Hey, this is a copy of our devlog from google docs on the forums here. Please give us feedback below on this process and the contents of the log. Thank you all, and have a great day.
** Dev-log 0**
Hello everyone! Welcome to the first installment of our dev log. First of all, thank you to everyone who has been supporting us from the very beginning and for sticking with us up to this point, it means a lot to us both and we are excited to share what we have in store for you. So let’s get right into it.
This first dev log will be a little different than the rest of them but we plan on being very transparent with where we are in the game and the things we are working on. The goal of these dev logs is to categorize them into three different sections. First will be a quick run down and overview for those who don’t want to get too far into the nitty gritty while the next two sections will be split between SinfullyFrosty’s programming and AerialsAbove’s building. While this first one will follow that structure we plan on giving a complete in-depth look into where we are now, all the way from the beginning. Thus this one might be longer than the rest. So get some snacks and relax, cause this will be a long one.
**Overview**
What is Wyverns Crest? The Crest is the next great fantasy roleplaying game built to give you, the player, as much control over the story as possible. From creating your characters with a wide variety of custom clothing and items, all the way to how you interact with the world, and the ways the world interacts with you. We give you the tools to craft your own story, all you have to do is use them.
With a game idea based so far on the roleplaying elements, it is very important to us to have a fully fleshed-out world with deep-rooted lore and established concepts. In Wyverns Crest we have a vast variety of groups (clans) to choose from. These groups represent the origins of your character and are the essential building block of your own story, they come with thought-out lore intact, meant to be built upon, or better yet, discarded so that you may develop your world and lore that we are all too happy to be a part of. You can play the game now as of this log, and play as someone who is Human, or play as of the more traditional fantasy races, such as Elves who come from a faraway war-torn land. You can instead pick Gnomes, who live in mushroom huts, and all obey a deep and dark Cthulhu-esc god, or pick Orcs, people of science and arts. Should none of the starting races interest you, you can also enroll yourself in the Arcane Academia, a large cold building with a primary goal of teaching magic and thought beyond the realm of most Men and Man-beasts.
Our goal is to expand on the ideas above in the near future, where we plan to feature new and classic faces of different races, like that of the Dwarves, the sturdy men, and women from below, or the more demonic creatures below, like the Demora. Our playable groups should reach the sky islands above the crest, to life in the ocean, and as far below the surface as possible, giving our players as many creative locations and backdrops to style themselves within. We don’t want to stop at just races, as we plan to one-year feature creature morphs, letting our players transform into dragons and wyverns, giants and centaurs; or better yet, to buy a home that you can decorate and style, or even possibly one day have a free build mode to build your own house from the ground up with our assets at your disposal in-game.
**Building**
Hey, Aerials here, and this game is my vision in terms of the visuals, graphics, and world-building. When you play Wyverns Crest, my primary goal is to make you feel immersed and sucked into a fictional world where dragons do fly, elves exist, and magic is a rule of thumb.
Starting nearly one year ago, with a handful of months in between, I laid down the first large chunk of terrain that started me off with Wyverns Crest. Now the time has started to fly, and the hours are tricklin’ away as both I and Frosty spend hours fine-tuning and crafting this beautiful game. My part of the devlog will hopefully shine a light on all of the countless hours we have both already poured into this game, and also teach and explain as much as I can from my own experience with game dev.
A little about me first, AerialsAbove. Just like Frosty, we both got started strong on Roblox first with an interest in creating beautiful little games called Showcases. Highly detailed games with really strong atmospheres and a sense of immersion in another world to our own. Nine years ago, I started my first and main showcase, Springs Rock, one of the most beautiful and detailed showcase experiences on the platform, and now with over ten years of total dev experience, I have moved on to my next big project, Wyverns Crest. My desire to build a proper game has been with me for several years now. Now I have the chance to embark on this desire and dream of mine, allowing me to express myself, my characters, my lore, and my setting, all while giving people the tools to use my game as their backdrop to do the same. When I draft up the lore and build the locations of this game, I do so with the hope that my players will one day use the lore as a launching point for their own, or completely scrap it in favor of their own, or imagine the scenic Elven lily pad falls as anything relevant to themselves.
With the experience, desire, and goals in mind, going forward with our new game has been nothing but an honest-to-good challenge. This is my first full-fledged game on Roblox, and it will show in many ways. I have worked on and off on building gorgeous maps for other developers, games, and projects, but nothing can prepare you for the challenge of building your own game. That reality has haunted me since starting work on this, and I would like to go over a few of them with the upcoming logs we create, such as the challenge of making a game performant friendly, art direction, freedom to explore, and the sheer amount of work something like this takes
For instance, working around Roblox’s Streaming Enabled mode presents a lot of hidden challenges, mostly for Frosty, our programmer. A game as big as Wyverns Crest is bound to lag on devices not suited for it, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try to optimize it. That was our intent with Streaming Enabled, and when you work with Roblox, everything good comes at a price, a give-and-take kind of development process. Turning on Streaming Enabled allows me to go wild with the scale and scope of this project, allowing me to create a port town, a castle town, villages, a forest, caves, and an entire landscape with eroded mountains, crops, and bridges. Turning on Streaming Enabled also broke many of our first attempts to add a map feature. That is a big issue because turning it on means we can create a large immersive world, but it makes it so hard to have an actual map that you now need to explore it properly. This took months to resolve, and eventually led us onto our current version of the in-game map, the one you can now see in the game at the start as of 1/16/2024. The next big problem was how turning on Streaming Enabled means that objects beyond a certain distance just… vanish. That is the primary purpose of Streaming Enabled, but it is also a double-edged sword you see. When we started Wyverns Crest, Roblox did not allow us to control which parts would vanish in the culling, and that caused a great deal of trouble. Streaming allows for a larger map, but now you cannot teleport easily without breaking the game because that village far away on the other literal end of the map, is no longer loaded in, existing. Again, my programmer, Frosty, spent a great deal of time finding creative ways around this issue, until at last, like magic, Roblox gave us only a slightly more improved control over Streaming Enabled. This was a great step forward in resolving one of our hardships with Game Dev, but not a magic bullet. We are still working hard to make the process of fast traveling over our map as smooth as possible, but it is always going to be a challenge in an engine like Roblox.
The great thing is when the game dev is working and going fine, it lets me do my favorite thing as a 3D artist. This game lets me design and create fictional cultures in a beautiful world. This next part is about my process of creating our first four essential races of Wyverns Crest, the Humans, the Elves, the Orkens, and the Gnomes. This part is also of use to anyone wishing to create their RPs, Showcases, or games and looking for tips on designing a believable world.
I’ll start with the Elves and Orken. When starting a game with a detailed world, you have to come to terms with your lore and figure out how you want to portray your characters and world. For me, that essential question is how I want to portray my Elves and Orkens (Orcs.) As a handful who may read this know, both races are largely popular, and their depictions in J.R. Tolkeins’ work has cemented a large degree of perception of them. Decades of art, movies, and books have all built the Elves up as a traditionalist group of tree-men, and often leaves Orcs high and dry living in dry lands and being brutal and unkempt. Here is the big question now, do I want to add the Elves and Orcs to Wyverns Crest as they are often depicted, or do I want to rewrite their very concepts? As you will see in the game, I have picked a balance of the two for important reasons. The first reason I have gone with the middle ground is because I must first understand that I am creating a game that should appeal to my players, not myself. That means my races should appeal to people who join my game and expect their elves to live in forests, and orcs in sandy regions. When I am creating a game or writing lore for myself, then I can feel free to write my Orcs into an entirely different concept, no longer green, tall, or barbaric, but rather smaller stout men who prefer sciences or arts, and would love to sail rather than collect bones and go to war, that choice is mine and it suits just myself. My game, on the other hand, should rest in a middle ground of biggest appeal and familiarity, and something new. That is why I have gone with the route of establishing lore that is familiar but is also a twist of my own, and that lore, it’s now up to you if you want to rewrite it, to make it more traditional fantasy, or more brave and novel. When you play Wyverns Crest, and pick an Orc, you will become an Orken, men and women of the Sail, who fly high, or sail low, and prefer a good bargain over brutist behavior. The same can be said for our Elves, who live in their picturesque forests, but unlike the peaceful and isolated Elves, they lean fully into the conflict, the opposite of most depictions. At the end of the day, my lore is a launching pad, you can rewrite it with your friends.
Lastly, and building off my last point on Elves and Orcs, is the architecture of Wyverns Crest. Another crucial building element of a good RP game is the world and setting itself, and what better way to portray your new world strongly than with its architecture? Starting with the Orcs, and their city of Glas-ord, or Glass. As of 1/16/2024 their large glass foundry has not yet been built and added in, but will become a crucial part of their cityscape, and it will be a distinct piece of their architecture. When you play Wyverns Crest, you explore a map with different races who come from different parts of the world, and that should reflect in the style of their homes too. When you explore the Orcs village, you find the sandstone hulks they have built, with large crystal-glass windows, a refined craft of their own, and large golden domes, all accented by navy blue stones. You might even notice which cultures from our world they are based on and borrow from, and that is Babylonian-Asyrian influences. Why would I mention this? Because as I said, architecture is the strongest point of a great RP world with lore. Each town has a long history and culture of its own, and that should show in the building, and the best way to get inspired to make your own as I did, is to look at our real world. I used the great Babylonian empire as my cornerstone for the architectural styles of the Orcs. You can see this in their great Ziggurat and lovely blue accent pieces, and their future statues (including the Lamassu, Assyrian man-lion mythical creature statues) in the upcoming updates.
**Programming**
Well hello! My name is SinfullyFrosty and welcome to the programming section of this log. My goal is to give you an idea of all the cool and unique systems we have running under the hood of Wyverns Crest to help you understand the end goals I have for the game, so let’s get into it!
The first and very prominent feature of any role-playing game is character creation. My goal as a developer is to give you all the tools you need to create the main character of your story exactly how you want, and in doing that I have tried to make the character creation system as in-depth as possible. For initial release, it has been slightly dumbed down to get it out the doors and into your hands but there are still a lot of great features packed into the system.
These features are split into two categories for ease of use and first-time digestion: character creation and character appearance. Character creation is what makes your character up fundamentally, the clan or group you are born too as well as more unique options such as face and hair. Another neat feature is the ability to choose your height to better convey your clan or age.
So what do these options entail? Well on face value the clan you choose seems to only change your ears but it goes much deeper than that, reaching very deep into other systems. Your clan dictates what role you can obtain as well as what actions you can do (more on the action system later on) such as elves being able to interact with trees or gnomes being able to grow mushrooms in random places. These actions are clan-specific and cannot be accessed by other clans. Another thing that is affected by clans is the economic system. If you are trying to buy items from a hostile faction to your own the prices might be more expensive thus making those clan-specific items hard to obtain for your clan. These are just a few things we have planned to make the game feel more real and alive.
Things such as hair color and character color can be adjusted as well to give you more tools to craft a character perfect for your story, but something a little more advanced is the face system. With our face system, you aren’t limited to one face or the other, you will be able to select and choose different sections of the face to mix and match. Such as the left eye from one face matched with the mouth and right eye of another. Or all 3 sections from different faces as a whole, we plan to continue to expand these selections to scars or face paint as we go along in development. You could spend hours crafting just the perfect face.
The rest of the system is pretty self-explanatory in terms of selecting your shirts and pants, but there are some systems planned that I am excited about. We plan on making each clothing item completely colorable so you as the player can customize each section of the clothes you wear. This will further increase player uniqueness and customization for you as the player.
Whew, that was a lot just for the character-creation system. A lot has gone into the programming and planning of that system and I am really happy with where it is at and where I can easily take it. So let’s get into the main chunk of the games and the systems you can use through the in-game menu button
First, let’s quickly go over the character customization screen. Just like the character creation system you can change your clothing appearance on the fly. All character appearance items are under an unlocked-based system which means once you buy something you have it forever, so don’t be afraid to explore new looks. Items are also another cool system that allows you to equip items that will appear on your character as well as use them. For example, when you have a lamp equipped it will show on your character until you equip it into your hand using the hotbar. At that point, it will equip into your hand and disappear on your character. This allows you to show off your cool gear and items on your character giving you another level of customization and usability.
Another thing to note with character customization is that it is under a client-based change. This means that when you change your character it’s not the same appearance as it is to other players. This way you can change your look and if you aren’t pleased, you can press cancel and go back to your original avatar. So be sure to confirm your character appearance when you change it so other players can see the new and improved you.
Wyvern Crest is a big map with tons of space and traversal, and with that, it can be hard to get from one place to another. This is where the teleport system comes into play. Instead of a boring UI-based teleportation, I decided to have a 3D map created to help people get a sense of the entire map. It is split up into regions allowing quick access and help form the lore and map in your head while allowing us to fit the entire map into a small area. Once you click a region you get a blown-up version of that region giving you a more in-depth map and places you can teleport to.
There are two types of teleport locations, a landmark location and a waypoint location. Landmark locations are teleport areas of notable areas, such as the castle in Stonehaven or the school at the school of magic. Waypoints are an unlocked-based teleport area, you must traverse the map finding and unlocking these waypoints to use them teleport areas. Another teleport type I have planned is a dynamic teleport location, these are locations that are set up by players. They can be created using magical items, or created by a powerful role such as an arch wizard are an elven lord, and each one will have requirements to use them as such. Such as world roots set up by elves can be used by elves to traverse the map, or dwarven tunnels that only dwarves know the location of. All these things will help with the roleplay ability of the world.
I keep talking about this mystical action system throughout this log and it’s finally time to give you an explanation. When I played roleplay games I noticed there was one thing missing from them. The player-to-world interaction. It almost seemed like the world was just a facade, a face-value object that you could walk around in and that was about it. So my solution to that issue was what I call the action service. The action service is split up into two groups, actions and events.
Actions are things that are run by the player using the action UI to interact with the world. Setting up a camp or a mage using magic to turn off surrounding lights, are small examples of actions players can do and are dictated by many factors. Different clans will have different actions available to them as well as roles giving access to actions. An example of this could be the king role giving the ability to close or open all gates in Stonehaven with a click of a button, or the arch wizard or witch being able to open or close the magic barrier.
Events are things that players can use that are world-based, such as using the lever to open the gate or using the magic orb to open the magic bridge. These are also dictated by the clan and role you have and will update in real-time upon change. Events can also be something that the world runs by itself, such as a natural disaster or a big siege of Stonehaven. These events will keep the world feeling alive and dynamic and will help story progressions for those who are struggling too.
As stated above the role you obtain can dictate many things. Roles are pre-defined slots that give players heightened abilities and are on a premium access basis. There are many requirements for roles such as max players, game pass specific, clan specific, etc. You can obtain these roles through the character information screen located in the menu on the left. Other things that roles allow you other than actions are items. Certain roles will give you certain items you can use for character customization, such as the king role giving you king clothing, a crown, and a scepter for you to equip at any time even if you aren’t the king role. Another cool feature of roles is the kick system for roles that are player-limited. Instead of doing a boring old UI asking if you would like to vote kick an event will run For example when vote kicking the king or queen out of the castle an event will run allowing players to swarm the castle and involve themselves in a riot event. Will you side with the mob to remove them from ruling? Or maybe defend them and squash the rioting mob to put a swift end to the rebellion. These are things that we as the developers can implement to help you create your story while masking needed features to keep immersion.
The last feature I have for you is our economic system. As it currently stands we have a temporary economy system allowing for the purchase of new items from stores all across the map. But later this will be replaced and I will go more in-depth into those plans once I explain what is in place now. Each shop has been given a category and type. The category dictates what items they sell and the type dictates what theme they are. Such as an elven blacksmith, or an orc tailor, each clan has its theme and sells accordingly. Clan hubs such as Stonehaven have a universal type meaning anything from any clan can and will be chosen allowing a greater diversity of items to select from.
Every in-game week each shop will refresh their inventory selecting new items and quantity to sell, and that is dictated by the store’s budget. Each time an item is selected the budget goes down and this simulates an economy of sorts. When you buy that item from them they get an extra % of what they paid which increases the store’s budget thus they can buy more expensive items when the shop’s inventory refreshes. So somewhere like Stonehaven with lots of people buying from them will boast a huge variety and selection of items and have more of a chance to sell a super rare item. So be sure to always check the stores when they refresh so you dont miss out on a rare item because once it’s sold out, it’s gone until it’s possibly selected for a refresh the next week.
There are some more little systems still going on in the background such as a day and night cycle along with a weather system, but those are kinda more background things that just make the world more alive. But they are still an aspect of user interaction. The possibilities for the action service are endless such as an action for mages to change the time of day or elves running a ritual to clear the skies from a nasty storm. These systems are all interlinked and modular that everything I as a programmer can do with code, you can do with actions. It’s an exciting system and is what Wyverns Crest is all about.
That about sums up what I have in place and the systems im still working on. If you are as excited as I am about the possibilities be sure to let me know and give me suggestions. Nothing is impossible to do with the way I have things laid out so dont restrict your imagination. There are also a lot of things I have in store for after-release updates but that would require an entire document all on its own, so for now, be excited about what I have talked about here and look forward to the future.
Talk to you guys again soon, Stay frosty
- SinfullyFrosty
Closing statements
Whew, that was a lot of information, but man was that exciting. I hope you guys are all as excited as we are here on the development team. Something to remember is that this is all early access stuff and things can and will change but we will be sure to let you guys know. We plan to do these dev logs as much as possible but we are a small two-man army as of now with our own real-life stuff. If you want to support us, be sure to share the server with your friends. We might plan on doing some paid special access stuff but as of right now, everyone here and now in this server is already our special access member.
Again thank you all so much for being here and reading about our goals and passion for Wyverns Crest. We cannot stress enough how grateful we are for every one of you.
We are open to your feedback on our new game. Our community server can be found in our group as well, where we recommend bug reports and suggestions.
Until next time,
Wyverns Crest Development Team
