Mike Hines's page

I'd just like to pipe in and say something. I've been in the game industry for around 16 years now. I've seen a lot of companies come and go, and worked for like 8 I think. In all that time, I haven't seen, or heard of, a game company as dedicated to making a game with a focus on building a true community (with the possible exception of Cyan, who I loved working for as a result). I've worked for good companies, and worked with people who cared about the games, but never for a company whose focus is so clearly on the quality of the game features and experience, or which has such a connection to the community and interest in making them (you) happy.

We are a TINY company for the scale of game we are trying to make. Our budget is a pittance compared to other games of this scale and complexity, even though it may seem like a lot of money. We are infinitely grateful for the money each of you has spent and your support, and doing everything we can to eek every iota out of that funding (as I sit here on hour 80 or so of working this week). All of that is so we can be sustainable and make this work for Pathfinder fans and a relatively focused online game community that we see as 'where it's at'.

Yes, I realize that none of you know me really, and that I work for Goblinworks, but seeing comments suggesting this team is trying to milk people for money hits a bit hard considering the reality I experience daily. I hope you will take it to heart that we are doing everything we can to make a company and game that can live on for many years and be a living and vibrant community. As part of that, we will do everything humanly possible to make sure the experience is balanced and not 'pay to win', because we believe that has a huge bearing on building on the quality of the community, and that is utterly key to us. However, as with any business, revenue is life blood, and gives us the ability to keep growing and building the world and features for all of you.

Thank you all for the support and input. Sorry I don't prepare more cool screenshots and videos... SO MUCH TO DO.

I just wanted to add a note that the faces are just static placeholders at the moment (one male one female), and we will be doing a ton of work on that.

I'm also working on a video and a bunch of screenshots with the players actually doing something interesting. Taking decent MMO screenshots obviously requires multiple people, and I generally try not to pull the art team (or rest of the team) off to do screenshots and such considering how much we have to do. That being said, I am working on setting up a capture scene with more dynamic cameras and we are planning to do a quick capture session in the next day or two to get some good shots and footage for another art update video. I expect we will have quite a bit of that to show for the next blog :)

Thanks for the feedback and compliments. The art team always loves to hear both!

Thanks for the comments! Some responses, but keep in mind that I'm just the art director, so you can probably not trust anything I say with regard to the design ;)

Areks and Nihimon - yes, the light yellow/green hexes are the settlements and the pink/purple hexes are the monster hexes, which would be the source of your misery (or entertainment I guess ;) ). And it is definitely very subject to change!

Harad Navar - The elevations are very likely to change. Designing the whole world is a very tricky process, and I'll probably do another full pass before more areas are detailed out. It is over-magnified in height diversity to make the world more interesting. I am spending a lot of time talking to the Paizo team about striking a balance between the previously defined aspects of Pathfinder world and having a fun and interesting world to physically explore in the virtual world. Forested rolling hills sound awesome until you physically have to run through them for days on end with no changes. We'll probably end up striking a balance between the normal MMO world of constant micro-environment changes and the boring nature of 'realistic' environments. We want it to be believable, not far off of any existing descriptions of specific places, but also interesting from moment to moment for the players. The waterlines are far from anything I'm really developing at the moment, so they will almost certainly change completely.

Thornkeep is not really detailed on the terrain in the video yet, or much else other than a starting hex and the primary roads. The settlement hex and surrounding hexes that have been developed are for us to figure a lot of things out, but they are completely subject to change and not necessarily any point of focus for the actual game... it's just an area we are developing for testing.

The circle areas around the settlement are the initial test areas for encounter locations, which would be dynamically chosen and populated by the escalation system. They are all wilderness hexes. The settlement itself takes up a good chunk of the center hex. The terrain in the video is an older version and all of the encounter spots have been naturally integrated into the terrain and trees placed already, I just didn't have time to re-shoot that video. I will say that it's all a pretty huge amount of space. It's misleading to see it from the air and without the detail objects and vegetation in.

We're working on ways to create a lot of building variants both for visual variety, settlement and structure customization, and indications of game state, but our first job is to make sure there's enough content in the world to satisfy all of the core game design needs, at which point we will certainly add everything humanly possible to make it more full of life, variety and awesomeness. I promise you we are squeezing out every bit of quality content we can, optimizing our pipeline as much as possible, and coming up with inventive ways to make our work count.

And of course, as you know, all of this is very subject to change ;)

Thanks for all of the comments and feedback!

I'll just reiterate what Ryan said with regard to the female clothing and equipment options. We want to hear your feedback and do our best to walk the line between 'desirable' and 'exploitative' as he puts it. We obviously have pretty tight limitations on how many assets we can produce initially, but in the long term we hope to provide lots of options. We have even been discussing the possibility of creating a player 'style' setting that would allow you to choose between more conservative or liberal looks. However, this has both a technology and very significant art asset production hit, so it would almost certainly have to come as a later option.

In the meantime, we are focused on making outfits that have some mid-range appeal. Additionally, we are trying to follow the rule of reason more than most games in the sense that we aren't treating bare female skin in armor suits like it has an apparent massive AC bonus ;). That doesn't mean we won't show some skin on both males and females, but it may correspond more directly to the level of armor of the suit. With robes, it is entirely about the decorative element, since they have no effect on AC. We will certainly try to provide a range of looks on them as well though. We're still working through a lot of the designs, so hearing your thoughts certainly helps shape our direction.

Ultimately we want to know what you think and want, and I'd specifically love to hear from more women who want to play female characters in the game... on either side of the liberal/conservative dress argument. I think we all want a more balanced male/female player base in the game, so my goal is to provide everyone options that makes them enjoy playing their character (keeping in mind our relatively small team and timeline).

Similarly, we definitely want to provide body variation customization options, but it's also a hit on the already very tight art production schedule and has some potential for technology development impact depending on how we do it. It's all a balancing act of trying to give you the most features we can with what time we have available, and our initial focus is on giving you great looking core gear and characters while still planning for the customization systems so we don't box ourselves into a corner where that is notably difficult.

We will definitely be detailing out more about settlement and structure customization and art in the future, so no worries on that front. We're all very excited about the way things are headed on that, and we think you will be too :)

Thanks again for the thoughts and feedback!