Chronicles of Spellborn Dev Journal
The Sound of Shorath Mesa
By Matthew Florianz
As you may know, in Spellborn, a map contains several different ambiences all linked to specific areas of the map. A forest for instance, will have a different ambience from the little road next to it, or the field that lies across the road. As the player moves, the sound changes accordingly.
In Shorath Mesa there are several unique locations that will receive their very own ambiences. One of those locations was shown by Environment Artist Frank Bakker here (link: http://www.tcos.com/sbforum/viewtopic.php?t=13151)
It is called the Shrine of Currents and will no doubt play a role in questing. Since I assume the player will not spend a whole lot of time around it I choose to make an ambience that is a bit more musical and abstract than those ambiences found in regular places. As a sort of general rule, places which the players visits more often, sound more natural than those that are rare or unique. A forest will almost always sound like a forest, but for a place like this it is possible to creating something a bit more unexpected.
Shorath Mesa Shrine of Currents
Please keep in mind that where the above screenshot is taken from, you can barely hear the ambience that you just heard. On this location, you would hear a more natural “swamp” ambience (crickets, birds, water lapping). When you move towards the Shrine, the ambience you just heard in the file will become louder and louder.
As described before, the ambience is probably more dreamlike and soft that what you’d probably expect. The sharpest sounds (the thunder) have been dampened and made to sound a bit surreal and dull. Since most temples and shrines in the game are from a time long past the dreamlike atmosphere helps set a mood of them being from another time.
Of course not the entire area of Shorath Mesa is as specific as the previous sound example. Most of the area is simply nature, trees, wind and rain. The following “mix” takes you from a forest ambience in Shorath Mesa, to a canyon ambience back to the sounds heard in the marsh. These are short clips mixed together from longer ambiences that are specific to small areas of the zone.
Shorath Mesa Traveling from marsh to canyon
As you can hear, some of the musical elements from the previous track remain (slowed down piano) but they are very subtle and silent, letting the natural sounds do most of the “talking”. In the game (which you don’t hear in the mix) the ambiences are complimented by all sorts of locational sounds such as wind, dripping of water from trees, little fires, soft water splashing etc.
Hope you liked it !
See you next time !
February 8, 2007
[QA Journal] Combat testing
by Johan Sandstrom
Little introduction
Before I get into the details of combat testing, let me first explain the setup we have here for our QA department. Each of the QA testers has developed certain knowledge of the game over time, but no one is assigned to anything specific. This keeps our job fun because you get to handle different test cases but it also means that everybody has a thing they are more informed about. We all attend team meetings so we know what design changes have been made, if any new features have been implemented and basically keep up to speed on what is happening to the game. Based on that information we make sure we know what to look for in the game, what to test and what to ignore for the time being. (“A purple building in the game is a work in progress, not a bug” – Lead Level Design)
Combat testing
Of course this important feature of our game has to be thoroughly tested in any way we can to make sure that it not only works but it is also fun from a player perspective. This is why testing the combat system is not only performed by QA itself, but also by the combat designers and AI programmers themselves. A lot of systems have passed the review since design pitched the first idea, and the current system is still open for improvement and added functionality. However, the fact that QA has reached combat testing phase 3 by now means that a lot of basics have been established and most of what is being done is fine tuning before we get to combat balancing (although balancing is done all the time by Combat system specialist El “Selachii” Drijver).
Phase 1: Basic skill functionality
The first testing Phase involved the basic testing of skill functionality. Just to give you an idea, we have about 200 skills which all have a design description stating what the effects are, which visuals should accompany the skill and much more info. So this meant that each skill had to be compared with their description and checked for inconsistencies or, in the worst case, stuff that just did not work. We put a part of the QA team on this assignment, divided the classes and went to work. This phase took about 5 days to complete and resulted in about 100 bugs (some of which were related, don’t worry). One thing I have to mention is that this test did not include any party skills yet because our Devs were still working on the way grouping works. So this means that at a later stage, we will have to pick up the party skills some classes have and go through the motions again.
Phase 2: Bodyslots
Before we could tackle the bodyslots both coders and Combat design had to check if everything was in place for QA to be able to test the bodyslot functionality. I am not going into the details of our bodyslot system here (you can check out the journal for that here) but it is a very complex system that differs for each class and subclass. First of all we had to assemble a list of bodyslot items that we could cheat into our inventory. Once we got that together, again some of us went to work with their respective subclasses and tested bodyslots. Some nice bugs we encountered were, for example, the following: using skinshifting bodyslot could result in teleporting yourself under the world, summoning a pet, as well as the use of thrown items for the Trickster, would result in a server crash, etc.
Don’t worry though; this is exactly the kind of information Devs like us to give to them. Well, not really "like", but if this kind of testing was not done, just imagine what the game would end up like. We all try to put together a cool and fun game with Spellborn, and QA is a necessity in the process of getting there. The combat tests have not been concluded yet after these phases of course. Now that the bugs have been filed, we have to follow them up and check if the fixes the Devs apply are working and don’t break anything else. For instance, of the 100 bugs that were filed during phase 1, 52 have been fixed already and QA has checked these fixes and approved them.
I’m going to wrap things up here to make sure this journal doesn’t become too boring and long, but I’ll leave you with the information that phase 3 has been concluded as well: Combos. And I can tell you right now, they are awesome!
Banshee
English Community Manager
The Chronicles of Spellborn
The latest news, the latest trailers, the latest Screenshots, maybe even the latest beer Pugilist is drinking - that would be Weyerbacher's Old Heathen Imperial Stout.
Latest Chronicles of Spellborn Trailer
Lo-Res WMP version:
http://tcos.com/downloads/download.php?id=233&filekey=bgfb55
Hi-Res WMP version:
http://tcos.com/downloads/download.php?id=232&filekey=erge44
The Latest Screenshots for Chronicles of Spellborn
The Chronicles of Spellborn, by new developers Spellborn International, has released their newest batch of screenshots. Powered by the Unreal 2.5 engine, this MMORPG will bring gamers to a fantasy world rife with hidden secrets and adventures.
The latest screens can be downloaded at:
http://bohle.fileburst.com/Spellborn_screens_10-19-06.zip
More info can be found on http://www.tcos.com/
About Frogster Interactive Pictures AG
Frogster Interactive Pictures AG, based in Berlin, acts as publisher of computer games of all genres and price levels and is amongst the market leaders in Germany. Under the labels Brigades, Hall of Game, Eclypse and BacktoGames the publisher markets PC games by international licensors. For the future the growing market of massive multiplayer online games is taken into focus. The company currently employs 30 staff in the departments licensing, marketing, sales, administration
and logistics. Internet: http://www.frogster-ip.de/
About Spellborn International Ltd.
Since the founding of the company in 2004, Spellborn International Ltd. has focused on the single goal of developing an innovative Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). Privately owned and operated, SIL's development studios are based in The Hague, The Netherlands. The multinational development team is made up of experienced professionals from the game development industry as well as specialists in the many other disciplines required to release a game of this scope. The team is bound by a collective desire to break conventions on the way to developing a revolutionary title.