Greetings and welcome to the very first issue of the Intrepid Informer!
What is the Intrepid Informer you ask? Well, it's a regularly written feature that is about to become a staple of CoH community life!
The fact of the matter is that wee have awesome developers working on an amazing game with nearly 7 years worth of history and much more content to come. That means we have a tremendous amount of information that we can dig deeper into and share with you, our players. This is where the Intrepid Informer comes in!. It's a way for us to share exciting pieces of information about not only the game but about what goes on behind the scenes at Paragon and a whole lot more!
One week the Intrepid Informer may focus on one of our developers so that you can get to know him/her a little bit better, while the next issue of the Informer might showcase a feature of the game and give you a bit of background on its design and conception. You never know what you might get!
Really, it's all about us sharing information so you can paint a clearer picture of the game and the people behind it.
Since a hot topic of the moment seems to be the recently announced Animal Pack, what better way to start this new written feature than with a little bit of background information on its conception, courtesy of Eric Johnsen, one of Paragon's awesome Producers whom some of you will recall from our panel at PAX Prime in 2010!
Without further ado, and with a couple of decidedly feathery and hairy images, welcome to the very first issue of the Intrepid Informer!
Intrepid Informer: A Paragon Periodical Issue #1 - The Animal Pack! By Eric Johnsen, Producer
The Animal Pack was really born from the discussion of what we should do for the Mutant pack. We knew players were looking for some anthropomorphic costume pieces, but we didn't really feel that the Mutant pack was the place to put them. As we started exploring themes for the Mutant pack we realized that Animals really deserved their own pack and that Mutants should stand on their own.
So when we started doing concept exploration for the Animal Pack we started broad (as we often do when we're considering themes for booster packs) and slowly refined the scope. Eventually we narrowed down what we wanted to do to a few different themes and objectives.
We wanted players to be able to create a legitimate Minotaur model. We already had the Cimerora costume pieces, so it seemed like a short jaunt to getting a full Minotaur costume in there. With that in mind we decided to build the Minotaur head and tail.
We wanted players to be able to create a more classic Werewolf model, but felt that the wolf tail we introduced with the Mutant Pack was a little too nice (for lack of a better term). So we built out the wolf heads and new wolf tail, which is a bit more ragged than the one introduced in the Mutant Pack.
So we have cows and wolves, what else do we need, seriously, bang, done, right?
Ok, maybe not, we figured our canine friendly players would be happy with the Wolf parts, but you can’t have dogs without cats now, can you? So we pulled a lot of reference for the various big cats, and put together a collection of fur textures, big cat patterns and the like (which really came out great), as well as feet. Of course, then I read the forums and saw some of the more esoteric requests for things like house cat patterns. Sadly that realization came a little late, so hopefully you folks will be cool with big cats for the time being. Maybe we’ll look into an SPCA pack later. Putting the cats together created a huge number of variations and added a lot of bulk to the pack (I’ll get back to this later).
Lastly, we knew that Ghost Falcon would kill us if we didn’t include some bird parts (we also suspected some of you might want them based upon the forum chatter). So we put together a solid bird head as a base, a few beak variations and some bird feet, which in combination with the various wings will allow players to create some very solid anthropomorphic bird costumes.
That’s it, right?
Not quite! One of our other objectives was to provide an alternative to Ninja Run, which seems to be pretty popular. So we introduced a Beast Run travel power in the pack, which may or may not allow players to run on all fours with the same movement attributes as Ninja Run.
Auras and Costume Change emotes you say? Very well then! We put together two flavors of costume change emotes involving fur and feathers either bursting out from the character or as a result of excessive spinning. We also came up with a couple new auras, but we’ll let you check out the pack to determine what those are (I’ve spoiled pretty much everything else in the pack at this point).
I will also attempt to defuse at least one set of questions with a brief mention that we did not include everything that had concept attached to it in the pack. As I said, in building the schedule for the cat pieces we got a lot of costume piece variations, this led to one set of concepts getting cut and folded into what we expect will be another pack at some point in the future (we’ll let you speculate on that one).
All of this is brought to you by our newest character artist, Eric Chyn, with Jay and Cheryl consulting (they are hard at work on other Fabulous™ projects).
There you go. Everything there is to tell about the Animal Pack and maybe even a little more! Not bad for the first issue of the Intrepid Informer, eh?
Greetings and welcome to the very first issue of the Intrepid Informer!
What is the Intrepid Informer you ask? Well, it's a regularly written feature that is about to become a staple of CoH community life!
The fact of the matter is that wee have awesome developers working on an amazing game with nearly 7 years worth of history and much more content to come. That means we have a tremendous amount of information that we can dig deeper into and share with you, our players. This is where the Intrepid Informer comes in!. It's a way for us to share exciting pieces of information about not only the game but about what goes on behind the scenes at Paragon and a whole lot more!
One week the Intrepid Informer may focus on one of our developers so that you can get to know him/her a little bit better, while the next issue of the Informer might showcase a feature of the game and give you a bit of background on its design and conception. You never know what you might get!
Really, it's all about us sharing information so you can paint a clearer picture of the game and the people behind it.
Since a hot topic of the moment seems to be the recently announced Animal Pack, what better way to start this new written feature than with a little bit of background information on its conception, courtesy of Eric Johnsen, one of Paragon's awesome Producers whom some of you will recall from our panel at PAX Prime in 2010!
Without further ado, and with a couple of decidedly feathery and hairy images, welcome to the very first issue of the Intrepid Informer!
Intrepid Informer: A Paragon Periodical Issue #1 - The Animal Pack!
By Eric Johnsen, Producer
The Animal Pack was really born from the discussion of what we should do for the Mutant pack. We knew players were looking for some anthropomorphic costume pieces, but we didn't really feel that the Mutant pack was the place to put them. As we started exploring themes for the Mutant pack we realized that Animals really deserved their own pack and that Mutants should stand on their own.
So when we started doing concept exploration for the Animal Pack we started broad (as we often do when we're considering themes for booster packs) and slowly refined the scope. Eventually we narrowed down what we wanted to do to a few different themes and objectives.
We wanted players to be able to create a legitimate Minotaur model. We already had the Cimerora costume pieces, so it seemed like a short jaunt to getting a full Minotaur costume in there. With that in mind we decided to build the Minotaur head and tail.
We wanted players to be able to create a more classic Werewolf model, but felt that the wolf tail we introduced with the Mutant Pack was a little too nice (for lack of a better term). So we built out the wolf heads and new wolf tail, which is a bit more ragged than the one introduced in the Mutant Pack.
So we have cows and wolves, what else do we need, seriously, bang, done, right?
Ok, maybe not, we figured our canine friendly players would be happy with the Wolf parts, but you can’t have dogs without cats now, can you? So we pulled a lot of reference for the various big cats, and put together a collection of fur textures, big cat patterns and the like (which really came out great), as well as feet. Of course, then I read the forums and saw some of the more esoteric requests for things like house cat patterns. Sadly that realization came a little late, so hopefully you folks will be cool with big cats for the time being. Maybe we’ll look into an SPCA pack later. Putting the cats together created a huge number of variations and added a lot of bulk to the pack (I’ll get back to this later).
Lastly, we knew that Ghost Falcon would kill us if we didn’t include some bird parts (we also suspected some of you might want them based upon the forum chatter). So we put together a solid bird head as a base, a few beak variations and some bird feet, which in combination with the various wings will allow players to create some very solid anthropomorphic bird costumes.
That’s it, right?
Not quite! One of our other objectives was to provide an alternative to Ninja Run, which seems to be pretty popular. So we introduced a Beast Run travel power in the pack, which may or may not allow players to run on all fours with the same movement attributes as Ninja Run.
Auras and Costume Change emotes you say? Very well then! We put together two flavors of costume change emotes involving fur and feathers either bursting out from the character or as a result of excessive spinning. We also came up with a couple new auras, but we’ll let you check out the pack to determine what those are (I’ve spoiled pretty much everything else in the pack at this point).
I will also attempt to defuse at least one set of questions with a brief mention that we did not include everything that had concept attached to it in the pack. As I said, in building the schedule for the cat pieces we got a lot of costume piece variations, this led to one set of concepts getting cut and folded into what we expect will be another pack at some point in the future (we’ll let you speculate on that one).
All of this is brought to you by our newest character artist, Eric Chyn, with Jay and Cheryl consulting (they are hard at work on other Fabulous™ projects).
There you go. Everything there is to tell about the Animal Pack and maybe even a little more! Not bad for the first issue of the Intrepid Informer, eh?
Eric Johnsen
Producer
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