Dev Blog | Animating Spirit Dragons
Here's the latest in our series of Dev Blogs on the Arc – coming July.

Want to know more? Look out for Mod Osborne’s July BTS, and a healthy helping of Dev Q&As in the weeks to come.

But now, over to Mod Hing!

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Hello peeps!

This is Mod Hing, Animator for The Guardians. I’m going to share some of the challenges I faced in trying to bring the spirit dragons of The Arc (as first mentioned in Mod Joe’s dev blog) to life.



Spirit dragons are the highest-tier slayer creatures that you will face on the Aminishi island. Before I started animating, some of the things I had to consider were:

• How the dragons will move around within a set area
• How are they going to translate from moving around to a 'ready' stance for combat
• How to deal with certain technical limitations of our in-house tools while in rigging and animating the dragons

Spirit Dragon - Pre-Animation

First, I had to research how we wanted the dragons to travel around. We leaned towards Chinese dragon designs, which we decided should travel in a wave like motion where the head leads the body. So where the head turns, each segment of the body will follow in a delayed manner leading to the characteristic motion.

Finding out how I was going to animate the dragon with the tools we have took some R and D. We currently use an in-house animation tool which doesn’t come with a wave deformer, so there was no quick and easy way to make the dragon model animate in the fashion we wanted. Another way would have been to use a spine-like system with rotation, but because our tool has a non-standard rigging structure it would have taken a long time, requiring me to go through each frame adjusting the pose by hand. It wouldn’t have been impossible, but it wasn’t efficient enough for our needs.

So after doing some research with my team leader, we decided to use translate instead of rotations to animate the dragon.

First, the dragon was modelled in a straight line so it would be easier for me to change its body shape, and so it would deform better. I then rigged up the body into separate segments. To get the basic wavelike animation, I animated the neck of the dragon going up and down, and copied this motion to all the segments of the body behind the neck. After this, I selected all the body segments, offset the animation by one frame and copied and pasted the animation to the body segments. I then deselected the body segment behind the neck and did the same thing. Then it was a case of repeating the offset, copy and paste process, each time deselecting a segment behind the last segment until I’d gone all the way down the hierarchy. With the main animation complete, it was just the case of adding extra motion to the arms, legs and the features.

When it came to combat, we didn’t want the dragons to be in their travelling state as, they would have taken up too much room. We decided that the dragons should be coiled up while in combat to show that they are focused on attacking the player, ready to strike. The problem with having a completely different pose is that it will create a popping effect. One moment the dragon is stretched out in a wave shape and the next - pop! - they are curled up.

To make it more of a smooth transition, we needed to add some kind of blending. Again, our tool doesn’t have a blending system, so we had to find a way to mimic it.

We achieved this by adding an extra cycle to the start of the travelling and combat-ready animations. So for the travelling animation, it would start with the ready pose and in one server cycle it would blend into the travelling pose giving it a smoother transition and then the travelling animation will play. It blends because the software is calculating the in-between pose of the ready pose and the travelling pose. This is called Tweening. So for example, if you have two poses - a standing pose and a sitting pose - the in-between pose will probably be a crouching pose. To get it even smoother, you would select the standing pose and the crouching pose and add another in-between, so the new pose would be somewhere between the standing pose and the crouching pose and so on. Then, we finish it by adding some final touches. The same thing is then done to the ready animation, but the other way round.

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Hopefully this will give you some idea of how I got the spirit dragons animated. Thanks for reading!

Mod Hing
Animator – The Guardians

Dev Blog | The Arc - Narrative
Following on from Mod Joe's blog about the overall plan for July's Arc project, and Mod Orion's blog about the Uncharted Islands, here's Mod Rowley with some info on the content's narrative elements.

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Ports!
Ports voyages are already overflowing with narrative content. Even the simplest of voyages could mention a new character or faction, a sea monster or event. At the time of their writing, we weren't considering that these were things we would ever see in-game, and as such, there are lots of ideas that wouldn't even work as game content. As text, your mind can fill in the blanks that no amount of graphical budget ever could.

As such, Ports has made the Eastern Lands a true melting pot of concepts, a blending of real-world cultures and mythologies, original creations and thinly disguised pop culture references. In one way, that's great for us, as it's a treasure trove of ideas for us to draw upon and a great starting place. On the other hand, there are more concepts available than we could ever do justice to, even with years of development time.

To reel off 'just a few' from the Arc region alone we have (take a deep breath) Incha the sea harpy, invisible salmon, tusked lions, Waiko earthquakes, various sites of magical significance, Shuma, flying squid, cyclopes, sirens and seasingers, Purists, sea orphans, soothsayers, smugglers, oxen, haunted islands, various missionaries from the west, Skulls pirates, sky orphan temples, giant turtles, bamboo, isolationists...(phew).

This list isn't exhaustive by any means, and we wouldn't only want to be making content based on descriptions of Ports voyages anyway. We've got plenty of our own new ideas, a heap of great suggestions from RuneLabs, and some new narrative based on Monkeymaner's Temple in the Sky idea.

It's possible that, over time, more of these ideas will make their way into the game beyond the short text descriptions they currently have. For our July and October releases for the Arc, however, we've had to be selective. As a result, some parts of the Arc will feel familiar to Ports players, and we're hoping that other elements will end up being an unexpected surprise.

Ports Adventurers
One element of Ports that we will most definitely be using in the Arc is the various adventurers. We'd be silly not to use them. You couldn't ask for a more varied, eclectic and developed bunch of characters.



For the most part, they will only be visible to players who have actually met them in Ports, though in a couple of cases they might be available earlier (but suitably standoffish). In all cases, however, they will reflect your current progress through their personal story voyages.

Elements of their stories will also come into play. For example, Lydilla (The Architect) lives on Waiko, and her story revolves around finding building materials strong enough to withstand that island's earthquakes. This particular facet is more likely to come into play in October's release, though.

Motivation
As a team, we've also decided to release a graphical rework of Port Sarim. Much like the Falador graphical rework, Port Sarim's rework will be accompanied by a small event. Through this, we'll be building up to your first proper journey east, to give you narrative motivation to go there beyond just wanting to explore it.

Before you'll be able to sail off to the Arc, you'll first have the Raid on Port Sarim to deal with. Structurally, it is similar to The Invasion of Falador (albeit on a slightly smaller scale), but more on that at a later date.

Some of you will be familiar with a character called Jed. He was introduced in Mega May, though we always planned to continue his story. Jed will be your initial antagonist in the Arc region, but dealing with him will just be the first step as you strike out farther east. Charming as he might be, Jed is a Skulls pirate slaver and not a nice person. While Skippy and co. might be safe back home, others haven't been quite so lucky.



We already know Trader Stan hasn't been lucky, with Jed having stolen one of his ships, so you'll also want to talk to Stan to begin the first of the Tales of the Arc: Impressing the Locals. This is the Raid on Port Sarim's equivalent of the Invasion of Falador's Banner of Radallin quest, and it will be a requirement for visiting the Arc.

Just to be clear, this miniquest is the only requirement for visiting the Arc, itself only requiring membership to complete, and it will be the only element of the Raid on Port Sarim event that will be permanent content.

Quests versus miniquests
Tales of the Arc will be the main narrative content in the region. It was clear early on that the bulk of development time on this project would have to go into actually building the known islands of the Arc region. Filling them with things to do then became the next most important thing, to give players reason to keep going back there. Creating a full-length quest on top of that just wasn't feasible, so we opted to instead create a number of 'mini' quests.

In structure, they are simpler than a full-blown quest, focussing more on character and story than bespoke set-pieces, puzzles and boss fights. In addition to Impressing the Locals, we're aiming to have one Tale per inhabited island, though not necessarily focussed on each island.

So how many islands will be coming with July's update, and which ones? Well, your first port of call in July is going to be Waiko (a trading hub), along with Whale's Maw (a haven for fishermen) and Aminishi (home of the Acolytes of Seiryu – see below for more on them).

This means, for July, we're aiming to have three further miniquests set in the Arc region proper. The other four locations – Tuai Leit, Goshima, Cyclosis (you'll have to discover this one in Ports first), and The Islands that Once were Turtles – will arrive in October. That release will likely bring another three, and we're considering a final one to form part of this year's Halloween update. That's up to eight miniquests in total in place of one or two regular quests, though the final number and distribution is, of course, still subject to change.

In the future, once more of the Wushanko Islands have been built, we have no doubt that they'll be home to full-length quests. A lot of the initial stories will be on a more personal level (the Eastern Lands is free from the influence of gods, but it's not without its own problems).

Also, Mod Stu clearly missed the 'mini' part when he worked on his quest. The internally titled 'headquest' (one of July's miniquests) is on the longer side. Bad Stu, bad.

The Acolytes of Seiryu
Monkeymaner's concept has been ever-so-slightly tweaked to better fit into the established narrative of the Eastern Lands. Instead of a Temple of the Sky (with air monks and elementals), we've made it a Temple of Seiryu - the azure dragon of legend - as depicted on the highest-tier Ports portal. For a number of reasons, it's made more sense for us to theme this around water instead of air, but narratively everything else is still there – the monks, elementals and spirit dragons, and suggestions of a temple.


Work In Progress

It's a previously unnamed faction in the Eastern Lands, but one that fits in very neatly, and leaves us future room to expand upon. Perhaps later regions will also see you running into other new factions focussed on the other known legendary creatures of the east – Byakko the White Tiger, Suzaku the Vermilion Bird, and Genbu the Black Tortoise.

Random lore drops
One other way in which we'll be delivering some narrative is through random lore drops. The story surrounding the Acolytes of Seiryu is likely to be delivered in this way (time permitting). And what would desert islands be without at least one message in a bottle? Where it might lead, though, is anyone's guess at this point, so we'll leave this for you to discover for yourselves.



Mod Rowley
Senior Content Developer | The Guardians

Dev Blog | Welcome to the Arc
Hi there,

I'm Mod Joe, Product Owner of the Guardians team. As I write this, we have recently released the River of Blood quest. We've been fully immersed in the darkness of Morytania for the past few months, and we really need a holiday - preferably somewhere hot and sunny.

I can think of no better place than the Eastern Lands!

This project all started with you, through RuneLabs. Loads of ideas were submitted for the Player Power Month poll earlier this year and - honestly – we all thought that either Menaphos or the Underwater City would be the clear winner. The Arc Islands won, though, and we were hugely surprised and massively excited. That choice requires a very different approach from our team – and an all-new set of challenges.

Our two most recent projects - The Lord of Vampyrium and River of Blood - have been story-driven, and – as such – spoiler sensitive. Fortunately, the nature of The Arc means that we can be much more open with you all about the update – and we can't wait to start sharing it!

So - this'll be the first of several dev blogs from the Guardians team, where we'll tell you what we are working on and how the Eastern Lands are shaping up. Read on to find out!

Where are we now?
Back in January we commissioned some mood art from the Concept team to get the feel for the place we were going to build. We also had a very quick play with some water effects in NXT in March, as part of our prep for the islands.

Since the whole team was concentrating on River of Blood from January through to the end of April though, we didn't manage to do create any new art or gameplay assets. It did, however, get us thinking about what we'd want to see in the Arc Islands.

Based on reviewing RuneLabs ideas, as well as our own team brainstorms, we've selected a few key ideas that we really liked:

Slayer
Firstly - Slayer should feature, along with some new Slayer creatures. We've started working with the Concept team to get a flavour of what we can do. We really liked Monkeymaner's Runelabs idea which won the poll, so we'll be taking inspiration from this while still ensuring it fits in with the rest of the narrative. We are thinking at least a couple of new enemy types (along with some variations).

We probably won't have a new Slayer master in the traditional sense, but there will be some way to get Slayer XP based on specific targets. It's early days for us - we haven't started modelling any characters yet - but here are some initial designs from the concept artists:



Player Owned Ports
Secondly, the Arc should clearly be linked to Player-Owned Ports somehow. We are designing this update for our high-level players, but that's not to say that if you are lower level you will be blocked from visiting. Bear in mind that (just like in Player-Owned Ports) if you want to see everything in the Arc you'll need to be level 90+ in a handful of skills. More news on this from us as we start building our content and have more details to talk about.

We will, of course, build on established content.You be able to visit the Architect on Waiko, and we're hoping to add other familiar faces, too.

A Fresh Start
One idea we all really liked from RuneLabs was the concept of a closed or new economy. This means that everyone starts out on a level playing field and can't just spend money to unlock everything from day one.

We will be introducing a new currency, and while you won't be able to trade any of your existing gold or resources, we will probably let you take Eastern Lands home and re-invest them in Ports resources.

All your existing Ports resources will be tied in to running your own Port, though, and you won't be able to use them when you get to the Arc itself. It'll be everyone for themselves – exciting times!

The Rest
It was clear that given the ideas from the team and player expectation for this update we couldn't produce all the islands in our normal three month window. I'm therefore happy to say that we've been given double the time of our normal updates for the Arc region. Whilst we didn't want you to have to wait until October for us to finish the whole area, we are planning to give you half of the Arc islands in July so you'll get the opportunity to play it early and give us feedback so we can build it in to the second update.

For October, the Guardians have also landed the Halloween update, so expect this to feature on one of the islands as well. The holiday event will be open to everyone, so even if you still have some way to level up you will definitely get an opportunity to visit the Eastern Lands later this year.

Next time expect to see dev blogs from Mod Rowley on what kind of story and lore you can expect to find out more about in the Arc and Mod Orion on how he is planning to let you explore the islands themselves. While you are waiting, have another piece of our concept art to whet your appetite!



Mod Joe
Product Owner - The Guardians