I love being both lead designer and CEO sometimes (other times I wish there were two of me to fill what are really two full-time roles).
As I mentioned a week ago, I decided to hold a contest for Earth Eternal where we take submissions from users out of which we’ll pick the 14th race for Earth Eternal. We got a few hundred submissions and as I went through them realized that there were a lot of requests for reptiles and amphibians. There were also a few submissions for boars, and as any long-time player of Achaea knows, I love boars. There’s an 800 pound big black boar roaming around the Saoghal Valley that is loyal to me, in fact. Even though I’m not really visibly active in Achaea any more (though I’m there a lot invisible to all but the producers), woe be to the player that slays my boar! He’s even item/NPC #17, which is my favorite number. (All items/NPCs have a number unique to themselves in our and many other text MUDs.)
Anyway, obviously I had to give boars some love but all of our current races in EE are mammals and birds. So, I massaged the budget a bit and worked in room for three new races, putting us at 16 races for release. I love being both the lead designer and the CEO sometimes! (Other times I wish there were actually two people doing those two basically full-time roles rather than just one.) The new races are: The Anura (frog-people), the Tuskians (boar-people), and the Lisians (gecko/lizard-people).
I’m pretty psyched to have sixteen races though we’ve had to make a lot of sacrifices in terms of individuality of the races to make that possible. All of our males and all of our females use the same body structure for instance, and all PCs share the same skeleton. The only differences in geometry between characters are relatively small differences between male and female, and then head, hands, feet, ears, and tail can be different, though anything that’s a rigid add-on like horns for the Harts (stag-people) aren’t a problem to do. That way we preserve UV mapping between characters which reduces our workload in terms of clothing and armor quite a lot.
I think at some point I’ll write a post talking about the trade-offs we’ve had to make to produce EE on such a limited budget and the ways in which we try to disguise the fact that we’ve had to make a trade-off.
3 comments
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April 11th, 2007 at 11:31 am
Kyle
I’ve got a funny story about the boar. way back when ridding went in one of the guild secs in the Runewardens lassoed the boar. It got locked up in the armoury inside the Spire. All the guild secs knew where it was and could get to it but they never took it out. So it was locked in the armoury for actual months and the joke among the guild leadership was they had stolen and locked up the Logos’ boar and seem to have gotten away with it. That was until Pandora of all people found out and took the boar back while yelling at a few people.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Acrune
You should have picked my beaver, would have made this picture so much more amusing to me
April 17th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Craig Bell (Thalion)
Personally I am not a big fan of a large generic selection vs. a smaller unique selection. I always liked Achaea’s races (Even though I think you could have gotten rid of Mhun as a playable race - even though my Character is one!) it has a decent selection of races, each with their own pro’s and con’s which makes every race totally unique and gives you the ability to customize your character to suit your style of play. I wonder, will there be much of a difference between being a Warrior archetype of the Tuskians race and one of the Harts race beside the texture rapped over their slightly different meshes?