Within the industrial landscape of Nidaria lies a lush park at its topmost level. Depending on what side of town you are coming from, the park can be accessed by zip cord or air-lift. On this level, you can chat under the shade of the maple trees, check out some rankings (we’ll discuss that another time), or visit the weathered shack known as the “Housing Department”.

This is where the NPC (non-playable character), Cypress, comes into play.

He works (and practically lives) in the Housing Department, the RoS equivalent of the DMV. Even though work is slow, he has to maintain his dreary post all day and night. When he’s not filing papers, he’s either drawing, tinkering, or dreaming of adventure. People started to notice his rare talent, and would ask him to draw things they would encounter on missions. He had an uncanny knack for taking their descriptions and accurately illustrating them on his office note cards. He soon started to frame his drawings in pocket-watch sized lockets, which he fondly referred to as “Sprockets”. When you open one up, the left side displays a drawing while the right side has a brief description of the subject matter.

After a while, he made a name for himself with his Sprockets, and found himself with a fulfilling side job. He soon (after filing all proper paper-work) converted the second window of the Housing Department to be his own personal “Sprocket Booth”. He makes his Sprockets for players by giving them a challenge relating to its content (kill 20 Mimitaur to get the Mimitaur Sprocket). Then when the challenge is complete, he draws up the picture for you from your own experience.

Not only do players collect Sprockets, but so do the NPCs around town (they are pretty popular in Nidaria). Sometimes, if you are lucky and scratch a few backs, an NPC will reward you with a Sprocket from their own collection.

It’s also not rare, yet still unfortunate, that Sprockets get dropped from above and end up hidden on the haze-filled ground below. So, you may stumble upon a Sprocket as you explore the land.

The Sprockets are divided into multiple series, so you could have the “Rooks” Series A, which has 16 sprockets total, but you only have #1,#5, and #9, so keep on collecting. Maybe you are focused on collecting “Lana Westwood” series B, which covers her back-story, and how she got to Nidaria.

This should be an interesting way to introduce the stories, history, myths and other info in bite-sized, collectible amounts. This way, players can slowly connect the dots of the world of Skystone.

Spread the word!

Posted by Tony under Town | Comments » (3 comments) |

Nidaria

(pronounced /naɪˈdɛəriə/)

From the word Cnidaria; the phylum that contains all species of jellyfish, for which the city was modeled after.

Nidaria was cobbled together during the last two decades before the Mimic haze engulfed the land. It can then be said that work on Nidaria commenced around 20 BH (Before the Haze). Its launching marked a new era of life for the inhabitants of Skystone. This dirigible became a beacon of hope, and the last refuge for man as the land below vanished beneath a thick veil of haze.

At the base level is The Boiler which pumps ether-infused steam to the Bell at the top of the city. The Bell maintains buoyancy and support for all its levels, and acts as a tethered hub for all the surrounding houses. When Nidaria first set sail, The Dock was the only level found above The Boiler. Since that time, more levels have been added to accommodate the growing number of refugees from around the land. While most levels are maintained by the Aeronauts, a few have been built up by both Crags and Ferrics. These welcomed additions add cultural flair to this ever growing, sky-bound city.

Nidaria Development

Although much can be said about each individual level of Nidaria, we will have to save that for another time. Instead, let’s explain some background into the development and evolution of this floating city.

From the start of it all, we knew there would need to be a town, and based on the story, it would have to be located up in the sky. Our first step was to create a style guide that would include all visual inspiration needed for the design of the town. It was divided into 4 main categories:

1. Tensile/Fabric Architecture
2. Neo-Victorian Details
3. Rust/Grass Surface
4. Industrial Sub-surface

Draft 1

The first draft had a town scattered across multiple chunks of land connected by bridges and all at the same altitude. The perspective of the scene would all be done from a top-down axiometric viewpoint. This would be a contrast to the 2D platforming levels found during gameplay. After a rendered version of one of the levels was created, the flaws in the design started to appear. The top down perspective became jarring when both vertical and horizontal movement was allowed. Movement between areas was also dull when using only bridges as connection points. On top of all that, houses were almost completely covered by their canvas roofs.

Draft 2

The next redesign had five goals in mind:

1. Give the town a more vertical orientation
2. Multiple town levels reflect the multiple-floor setup for houses
3. Lower camera angle to add more depth to each composition
4. Divided town into smaller chunks to ease loading time
5. Better understanding of how town works and looks from a distance

In this draft, we organized the town completely vertically, with a single elevator that can take you to any section of the city. Each Section was built with an inflated bladder that supported a giant surface cog. We now had a full understanding of how the town looked and worked, and we gave it the name, Nidaria. For this draft, a vanishing point perspective was used to allow the faces of each house to be in full view. We also locked the camera to only pan left and right, allowing vertical movement only when the players traveled between sections.

We were getting warmer with this new town, but there were still a few issues to be dealt with. Although we thought we would be improving movement between sections by giving them elevators, it still resulted in the same dull feeling, maybe even worse than the bridges. Also, the design became a bit monotonous with each section being built off a similar bladder/cog template.

Final Design

First off, thanks to Chris Pasley from Kongregate for convincing us to try one more time to see if we could create an even better town experience for the players. This resulted in reorganizing the town to allow multiple paths to take, and multiple ways to travel between sections. We now have incorporated air-lifts, zip-lines, elevators, stairs and ladders as modes of travel. Each Section is individually designed to reflect who built it, how it was built, and why it was built. We are now very happy with the final product, and hope you will be too when RoS is released on Kongregate.com

.

Spread the word!

Posted by Tony under Town | Comments » (2 comments) |