Yesterday, an amazing announcement was made that will make any fans of Crowfall and anyone who watches idly with interest extremely happy and cause everyone else to give Crowfall a second glance. I believe ArtCraft may have cracked how to bring a crowdfunded game to market. The team’s knowledge of the business side of the development has led to an additional $6 million investment, which according to their funding tracker was roughly an additional 60% in funds. And while expanding the Crowfall team is great news, their announcement to use those funds for marketing is equally excellent. To have grown from a crowdfunded project to a company with this type of momentum is fairly rare. It’s no Star Citizen, but not everyone can make all the money. While testers (myself included) await the promised glory of patch 5.3, I continue to be excited for weekly updates as news has almost always been increasingly promising.
Since we covered the Founder’s Update yesterday, today I’ll examine the December Q&A which happens to be less ‘Q’ and mostly ‘A’ as Todd and UX Design Lead Billy Garretsen jump right into upcoming improvements to the UI. This is by far one of my favorite Q&A videos because it’s packed with the team’s inspiration and motivation behind particular improvements, in this case the UI and the character sheet.
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Inspired by Diablo and Path of Exile and learning from the greatest and earliest of RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, the character sheet will soon become one window instead of individually docked windows. This window will have all stats, disciplines, and equipment readily available. I love listening to Todd’s intentions for this type of UI and how it encourages player aspirations. There are particular revelations about character sheets that I never considered but are surprisingly true.
Also, if you remember that I mentioned the importance of maps in last week’s article. Well, Todd and Billy discuss that very subject in the Q&A. I can’t wait to see what the next iteration of it is, and why they decide to design it the way that they do. While they said it would probably become less stylized, I think they should take a unique approach to creating something both unique in style but with all the functionality necessary for something an complex as player built strongholds and procedurally generated worlds.
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Feel free to watch the video below, especially if you like hearing about design inspiration. Like I said, it’s one of their best yet.
