City of Steam Developer Journals - Design 2012 01 10 news

Design Dev Journal

House System Preview

Here’s a look at the common room of the house that will, sometime after Alpha, be at the center of the City of Steam experience. While each individual character will have private, race-specific quarters accessible by the stairs, complete with quest-giving family members and friends and such, all of the player characters in your account will spend their off-hours hanging around here. You might come home to find your Orc Warder peering in the fridge for a snack, or your Riven Channeler curled up on the couch. If you want to switch to another character, simply find wherever that character NPC is lounging and say so.

It should be clear that the place is a bit of a fixer-upper. The lack of doors is…okay, that’s our fault, and they’ll come free of charge. Everything else can either be upgraded outright (so long, ratty carpet!), will improve according to common room quests, or just change naturally as you reach milestones in the game. Other elements of appearance will respond to maintenance; stay away too long and you might find your common room overrun with clockroaches. There will be plenty of other reasons to return to the house, though, besides keeping things nice and fresh. Mysterious and delightful gift deliveries, for example, won’t stack up.

We hope you like the layout of the player house, and that you’ll invite friends over to see what you’ve done with the place!

World Machine
For those of you who are still waiting for the interactive World Machine Unity project, suffice it to say that we’re still working on it. Mark has come back from his holiday travels and is hard at work putting together this exciting, animated look at the nations and components of the Mechanism. Here’s a quick look at the project design:

Please go to our Developer Journal Page to dig more about the development of City of Steam.