Just finished setting up a page on the Song Dominion, the second of the player-inhabited civilizations we’ve announced!
You’re probably wondering what a player-inhabited civilization means in practical terms. If you’ve played our existing MUDs, they all have some version of player civilizations, usually expressed as cities or city-states. These are initially admin-created areas with player-run governments that exercise control over those areas. They’re the most important of the types of player organizations in our fantasy MUDs, and there are only a handful in any single game, since we want some player density in them.
Obviously, we’re going to have player civs in Starmourn (see the first line of this post!), but how they’ll be expressed will differ a bit from our existing games. You’re going to have to wait to find out how, but one thing we’re going to be experimenting with is a civilization that is basically for people who don’t want to deal with other players telling them what to do. In other words, though it – Scatterhome – will be a player civilization, it won’t really be ‘run’ by players, since that entails having control over your fellow players, which has both pluses and minuses.
I suspect it’ll end up either being an immensely popular option or a big failure, without much room in between. We’ll have to wait and see, though of course if the experiment is a failure it’s not too hard to fix.
Song City.
Here’s a composite of our various player races for use as desktop/laptop backgrounds. Enjoy!
Just right-click (Windows) or click-and-hold (Mac) then save the image. If you’re not sure which one to use, just try the first one.
For 1920×1080, 1368×768, and other 16:9 aspect ratios.
For 1920×1200, 1280×800, and other 1.6 aspect ratio monitors.
For 4k monitors.
Today we announced the Jin, our 12th and final player race in Starmourn.
Female Jin soldier.
You can read all about them on the Jin page. I think you’re going to enjoy them!
I thought I’d share the initial concept art sketches that our artist did for the Jin too. In this case I ended up liking #3 on the female one well enough that I used that all bit itself, whereas the male is basically #1 with the pose of #3.
Jin male sketches
I was stuck on a plane for awhile yesterday, so watched the new Independence Day. It’s the kind of movie I’d probably only choose to watch when I’m a prisoner in a metal tube. I mean, it wasn’t just bad, like the first one – it was terrible. I’m not sure there was a single original idea in the entire movie. I mean, throw me a bone, Roland. Give me something that is at least vaguely new.
Warning: Spoilers below!
Thor’s little brother, Liam Hemsworth, does some stuff.
Instead we got a rehash of the first movie, except this time, the invading ship is a lot bigger than last time and, they get help from a deus ex mach….sorry, another alien race that has ‘gone fully virtual’ and whose only purpose appeared to be to lure the alien invader queen to it so the humans could kill said queen. Nevermind that this new alien informs us that nobody has ever killed one of these queens. Jeff Goldblum can do it!
Oh wait, no he can’t. Despite detonating a bunch of “cold fusion bombs” on it, it survives, exactly like how the ship in the first movie survived being nuked. Although, why they’d use a cold fusion bomb, I don’t know. The entire point of cold fusion is that it produces a sustained nuclear reaction without exploding, which is literally the thing people trying to solve cold fusion are trying to solve for.
No, the cold fusion bombs don’t kill it, but do kill the ship it’s in. It then turns into a monster pic with this huge queen running about smacking things until Bill Pullman’s (the President from the first one) daughter shoots it a few times with her fighter craft and penetrates the shield that these supposedly mega-powerful “cold fusion” bombs couldn’t.
I should have just continued watching Coming to America, which you can never go wrong with, despite its total lack of science fiction. Their buns have no seeds.
Darth Vader is in Coming to America, which validates its sci-fi connection.
Are you guys watching Westworld on HBO? If not, go do it. Find a way to watch it! It’s fantastic, and one of my favorite things about it is how unbelievably similar to designing and running a MUD or MMO the show is.
Westworld
For those unfamiliar, the tl;dr is that customers come to this fake world populated by entities indistinguishable (mostly) from real people. They’re some kind of organic-digital combo that exist in this fairly vast area based on a fictionalized and dramatic version of the American Old West. Cowboys, prostitutes, gun fights, treasure hunts, etc.
Many of these NPCs (non-player characters) are the exact equivalent of well-done quest-givers in a MUD or MMO. Of course, they don’t have big exclamation points over their heads (and neither do NPCs in Iron Realms games) but many of them are explicitly designed to involve the customers in storylines.
I don’t want to talk specifics and spoil anything for you, but there’s a moment in the first episode where a customer basically ruins a storyline by just deciding to start killing. It was by no means intentionally funny, but I was almost rolling on the floor. We had this big story-based event in Achaea once based on contact with an alien race. We had some fun diplomacy going, with players and NPCs trying to suss each other out….when, predictably, someone came along and just started killing the aliens.
Anyway, go watch it!
We revealed the Krona player race today – a somewhat strange-looking race of belligerent show-offs.
Krona male star kith wielder.
A little behind-the-scenes fun fact about them: This isn’t what they originally looked like, at all, and we redid them to be more interesting.
Here’s how the player race process typically works, though this process gets broken or things get done in different orders occasionally:
- I come up with a concept for a race, inspired by whatever happens to inspire me at that time.
- I, and with a couple of the races our head builder Laura, then design the the specifics about the race’s personality, culture, and so on. All that info you see on the race pages.
- Now it’s time to get our concept artist involved, who lives in Bergamo, Italy. Completely by coincidence I found him a couple years ago for another project only a few months after I happened to have been in Bergamo for the first (and only) time. Beautiful city! Anyway, I’ll send him instructions for the race including a high-level physical description, anything special about them, what clothes I’d like them to be wearing, any weapons I want them holding, and so on. I’ll often include examples of existing concept art that I might find inspiring. For instance, I might say, “I like the hair on this image, but I like the body armor on this other image, and the stance on this third image.” It’ll usually take me a couple hours to put that together, but it just depends on how quickly I find inspiration.
- The concept artist then comes back to me with 4-6 sketches that are variations on the instructions I sent. I’ll decide which one I like, or combine parts of them (face on this one, weapon from this one, etc), and get back to him.
Krona concept sketches.
- He then comes back to me with a more finished line sketch. If changes are needed, I have him make them.
- Once that line sketch is approved, it goes back to the artist for coloring. He finishes that, and sends it to me, we make any final small alterations that need making, and boom, new concept art!
With the Krona though, we got to step 6, and it sat for awhile (finished the Krona months ago originally), but I decided that I was a little unhappy with how all of our player races lean pretty heavily towards human
Old, original version of Krona male.
proportions. Now, there are good reasons for this to be generally the case, with the main one being that most people have a hard time identifying with a being that is too far away from human. It’s ok to have these kinds of creatures in a sci-fi universe, and indeed I’d argue you should have quite a few of them, but very few people get into the idea of playing, say, a Rathtar – basically a huge nasty land squid from Star Wars – as a main character in a roleplaying game. From a practical point of view, there are also things about having players playing creatures that don’t have the same basic ‘parts’ as a human somewhat tough when implementing things like combat.
In any case, it was bugging me a little and it also bugged me how human the original Krona looked. So, I went back to the artist and we came up with with what you see as the final Krona, after going through the above process a second time.
We know the Krona won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I feel like there’s going to be a contingent that’s going to revel in playing these guys, and personally, I find them just weird enough to scratch a little bit of that itch for me.
Hope you enjoy learning about them!
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