Working on Crowfall!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me mention that after a couple of years of being fairly quiet, a lot of game announcements would be hitting soon. Well, one of them hit today! I am very happy to be able to tell the world (finally!) that I have been working with Todd Coleman and my other friends at ArtCraft on Crowfall!

I’ve been hopping on Skype every couple of weeks to go over game designs with Todd & crew for almost a year now. It started out as general brainstorming stuff, and as the team grew, we’ve been able to move on to working directly on designs and even picking apart UIs. I’ve helped out on everything from economics and materials design to yeah, dipping my toes into Todd’s bloodthirstiness and the warfare design that is embodied in “play to crush.” (If there was any doubt this is Todd’s game, that should be a hefty clue!)

That said, it’s definitely got me in the mix too! Most obviously, from today’s announcements, will be mention of an abstract resource system underlying the crafting system. It’s been something that has been absent from the MMO scene lately, despite the lessons from UO and SWG showing how powerful it can be in terms of enabling crafting as a true role in its own right. You can read about that more over on this MMORPG.com interview with Thomas Blair — everyone just calls him Blair. Blair worked on SWG, and with me at Disney to boot, so we’ve had years worth of collaboration on games and game economies in this style, and in this interview he spills, well, some beans on how it will work.

Here’s a peek at what those design discussions are like. They’re being really careful about info release over at ArtCraft, but I’ll just say that there’s some pretty big hints as to future system reveals in some of the stuff we’re talking about here!

I also have been asked about the sweater with the llamas — it’s from Peru.

You can read more about all this over on the Crowfall forums, where there’s a bunch more info released about the game.

So, this kicks off what is hopefully a pretty active year! I know I have been quiet for a while, but the last twelve months have actually been spent consulting and advising a half dozen different teams, as well as designing a bunch of stuff of my own. I’ve also got announcements coming on the good old tabletop game front, with some pretty exciting partners, and there’s one “massively multiplayer” announcement yet to go that is way out of left field and in an arena I have never worked in before. So stay tuned, and in the meantime, go check out Crowfall!