Mythos - Gamespy Dev Diary
Mythos is one of those quirky titles that we're proud to be able to shine a spotlight on. It began as a tech project for Flagship's Hellgate: London, and has rapidly evolved into something much more. Over the next few months, we'll be showcasing Mythos with exclusive insights from the team as well as screenshots and video you won't find anywhere else. Our second guest is Jason Beck, the game's lead artist. We'll let him tell you the rest!
I'm Jason Beck, the lead artist working on Mythos and part of
Flagship Studios Seattle. Our producer, Brock Jones, covered how
Flagship Seattle went from a single-man project designed to test the
technology behind Hellgate: London to an 11-person team
developing an MMO in the first installment of a couple of weeks ago.
It's a unique situation and one that has both advantages and
disadvantages that traditional studios don't face. I'm going to briefly
cover some of those from the viewpoint of the art team and move into
discussing some of our process as well as results of designing our
classes and playable races.
How To Make a Monster, Baby
Flagship Seattle has 5 devoted artists and a project lead that holds
his own doing art on top of all his other tasks. Along with the
internal team, we use an outsourced art house in Shanghai that have
been great, both in delivery, speed and communication. The key for a
5-person art team tackling a project of this scope is really in the
flexibility of each artist. In some studios the term "generalist" is
regarded as a master of none. Whilst I'm not in love with the term,
being well-rounded is a good advantage for a smaller team. We each have
priorities that are our immediate focus, but we can all adjust and
adapt incredibly well to tackle things that need immediate attention.
Having that flexibility is key for a small team to have success in
making a content-rich game.
One of the great things about our team (and Flagship as a whole) is
that we all know and love the fantasy genre as well as action-RPGs.
Consider Flagship San Francisco's heritage of working on Diablo and Diablo II (among many others) mixed with the Seattle team, where nearly all of us worked on FATE.
It's a fantastic collection of people who are well-versed in what makes
these types of games fun. But given that we all have done something
like this it's about trying to do something new. If it can't be an
entirely new idea, then how can we change something familiar in the
fantasy genre into something with a slightly different twist?
There is a strong desire on the team to create things in Mythos that are unique and fun that also happen to avoid the fantasy mainstays. I think it's safe to say that Mythos
is elf, dwarf, and orc free. And it's not that we're bagging on those
things; it's just that every other game fantasy game has 'em and we
really want to standout. Our early zone creatures are certainly more of
the tried and true expected staples. Among the forest creatures, bugs,
and skeletal zombies we're sprinkling in things like the Urax, an
8-foot-tall crow/bear hybrid, and Webcreepers, ghoulish-looking
humanoids that have learned to live among the spiders and use them as
their army. We set out to create an early crop of multi-purpose
creatures that would work sprinkled into many zones, but also give a
few tastes of the odder stuff to come. As we move into more and more
zones, the creature list will certainly become grander and the designs
crazier.
Everything we do is vetted against time and our capabilities as a small
team. The one area where our process differs from larger studios is in
our concept and design phase. Our goal has to be getting a concept or
idea we feel really good about into production as quickly as possible.
As artists, there is certainly the lure of dabbling and re-working
until it's perfect as well as the desire to take something to a
finished illustration or painting. But our pacing and schedule requires
that we get from idea or scribble to a model sheet that we can hand off
to our outsourcing partners as quickly as possible. There really isn't
any time for print-ready concept art as most revisions to the designs
come in the form of written communication or paint overs as feedback.
This isn't to say that we just rush ideas out the door and don't
properly consider each design. For such a small team, a more
streamlined and practical approach certainly works a lot better. While
the traditional artists in us would love the time to explore and tinker
with a design and paint something fantastic for print, our goal is to
make a great game; not to put out an "Art of Mythos"
book in a collectible edition. Would we love to? Yes. Do we have the
time as a 5-person art team? No. Get a model sheet your happy with and
get it in the pipe. With a small team, being practical is a necessity.
Small Teams for Big Ideas
As a team we're always throwing around ideas on new creatures in a very
casual, conversational way. I'm always jotting down my favorites into a
huge list of ideas to address when I feel we're in a zone where they'd
work best. Once we've nailed down the zone theme and look we tend to
create a roster based on what we think is cool and fun and still fits
within our world. Being free from any back story or rule set or
previous IP is incredibly fun. And I really like where we're taking
things both in look and the style of gameplay.
When I joined the team, Mythos
had been underway for a little more then a year. For the bulk of that
time it was a 1-man team with outsourced art. It then jumped to a
3-person team. I believe I was the 8th person added. My first task when
hired was to make our playable classes work. We had designs for male
and female versions of humans, elves, and gremlins. We had a model for
the male gremlin that was incredibly close to something we were happy
with, but the others hadn't progressed very far. Originally, the
thought was to "fix 'em". But over a 4-day period our elves became
redesigned into satyrs. It was a real easy decision to make based on
our ho-hum reaction to including elves and ultimately one that should
prove that Mythos is going to shoot for something different. An
initial roster of humans, gremlins, and satyrs certainly hasn't been
done before, and our next round of playable races should prove even
more unique.
Just as we're trying to avoid the standard fantasy playable races and
creatures, we're trying even more so to differentiate our classes. You
won't find traditional warriors, mages, archers, rogues, or paladins or
any of the D&D inspired archetypes in Mythos.
Our classes are really determined by the gameplay then the sort of
role-playing fiction that we've become so familiar with in fantasy
games. We want each class to be uniquely different from the others,
but, at the risk of sounding trite, the main focus is fun.
There are games where I feel like I'm progressing, but the payoff feels
disproportionate to the time I've invested in getting there. I never
really feel quite as powerful as I think my character should be
considering all the hoops I've jumped through or late nights I've spent
to get that next skill. In Mythos,
our goal is to get a reaction out of the player when they fire off that
new skill and then make it something they're going to want to try out
on hundreds of creatures because, for whatever reason, exploding a
corpse that might start a chain-reaction of explosions is fun.
Ricocheting fire bolts through dungeon corridors and trying trick shots
is fun. Setting up a perimeter of flame-throwing turrets while your
clockwork-technology Boomzippers crawl after creatures and explode is
fun.
Storming the Castle is Fun
The Bloodletter is our first "melee first" class. Some have said it's
our take on the warrior, but a Warrior/Necromancer hybrid with a thing
for pointy, stabby, and slicey things (as well as powers derived by
spilling blood) is probably more accurate. Depending on your skill
allocation, your bloodletter could become an intensely fast stabbing
machine of death . Some might prefer summoning bloodlings (we lovingly
refer to them as "bloodmonkeys") from fallen foes to cause mayhem or
just hang out with while you dungeon crawl. Of course, the
aforementioned exploding corpse chain reaction is tough to pass on to.
If you're tired of being a slow, armor ball for creatures to whack away
at who is only as good as the weapon he's holding, this might be your
class. Revulsion to blood might be a problem, though.
The Pyromancer is the closest thing to a "pure magic user" class that
we have thus far. As one would expect, Pyromancers are all about fire.
They can do some serious damage with fire-buffed scepters as well, but
it's a lot more fun having a cone of flame erupt from your palm (must
avoid lame "talk to the hand" joke). It's also terribly fulfilling to
lure a mob of creatures into a room and then set the floor aflame.
Bouncing a fire dart off the wall to pick off a fleeing, crybaby
creature is always good to. Our pyromancers have a very coal, soot, and
magical spark feel to them, which I personally feel make them more
interesting then a clean, traditional mage type who just focused on
fire at wizard school. All that aside, if you enjoy playing with
virtual fire, this class will definitely appeal to you.
The Gadgeteer is part gunslinger part engineer with a bunch of cool,
clockwork-tech style gadgets to aid him and provide assistance to a
group. While it certainly is appealing to carry a gun to a swordfight
and blast away your opponents, it's also fun to make toys. Toys that
crawl after creatures and explode are even better. Hovering drones that
slow creatures down to make it easier for you to pick them off from
afar sure are handy too. But, it's hard not to enjoy turrets that
target monsters and unleash a spray of fire at 'em. The gadgeteers were
originally "pistoleers" in earlier builds. It became quite clear with
the earlier versions that it just wasn't very satisfying. Once you got
over the novelty of carrying dual pistol flintlocks it just wasn't
particularly fun in a point and click game to dual wield pistols. Yet,
for whatever reason, blasting creatures with a shotgun-like musket was
very satisfying. The last thing we had to solve was giving the class
more options, and, thus, the Pistoleer became the Gadgeteer. Our recent
changes to the skill tree has really made this class incredibly fun to
play.
Those three classes have undergone a pretty major revamp that included
adding completely new skills, polishing up existing skills,
re-structuring the skill trees, and, of course, heavy balancing passes
to get them fine-tuned. For our latest build push, getting our 3
existing classes in a near final state was the goal. Now that we are
incredibly happy with them our focus will turn to the next batch of
player classes. What those will be…ah, possibly my next dev diary post.
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