We sat down with Ten Ton Hammer last week to discuss the future of Blackstar. Read all about it here.

This blog will focus on technology’s perspective of our grayworlding process. Before we get going, here is a final screenshot from the game showing what all this work leads to:

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As mentioned in previous blogs, rapid game prototyping allows for flexibility and quick iteration in order to create the most exciting experience for the player. In this blog we will focus on the other side of the coin, the visual one. Here’s the final concept for the Forbidden Core, and our process for getting there.

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“Games today are large and complex.” It seems that we could start every one of our Dev Blogs with this opening and still not make a dent in the challenges faced in making a “Next Gen MMO” – but maybe we can scratch the surface and show how we’ve adapted and evolved our development processes.

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Getting Started

We believe that top-tier MMO games (like our project “Blackstar”) need to have awesome player-versus-player gameplay to achieve a rich and fulfilling overall experience. So, from the very beginning we set out to ensure that we would have a strong PVP foundation and that we would be play-testing (and adjusting) PVP as soon as it was possible for us to do so. Fortunately, the end result of these efforts saw us making meaningful changes to our PVP rules, player abilities, weapons, area scale, movement rates and overall game balance … on a daily basis. Our PVP solution began with a Conflict Zone map.

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