the classes will never be truly ‘finished,’ as we will continue to work on class balancing and new features long after CU has launched. A big part of this process is testing and feedback, so we hope many of you will continue to join us in our ongoing testing, and let us know what you think of the state of your favorite class so far. Just remember that we still have a long way to go, and a lot more good things will be coming as soon as we can get them ready. Thanks, as always, for your continued support, and we look forward to sharing more with you as work on CU continues. Developer Quote “We plan on ramping up the visuals a lot before launch. Our focus still has to be on large-scale battles, but with the right graphic settings and engine support, I think we are going to surprise a lot of people with how the game looks.” -- Mark Jacobs Art It Up -by Tyler Rockwell A couple of months back, I wrote a small article about changes we’d been making to the style of the game’s animations and planned improvements to better support timing variation of abilities. This month, I want to delve into the ongoing work to update character art.



For those of you who may have missed some of our live streams where I’ve talked about this work, you may be wondering: Why now, and what does this work get us down the road? Well, we didn’t work on this prior to this point because doing all this work would have further delayed Beta, and was less important than getting more testing on the combat and gameplay that the beginning of Beta 1 would deliver. Furthermore, I don’t want to go too far afield before our tech is updated, making lots of assets that inherit the shortcomings of the previous work!



When we update our art and processes, we also create a smoother art pipeline by fixing known issues, and importantly, we broaden the scope of knowledge amongst the artists. We’re also better prepared to make more assets and use outsourcing. To describe this with a metaphor, think of it like a bike race. We’ve removed obstacles, smoothed out the track, and will be able to ride the race with our eyes (almost) closed.



Once this work is complete, we can more confidently move on to create art assets for the various races of CU, as well as more armor and weapons! We’ll also begin looking at the work involved in tinting, as well as how crafting can affect the visuals of armor. Fun stuff!



Our changes and improvements to the character art cover several areas:



1. Improvements to overall proportions of our humans. 2. Topology (how the geometry is laid out) improvements to the nude and armor meshes (geometry) to make better use of less polys and improve how the mesh deforms when animated. 3. Updated UV sheet (texture layout) to improve visual fidelity and support future shader improvements for things like hair, fur, or items that may need a more expensive shader. 4. Support for artist created LODs. (Level of detail - how we reduce assets based on distance.) 5. Updates to the main Human male skeleton per proportion changes and to improve the animation process. Let me explain how this all works together. Each race that is physically different from another gets its own skeleton. Our new skeleton will be the de facto Human moving forward. The old skeleton will be updated to be the new Luchorpán skeleton. This re-uses the work we’ve already done, and gets us Luchorpán that will look even more different than our new Humans.



Each of those skeletons drives the meshes, whether nude, armored, capes, etc. Each base character is roughly made up of twenty parts, such as upper arm, lower arm, hand, pauldron, chest, neck, face, head, and so on. These parts determine the armor parts that players are putting on their characters. These pieces, depending on how the art is authored, can take one or multiple slots on the player’s paper doll.



Currently, we have a light, medium, and heavy-themed set of gear for each Realm, plus three NPC outfits (already hanging out in each home zone.), plus six nude base meshes representing the characters without armor. When you equip armor, you’re actually swapping out parts. For example, if you equip a glove, your nude hand model will be replaced by a gloved hand model. Each armor set is built as if on our male character. We then “femalize” those armor parts to fit to the female models. We make minor changes to “Luchorpanize” the gear as well. So essentially, we have two sets of each of our armors. All of this means we’re updating almost 700 individual assets!



On top of that, we’re going to be duplicating those parts, three times apiece, to support artist created LODs of the characters. I’m fairly excited about this, because it’s a win-win! Procedural decimation, which we do now, only gets us so much, and is only as good as the code supporting it. I’m not downplaying the code: it’s difficult code, requiring lots of iterations to work successfully with all the different character geo we may be throwing at it. On the art side, however, it’s a fairly quick process to LOD the art assets.



Doing the LOD work by hand lets the artists decide what info is more important than others, so we get a more accurate LOD based on the original model. You can see this in the above LOD image. We’ve also discovered we can cull out way more geo than we are now and still retain good-looking characters over the long draw distances our game supports. That means better frame rate in the game, particularly in large-scale battles!



Beyond this update to the existing assets, we’re going to experiment with higher-poly characters up close. This would be for when your character is taking up the full screen, such as when you’re admiring your new gear! Most of the time, players are running around in game with the camera 10-20 meters away. At that distance, we’ll drop out a lot of that extra geo, as you won’t even be able to see it. This means we’ll have better-looking characters up close that are more performant at distance. This last higher res version may or may not happen, depending on testing, but so far I’m still confident it’s something we’ll be able to support, unless it degrades gameplay in large battles.



So where are we at now? I’m pleased to say that our artists have been churning through all this work faster than I expected. I’ve been trying to clear the road as they go, and will soon help out with the last bits, getting everything imported into our database and set up in game. I’m hoping, to use the phrase I’ve been using in the office, that we’ll be heaving this giant bag of assets over the fence and into game shortly. (This also includes all the animations, which are being updated to work with the new skeleton and meshes!)



The first drop will most likely include the first pass of the majority of these assets. This will give us an opportunity to vet all the work and start polishing and fixing issues. We’ll also be able to go back and get some of the tertiary animations updated, like fidgets and unique deaths. As we work on that, we will also update the models, later, with their new LODs, once the engineering work is done.



The scope of all this work was initially daunting, but thanks to the talents of our artists, we’ve hit few snags and churned through the work at a rapid pace! Big thanks are due to our determined crew. Now let’s heave all this stuff over the fence so we can start making new races and equipment!



-t Final Note -by Max Porter Hope you enjoyed this issue of Unveiled! It is always a blast to put this newsletter together for you all. Before you go, allow me to show off a last few images of a brilliant construction in our building system. Here we have a fortress by the Backer known as Pimya (thanks to Brian for arranging for the images!):











Okay, that's all for this issue! It was great fun as usual to put this newsletter together for you folks, and I wish you happy testing. Until next time! -- Max

