Dev Chat Highlights, June 29

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El Topo: Originally was just going to be piles of stuff, but the art team went "We can make this more epic" and started taking a look at all sorts of microscopic things, the in game Devouring Earth characters, and it "just kind of grew organically."

This draws groans from everyone else within earshot.

Chris Gregory (I think was the name said, El Topo is far back and my headset doesn't get any louder) is their environmental artist and he was doing all sorts of experimental stuff with moving fungus-type stuff. One day he was cooking in the kitchen and had some burnt egg stuck on one of his pans and he brought it in to use as a photoreference. The ground texture on the first pick is essentially heavily manipulated burnt egg.

Noble Savage: "I know we've got some super-zoomed in textures of Broccoli somewhere in that level."

El Topo: "Yeah, so if you find yourself salivating while fighting off the hordes..."

Zwill: "Salivating over heavily photoshop altered, mucus-covered burnt eggs. Awesome."


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Zwill is surprised how quickly we got the Ghostbusters reference.

David did the concept art for the whole "City Consumed with Tentacles" thing. They hadn't done a heavily destroyed, rubble-ized city since Boomtown. They wanted to do something amazing with the concept and with the new techniques and technology from Going Rogue.

They wanted to evoke images of epic destruction, with things tilted at crazy angles, the very foundations eaten away from the city and filled with water, big fozzilized tentacle husks sticking up, and a giant red vortex in the sky at night.

El Topo: "There are a variety of places in First Ward, normal city, some of the city that's intact but part of the section that's caving into the water, flooded skyscrapers, some craggy looked areas that have dust blowing through them and tumbleweeds, and a hospital."

Zwill: "The actual variety in the zone is pretty amazing. It's interesting going from the utopian/dystopian nightmare of Imperial City and Neutropolis to seeing the order and this area that was the gem of Cole's empire and seeing what happens when order in Praetoria just decays."

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There is a lot more variety that we'll be seeing in the game besides just the six there.

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El Topo: "There are some powers where the Failed Seers raise up their tentacles up high and present this really neat silhouette."

The developers wanted to make the First Ward villain groups unique and distinctive, and give them their own unique looks and shapes and silhouettes.

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There are more villain groups than just these that are neat looking. "Just the tip of the iceberg. I don't want to give Black Pebble a heart attack."

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Zwill: "And we have a Praetorian Giant Monster, and when I say giant, I mean GIANT!"

"Every once in awhile the Praetorian Hamidon sends out a little excursion to see if it's safe to come out yet."

The Avatar of Hamidon, which we'll face in the Underground Incarnate Trial, is described as "A big honking beast."

So apparently we'll be fighting a big evil goose, guys! Praetorian counterpart to Null the Gull! (Blatant VK lies)

David: "The neat thing about the Devouring Earth is that they can be whatever we want them to be. They're organic and they can grow and mutate and be just as gross as we want them to. So once we get into Praetoria where the story is greyer and darker and scarier what does that mean for the Devoured Earth? These guys aren't just tree guys anymore. They've changed and gotten scarier, and this is a really great opportunity for our team to go to town and really make some terrifying critters to fight."

The Praetorian DE started with the Avatar of Hamidon.

David: "It's not just an evolution of the lore, but what we can do artistically."

The Avatar of Hamidon has some jelly, but also has kind of a dead wood look to him, which was carried over into the Seed of Hamdion, with the jelly and nucleus.

David: "One of our other concept artists came up with the whole burned wood idea. The primal DE are not that scary, they're like nature spirits being all wood and rock and gems and such. So to make them scary we pretty much burn them to start out. Now they're like burned nature Cthulhu whatever."

They will be going into more detail with the Avatar of Hamidon when they start revealing more about the Underground trial.

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Tunnel Rat is responsible for the look of Time Manipulation, she was trying to find a way of not just doing a giant clock, but a visual way to insinuate time passing. So she cam up with a giant spiral. When time speeds up it spins clockwise, and when time slows down it'll spiral counterclockwise.

Finally they make El Topo scoot forward so I can bloody hear him.

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For the new tutorial they wanted to introduce the game, literally, with a big bang.

Freedom is not just a rebranding, they're going back and thinking about what the game looks like from the logo to the art style and part of that was coming up with the modern digital painting style to use throughout the game and the game's marketing. They’re using it in the character creation screen, the comic book, marketing materials, and some surprises coming up.

Alex Ross's artistic painting style in comics was mentioned as an influence.

David: "The thing with using 3D renders is that we can't make them quickly. We can never have enough. But we can draw digital painting assets much quicker and we can get this out to the players on a more regular basis."

Zwill: "And we plan on leveraging this asset into future content, right?"

El Topo: "This is just the beginning."

Zwill: "Just the tip of the iceberg."

Tangent onto where El Topo saying "Bibliotheca" came from. Zwill can't remember, El Topo thinks that trying to remember would ruin the mystery.

Zwill: "A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in bacon."

They don't have images to show for the redesign of Atlas, but they can talk about it.

They now have the technology to go back and make things how it was originally supposed to be.

David: "The original idea for Atlas Park was this futuristic, art deco inspired super-tall city. It's like future tech, old and new swished together. The original technology did a good job selling that, but the new version? We've got the intricacy and the cohesion that we didn't have before."

Zwill: "And we have shrubbery."

David: "Shrubbery helps. Atlas Park is a safe zone; it's a nice clean semi-utopian area, not that different from the Magisterium, really, but a little less totalitarian. But it's nice, it should look nice. And the team has really gone in there with foliage and the plaza redesigns and really brought that to life in a more compelling way."

El Topo: "With the latest technology it's possible to do more, and we also have a lot of recent talent that brings a lot to the table. Like Dave mentioned able to reach that vision that was there before but the technology was not allowing us to reach it."

The plaza was redone and there is more curvature in Atlas Park.

The artists will be available at Comicon to chat with, David will be doing sketches, and Zwill will be having Ustreams from the booth.

We'll be shown a lot of new stuff for the first time at Comicon.

And now we get into questions.

Hopefully these won't be piles upon piles of questions that could be answered by reading the documentation already available like the Facebook Q and A was. :P


Chaos Creator asks "What is your favorite new building?"

El Topo: "Diabolique's tower with the tentacle wrapped around it, and the silhouette and the vortex above it. We've got some great screens of that. Just so cool."

David: "For me it's the Atlas Park stuff. We have a building with a hole in it that you can fly though. And the elevators. And all these new things that we've added to it just bring it to life for me."


Infamous Brad asks: "Are some of the new buildings in AP modeled on real buildings in Providence, RI?"

Everyone has a chuckle and Zwill states "I don't think so."


"How are new costume pieces coming along?"

Zwill says they're coming along fine, but they can't talk about them yet.

David: "We're well aware of all the categories with new things that the players want to make, and I think one of the most fun meetings we ever have is "Hey, what should the next thing be?" Which one of these do we tackle next? There are so many cool things in the pipeline that I wish we could talk about but can't."

El Topo: "We look at your suggestions and also try to surprise you."


From Voodoo Girl: "How long did it actually take to revamp Atlas Park?"

David: "It's not simple."

El Topo: "It took some time. There were three artists working on it."

David: "It was pretty close to rebuilding the entire zone from scratch."

Zwill: "It's using a lot of the same geometry but it's touching like every pixel."

El Topo: "The buildings themselves are completely redone. We're talking many, many, many weeks."


"Ping pong paddles for dual blades, please?"

Zwill: "Noted."


"Do you have any plans on revamping some of the NPC's, like Skulls or Hellions?"

General behavior of winking and nudging that seem to state that they have done so.


"Are there any plans to give some costume parts from the new villain groups to the players?"

They are well aware of the interest, but there is nothing they can talk about. David is stroking an invisible goatee and grinning.


"Is the Atlas revamp going to be reflected in mission maps?"

David: "I don't know if we should answer that right now."

Zwill: "We'll see if we can find an answer to that."

I could've sworn mention was made of updating the Mayhem and Safeguard missions, but leaving the Meteor in Atlas map alone somewhere on the boards.


"Will our characters ever actually get fingers?"

Much chuckling over the question.

Zwill: "Kind of an interesting story, we were talking about ideas for emotes that we could put into the game, and somebody had brought up the joke of doing an 80's themed booster pack and I'm like "Absolutely! Do the hairband and like that, that would be awesome!" and that was based off of a player joke that I'm not really sure how they got there, but somehow it had something to do with my character description. I was like if we made this amazing 80's themed booster pack we could put a hairband in there and one of the emotes could be throw the horns up. *makes heavy metal/longhorns hand sign* And Positron was like "That's a great idea!" *holds up flat hands*."

David: "Every once in awhile we have a circle the wagons "What can we do?" tech meeting, and everyone wants to improve the game in little ways like that and we do things like that from time to time. It wasn't that long ago that we brought out Ultra Mode and drastically improved the look of the game. That'll happen again. We'll see what's next."


"Do you have plans on revamping other zones?"

It's something that has been discussed, but there is nothing concrete that they can talk about right now.


Release the Weasel: "Do all the Time Manipulation powers look as big and swirly as the screens we've seen so far?"

It varies from power to power.

It's customizable; we don't have to have the default imagery.

It looks better in marketing if they use the most powerful, epic-looking one.

They vary depending on the intensity of the power.


"Will we ever see new cars in game?"

David: "I would love to kind of sketch up (dunno what was said here) some new cars and maybe a bus. For all of our bus stops."

Zwill: "I've noticed we have a ton of bus stops, and I guess that bus is just perpetually late. That or it's an invisible bus."

David: "(reading the chat) Yup, gas stations. These are all on our wish list."

El Topo: "Well there's the one..."

David: "The one destroyed gas station that appears twice in Praetoria. There's no clean, undestroyed version of it."

Zwill: "Well, have you BEEN to a gas station lately?"


"Will you ever finish the construction?"

Zwill: "No! NO! It's a city, a growing, constantly growing city! Ever changing! All that good stuff!"


"Putting an Enriche plant in Praetoria?"

Zwill: "Interesting idea."

David: "There are some things we've done recently to keep the cities feeling alive and revamped and changing. I really like that way that when you come out of the tutorial Atlas Park is not just different in an art sense but in an atmospheric sense. With the squads of NPC's running around and all talking about it. I like how we’re keeping things consistant for you as a player. New billboards, things like that, going in to keep things fresh."

Zwill: "All the NPC's have new dialog in chat that they talk about the current happenings in Paragon City."


Dave67 "Sorry, I meant the construction sites south of the arena in Port Oakes. Will that ever be finished?"

Zwill: "You should ask Lord Recluse. I'm pretty sure he's got that tied up in paperwork."


"How are you finding working with the player art coming into the game on billboards and things like that?"

David: "The first time we did this was an art contest for Going Rogue. The ideas that came back were so cleaver we barely had to touch it before putting it in the game. There was one, the Unity poster that came out so well we used it in our marketing. So having such a good experience on that we took a look at Atlas Park and opened it up to players with absolutely no restrictions. With the new update players are just starting to see them around the city and see how many there are."

El Topo: "I come from a console background, CoH is the first non-console thing I've worked on. And it's just unheard of for console games to be using things from their players. An MMO can do that and we have a passionate community. And I think that's just awesome."

Zwill: "And our players have such a great wealth of knowledge about our game too. We try our best to get everything exactly right but sometimes we don't get every detail exactly right, but many times our players have things that they can suggest that happen to work better. For example the recent incorporation of Astral Christy and Empyrean Michael. We had some suggestions for a costume revamp and we incorporated those changes in there."

El Topo: "It was a great player suggestion we took to heart. It looked fantastic and most of the work was already done."

Quote:

Originally Posted by reiella Until I see something that states to the contrary, going to assume VK is right .

Great work!

Thanks for posting this!

Thanks for your time in posting this, can't wait to see the new low-level content...getting trial burnout at the moment.

Wait, what? I thought the Dev chat was tomorrow! Grrr! Argh! Missed it!

Thanks for posting a transcript though!

I wonder what would happen if the Devouring Earth (Primal or Praetorian) tried absorbing a Shivan. Or vise-versa. Hmmm...

Thanks for posting this!

I'm keen to see Praetoria's version of the Devouring Earth!

Watched the recording last night and was REALLY chuffed for David to mention the iCon billboard I made, really pleased he enjoyed that one!

Nice work! How many times did you have to rewatch it to get all this typed up?

Thank you for doing this.

Holy M-Rated Sister Psyche!!!!!!!!!111!!!!





**For all you people out there who make fun of my toons battle panties, now you know it's how CoX wanted me to make her! I now feel completely validified in my battle costume of choice**

They're not really going to make downing Praetorian Hamidon as trivial as i21.5 or i22, are they? It's just some kind of "bud" of Hamidon, right?

I mean, yeah, Primal Hamidon is sort of a joke now, but Praetorian Hamidon is supposed to be the thing that an entire world cowers before. Cole didn't contain Hamidon, he just hid behind a barrier.

I guess I'm wondering if they have also updated the futuristic atlas park in the villain missions, lrsf and recluses victory. They will need the new version there too.

Thanks for the write-up

Thanks, I missed yesterday!

War Witch did mention in one of last week's ustreams that they were updating the Atlas safeguard/mayhem maps, but not Recluse's Victory.

I hope those new female costume pieces are available to players this time and not npc exclusive again.