This week's Camelot Unchained newsletter has arrived, this time with a pretty cool article called "Putting the Pieces Together" In it, Ben Pielstick writes about seemingly large jumps in the development of the game that are actually the result of weeks, or even months, of behind-the-scenes development. That is the place Camelot Unchained is in at the moment, with some big pieces that have all come together and have been integrated into the game, seemingly a HUGE LEAP of progress.
Characters 2.0 "dramatically changes how characters are built and greatly improves how they look".
We learned a lot of lessons from our Beta 1 characters. As our wish list of things we wanted to do even better grew, it became clear that a large rework to the fundamentals of characters could provide a huge boost; both in visual quality and an improvement to the workflow needed to add future characters and equipment items to the game. This is where “Characters 2.0” started, and now that it is finally making its way into testing, all the current characters are suddenly looking much better, even though the work to make this happen has been in progress largely behind the scenes for quite a while.
The Ability System is another of the features that has been brewing in the background, but is now making it into the game. "Abilities are one of the most difficult parts of making video games." Over time, the reworked ability system has provided "a new way for us to author abilities and a faster path to expanding on the ability system in order to do all the new things we will need to get more classes into the game faster and with fewer bugs."
Once these changes finally come together, however, it will open up a huge range of new possibilities, and a lot of new content to be created. Once everything is ready, new playable races and classes, and new armor and weapons, will start to be added at a much more rapid pace than had been possible while these support systems were undergoing significant changes. It is always an exciting time seeing pieces come together so that work can shift from making the game work to making the game fun. We look forward to sharing more with you as these new features are put to use, moving the game forward toward our next phase of testing.
The newsletter also covers other topics including:
- building a battle
- the current "State of the Build"
- "hot topics" from the forum
- a brief not from Max Porter
Check out the full Camelot Unchained newsletter.
