Hail Elyrians!

If the glare coming off the still ever-present snow is any indication, it must be shiny time! Last week, we wrapped up our armor display series, leaving us with a question, what will we show next?

It would be hard to argue against the claim that one of the more requested things from all of you is an idea of what the architecture for the various tribes will look like. Of course, given the way we're approaching development of this game, so far, that's a hard request to fill.

Generally, we operate on "feature areas" - with so many (over 40!) different feature sets in the game, the number of individual features in the game is, to understate it, "quite high." So, we try to tackle each of the feature areas one by one, and we generally tackle feature areas in an order that caters to different play-styles. In our case, we started with the survival and adventure feature set areas, minus a few forays into prototyping other systems to ensure our intended approach will be viable.

Now admittedly, this is muddied a bit by the realities of production such as dependency chains (where work from one dev guild can't be done until another guild completes their work, for example) so that one guild may be working "ahead of" or "behind" the others but, generally speaking, we all work on the same feature set at once, and when it comes time to build the assets and models for certain environments, we generally leave them until we're doing active work on features that are using those environments. There are definitely exceptions, but this general truth means that many buildings just aren't built yet, so there's nothing in game to see.

Which is in no way unusual for where we are in development, but this means that something like "What does a Brudvir building look like" is answered in pre-production long before "What does a Brudvir building look like in-game?" gets answered with the physical production of the related assets. That's why we've hesitated to share much information on the architectural styles of the tribes, in fact.

Of course, shiny days are about sharing what's behind the scenes, so maybe those rules need not apply right?

And... you know... if they do still apply, don't tell anyone, OK? Let's just enjoy our shiny:

Which today, is some initial concept sketches that Heat did when we were originally putting together the architectural style for the Brudvir. If there's one thing I love about the Brudvir, it's definitely their aesthetic. The woodwork and the arches mix really well with the more rustic elements of their place in the world. There are other sketches in the series that highlight even more of this, so we'll probably share more of them as well.

In the meantime though, stay shiny friends!