Dev Blog 4: Ore Harvesting and Airship Flight
Greetings, Elysians!
Jeff is currently on vacation so I’ve taken on the important task of providing updates for our latest dev blog. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Ray Soto, Lead Producer of our studio. Some of you may have seen me in our Discord server or posting questions to the team during our live streams. I run the day-to-day overseeing the development of EoE working closely with the team and finding every opportunity to share my love of Castlevania (Simon’s Quest is an amazing game!).
I’m excited to share updates with all of you about the last two weeks of development. If I were to provide a headline, it would be that our game’s airship survival loop is nearly complete as a playable experience. We continued to build on the foundation set during the last dev cycle with a new ore harvesting mechanic, UI, airship flight systems, and more. Let’s dive in!
Ore Harvesting
With our airship wood harvesting loop on the books, it was time to turn our attention to ore harvesting! After loads of tuning and playtesting, we think you’ll have a lot of fun with our harvesting cycle. This week, we implemented our ore harvesting tools and gameplay.
For those of you who missed it, you can catch a look at airship harvesting in our Trailer!
Check out this brand new ore harvesting cycle:
Fire drills from your ore harvesting turret (see very cool animation, above)
Destroy ore nodes
Nodes drop haulable rock chunks
Shoot your grappling hook at the chunks
Pull chunks up to your airship
Remove chunks for processing in your airship crafting stations
You don’t punch trees in Elysium so having an interesting and unique harvesting system is top priority for us! We can’t wait to see y’all systematically deforesting and strip mining the Greek paradise of Elysium!
Airship flight and UI
Elysian aesthetics got a massive glow up this week! Check out the all new duo of spicy HUD upgrades in the screenshot above.
Up first: Airship UI. You can’t say your speedometer is broken when EoEPD pulls you over for speeding anymore. Airship UI will allow you to measure your speed, wind direction, remaining fuel, altitude, and more! We’ve also added snappy new icons to represent your sails, boosters, and thrusters. Not to mention the best part; it looks really, really cool! We’re so excited for you to check it out.
Pro tip: you can watch our UI evolve in real time if you follow our #official-art channel in Discord
Our second upgrade is a little less flashy but very useful for all you explorers out there. Check out that sweet compass. This puppy will show you all the nearest drydocks, airships, players, and even guide you back to your tombstone if you get jumped by a pack of howlers! You’re probably thinking “Bear, this is an aerial exploration game. I need to be able to dynamically measure the vertical and horizontal distance of the compass marker that I’m flying towards and have the compass indicate whether it’s above, below, or on the same plane as my ship.” You’re exactly right and we got you covered. <3
Crawler
I’m gonna go ahead and stop y’all before you ask. You can’t pet the crawlers. Please don’t adopt them. These little cuties got added to the game officially this week but they’ve been in the works for a while! They add a new aspect to gameplay that will BLOW your mind. We know you’ll have a BLAST exploring Elysium with the Crawlers around.
If you haven’t already, join us on Discord to stay up to date and to connect directly with our team. We’re excited to hear from you and to answer any questions you might have about Echoes of Elysium.
Stay tuned for more,
-Ray + 🐻
