Hello Voyagers! Stephiroth here with another update from the development of our upcoming patch Players' Most Wanted. This update will cover two exciting and delightful features: VO for Spirits, and customizable signs.
Why add VO for Spirits?
While brainstorming for our patch features, we discussed a wide variety of features and content that we felt both players and developers would be excited to make. Sometimes these were straight-forward requests, like players wanting signposts. But other areas we explored were broader and less defined.
Spirit VO came about because we were looking at feedback players were giving us about what they really loved in the game. Players love Spirits appearing in the base, and in our surveys and reviews this is one of our top-rated features. At the same time, players also have given feedback that they want the base to feel more active and alive. When thinking about this, the idea of adding VO for the Spirits came from one of our artists, Kyle. The team was so excited to do this and about all of the possibilities it can open up for the future too.
So do Spirits talk now?
Not quite! Finding the voice for the Spirits was a journey. We started by outlining some creative goals and emotional statements we wanted to achieve by adding VO for Spirits, such as:
We need players to LOVE these little guys - so the VO had to be something that felt endearing.
We want players to feel like Spirits are in need of protection, so that saving them feels more rewarding.
We wanted them to be believable, but not necessarily realistic. These shouldn't sound like some very specific animal or creature from the real world, but their VO needed to also match their stature, theme and how you'd expect them to sound.
After outlining the emotional goals, we wanted to narrow in on the character itself. How should it feel, what its personality is, and how we shape that to achieve our emotional goals.
Spirits are cute! This sounds like a no-brainer, but even a statement like this can be nuanced. They need to be funny, quirky, and innocent. We did not want them to feel too mischievous (think Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch") or too unintelligent (think Minions).
They are magical. They have latent, untapped power, which is why the Deep wants to gobble them up. So their VO needed to convey a sense of magic.
They are vulnerable. They may be powerful, but they are kind and non-violent. They don't want to fight the Deep, and that is why we need to protect them.
We explored several vocal iterations until we found one that felt right. Many hours were spent by our audio designer making weird sounds on his front porch; hopefully his neighbors will understand. After we landed on a direction, we had to figure out the verbs!
When do Spirits vocalize?
We tried to ensure Spirits would vocalize during critical moments, like when they are in danger or when they are rescued. We also tried to make sure that they vocalized while doing things around players, like sitting in the base, helping with the player's boat, channeling at the amenities. And we focused on some extra delightful moments, like funny sounds when they are sleeping or eating, or having little conversations with each other when they're sitting nearby!
Customizable Signs
Another feature we are very excited to finally have in the game is customizable signs! This has been a long-awaited passion project for our designer Ben.
While we already have the ability to name storage, signs open up whole new possibilities for organization of your base, and for fun customization and expression.
What can you do with Signs?
This image is from our first playtest of the prototype for signs. They look a lot better now, but even from the first playtest we saw the expression (... trolling?) potential is endless! We spent so long running around our base, placing signs in weird spots for people to find, planting a sign next to someone to mess with them, and more. And we organized our base or whatever. :P
Development challenges with Signs
Our initial prototype for signs came together very quickly, and we were feeling confident that we would finish that work and move on to other features or polish additions for signs. However, we ran into a lot of hurdles with localization.
When we tested with other languages, we found that many of the character-based languages like Chinese, Korean and Japanese were not rendering! And the way we needed to display the signs did not allow for us to utilize fallback fonts to fix this.
We actually ended up writing our own handler for switching fonts; now not only do all of the languages work but it lets signs display multiple languages at a time, which wasn't possible before.
Are there more features in the patch?
Yes indeed, there are :D Stay tuned for future dev blogs where we'll continue to share more about the upcoming features in the Players' Most Wanted patch!
Is there something in this blog you're very excited about? Let us know in the comments below! 👇
