Why I quit Legends Of Aria

Yorlik's picture

“Bye bye Shards Online and Legends of Aria”

We are quitting Legends of Aria - but we are not leaving Arcanima behind!

There are several reasons for the decision coming from several directions.

I’ll try to explain why I took the decision to quit, after being with the LoA project for more than 4 years now.

The decision grew slowly over the last couple of months. But recently something entirely unimportant burst the bubble and made clear to me that it is time to leave.

My team is behind me.

So I’m fine.

But my time with Citadels Project is over.

  • Arcanima as a project is going to live on and we will continue to develop it until we are where we want to be with it.
  • Our next iteration of Arcanima, codename “Next” will be a game in in its own right. Most likely we’ll use the Unreal Engine.
  • Legends of Aria is no longer the vessel for our journey.

Before I go into the main portion of this writeup, I want to address the Arcanima community:

Additions to Housing

Yorlik's picture

Since we notoriously suck at updating this website and some people start thinking the project is dead because of us not spamming you with entirely useless text (some call it information, though it is not in terms of "a difference that makes a difference" à la Weizenbaum), I thought it's time to post these videos about two tools I recently made.

The bottomline is:

Arcanima is under hot development - we just don't have time to pet this website a lot. Best source of information usually is to chat with us in Discord (See link in the menu).

Cheers

~Yorlik.

Improved Housing Placement

 

 

Moving Your House

Milestones June 2017

Mako's picture

Current Milestones

In this post I would like to try and show you the direction that Arcanima is driving towards, i'll briefly talk about a few of the current concepts we are working on to give you a flavour of what's going on. We hope this will show you that Arcanima isn't just making different systems and content simply because you can. Instead we are a design driven team that has a long term vision on how it will all fit together on the long run.

To start with I’d like to give a brief overview of the systems we are currently working on. Follow-on articles with detailed descriptions will follow after putting these systems live. It is important to state that our new systems are created to add flavour to the game and not to be a hindrance except in extreme situations.

We would like make this very clear that we do not want a player to be constantly micromanaging their characters and the balancing thoughts and discussions within the team keep this at the top of our priorities. We do not know if the players will take to a new system, but we need to ensure that these systems at least are not a nuisance. This expresses our overall design paradigm to create a roleplayed, diversified gaming world with many different fun things to do, not just faction wars or hack-n-slash dungeoning.

Recipe for an update - World Building, Scripting and a Dash of Arcane Brainstorming: So what happened the last 6 months?

Mako's picture

Ok, so this is going to be a longish article getting everyone up to speed with all the projects that have been completed and projects that are currently being worked on. This should give people a good outline of what the systems are, how they will fit into the overall concept of Arcanima and the general direction that we have been driving in during the last 6 - 12 months.

We would like to acknowledge the lack of updates on the website (although discord is used regularly), but going forward we want to bring the website back into play and use it to discuss, explain and show where Arcanima is heading as a concept and hopefully attract like minded players and admins /DM’s to help make a great game.

The website has been quiet, but behind the scenes the guys have been very busy. Below will be a lot of outline information about each system or project with an outline summary. There will be follow-up articles about each project in detail with images and videos for your perusal.


I asked Yorlik how he would best describe Arcanima:


"I would describe Arcanima as a social experiment in virtual space. Not an experiment as in using lab rats to achieve scientific results but an exploration into what is or is not possible.

The experiment consists of trying to build a community around a game, where the game also is the social platform, grounded in fantasy space, but with a real life counterpart which is discord and the forums and maybe real life meetings as a perspective.

The goal is to have fun, to exchange, to experience ideas, stories and the gameplay systems, to develop a shared storyline and to meet other people from different countries and cultures in a playful manner.

I hope we manage to develop an environment and a process, where people can have engaging and interesting experiences which help to open and broaden the personal scope."
 

Here is a quick list of completed projects so far:


Werewolves . . . Scary, this was a first attempt to create a shape changing system - What we learned will help us apply it to similar systems eg: druids, shape changing beasts etc. The next iteration will hopefully allow werewolves to be a playable race-like game mechanic which is not just a curse or punishment for the player. We may also implement vampires and other entities but for sure we will not copy the lore of a well known TV series ;)

One very cool concept that the team created at the start of our project was a hidden stashes system . . .

Reworking Alchemy Map

Yorlik's picture

I sometimes need a break from coding Arcanima and these are often times to go back to photoshop. This time is thought I'd recreate the Alchemy Map I did earlier. The old one used a Symbol font and I kinda just used the Symbols in there - this time I did them all by myself, though I used the old Lightnig symbol as a blueprint for my own.
Alchemy Map Sketch

Picking up the loose ends ...

Mako's picture

Afternoon.

For the short term and wildly against my anti-social personality, I am taking on the role of writing articles for Arcanima. I have ended up taking this on because the team has highlighted an obvious gap in the website content. I will be writing regular updates on all the work being conducted behind the scenes and all the great content and systems being planned for the future.

 

Dedicated Server for Arcanima

Yorlik's picture

I know - its been lacking some updates here, but we weren't lazy. We have been scripting our rear off and developed a bunch of fascinating mods and functions for the project.

But this post is about our infrastructure, namely server horsepower:
I just ordered a dedicated server for Arcanima.
Intel i7 6770 CPU, 64 GB memory, 2x2 fast HDD.
That should keep us safe for a while and provide plenty of space for the upcoming Shards Online cluster functionality.

Stay tuned !

Cheers
~Yorlik

First DMed event on Arcanima and introduction of the custom Lore

Yorlik's picture

Last Saturday we had a first small testing event on Arcanima DMed by me. Beforehand I changed all the vanilla dialogs of Shards Online on our server to reflect the Arcanima Lore local to that certain region of the world which is being run on our test and development server.

Though Shards Online still is in a very basic and limited state concerning DMed events we had a helluva fun. Storytelling really doesn't require too many technical nuts and bolts and the event was a success within its limited scope.

world.arcanima.org developement server is online

Yorlik's picture

We now have made a step ahead in our infrastructure and can offer acces to the gameserver at world.arcanima.org. We have rented a virtual windows server with 4 vcores, 4 GB guaranteed RAM and 400 GB storage. The game runs smooth with the usual hiccups stemming from the very early development stage Shards Online is in. Sometimes it crashes. We are working on an efficient watchdog to keep it up 24/7. Later, once we have a Linux server executable we will migrate to a dedicated, non virtual Linux machine.

Gwarship Stage 2.5

Yorlik's picture

Allright - the Gwarship has passed Stage 2 - a finished outline of the basic ship. I now added some decorations, extras and colors and put it into a photograph of mine I took on a flight years ago. I have never done anything like this and am not a professional illustrator, but I can tell you it was a helluva fun!

 

Aurely - Concept Art

Yorlik's picture

I fooled around a bit with Photoshop and various stuff shamlessly stolen with the help of Dr.Google to finally get an idea about how the Port Aurel region might look.

This image is one iteration in a chain of wild experiments.

I used about 10 images to make a collage and then messed around with it.

Locations:

Pages

Subscribe to Arcanima RSS