Chronicles of the Principii

An MMO has a lot of moving parts. So many features are needed for even a modest MMO: game mechanics, art style, avatars and avatar customization, the world we play in, social features, servers and network messages. So, what have we done so far? What’s in the pipeline?

The core game mechanic of Mage Faire is doing magic: casting spells and performing magic rituals. As we describe in “The Magic of Mage Faire,” spells are invoked using incantations. This is what we as designers and programmers focused on first.

So far, we’ve implemented about 125 incantations, which allow you to

• create buildings, walkways, mountains, waterfalls, fountains, trees, and other features of the world,
• assemble complicated objects from parts,
• customize all these things you built,
• animate them,
• and conjure and destroy as many of them as you like.

You can also:

• Make possible and impossible spaces
• Revisit your memories and your past selves multiple times, and it won’t even create a time paradox! (the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!)
• Enchant objects, so they do something magical when triggered
• Create custom spells

Admittedly, there are still bugs to work out. And some capabilities, like the assembly and animation, could use a few more spells, to make them more rich and juicy. But we’ve certainly implemented enough to have confidence that they’re powerful, fun, and spectacularly customizable. Our Art Department has been using these spells full time for 5 months, and they are still discovering and inventing new things they can do with them.

Because Mage Faire takes place inside an enchanted watercolor painting, the world is watercolor. The colors are rich and vibrant, the textures painterly. Everything is a painting, although many of these paintings are curved or folded into 3D shapes. Is took us a long time to decide on our art style, but it is now well established, and we hope our mages find it unique and beautiful.

Right now we are working on our “avatar pipeline.” By that I mean, we’re writing software tools and defining processes our artists use to quickly crank out lots of avatar variations, which players will be able to choose from and customize. We’re also working on real-time avatar puppeteering. You’ll be able to directly control your avatar’s head, body, and hands.

Your avatar will wear a robe (don’t worry, guys: we’re working hard on making the male robes look manly) and a mask (it is an ongoing magical celebration, after all) and cast spells using a staff (which you can wield left-handed if you like).

Avatars are also paintings, like everything else in the world, and are flat, which has some surprisingly cool advantages. It makes it so much easier to pop on accessories and magical doodads, without having to worry about how to make them fit in 3D. And, because your avatar is a painting just like everything else in the world, you customize your robe, mask, staff, and accessories using the very same spells you use to customize anything else. Avatar-customization isn’t choosing stuff from a menu, dialog, web page, or some other window-y interface; it’s magical and fun. We decided magic and fun trumps realism.

The Faire will be organized into villages, where you learn different disciplines of magic. In Majestica, surrounded by huge trees, mushrooms, and fiddleheads, you’ll learn conjuring, destroying, customization (like, making things big), and enchanting. In Memorata, which is full of streams, fountains, waterfalls, and clouds, it’s about revisiting and creating memories. Enigmata focuses on building possible and impossible spaces, and it will have an Escher-esque surreal aesthetic. Steampunk-themed Animata will be the hub of assembly and animation.

The plan is for Val and John to build a smallish central area of each of these four villages. Then after the Faire is open, we’ll extend the villages with contest-winning content created by mages. We also have in mind four additional villages, with associated magical disciplines, to be added later as expansions. But it’s too early to give away too much about that yet.

Since Val and John joined us in July, they’ve been doing a lot of world building. We’ve established the color schemes, styles, and most of the trees/buildings/walkways/etc. of Majestica and Memorata. We haven’t laid out these components into the actual villages yet, though, because Gordon and I need to finish implementing some key spells to connect different locales into a village.

Our approach to creating the world has been: “Make something you think will be awesome. If it’s not, why not? Tweak and repeat.” Sometimes you end up with something awesome, but not how you expected. There were a handful of buildings Val and John intended for Memorata, but when we looked at it, we all said, “That’s really awesome, but it looks like it belongs in Enigmata,” or “Wow, that’s cool! It should go in Animata.” So, we have a few components of Enigmata and Animata too, without even trying!

So far we have chat working. We have designs for guilds (groups focused around a particular topic of interest) and circles (purely social groups), as well as following other mages. But none of that is implemented yet. What can we say? You have to prioritize.

At this point our network messaging infrastructure and servers are simple and straightforward. You can see other people’s magic, and they can see yours. We designed with scalability in mind, but we have not tested for it yet.

Our focus now is on what is needed in order to make more videos, and to get some more play testers into the world. What does that mean specifically? Finalizing our avatars, incorporating visual and sound effects into the magic, and bullet-proofing the code against all the amazing, fascinating things that users will do, that we never thought of.