The way Fantastic Pixel Castle is putting together its upcoming MMO Ghost certainly appears to be quite different from the usual game dev trajectory. For example, the studio held what it calls an “innovation week” this past spring in which devs were put together into teams to craft different kinds of prototypes, and followers of the project are getting a late look at the results of that affair.
The “teams” in question formed to consider things like loading screens, how tanking works, voxel tools and world creation tools, traversal, and making blue zones. The various projects yielded some new prototypes including the first pass at voxel-based sculpting tools for players, some new ways for the devs to quickly create blue zones along with some rough hypotheses on how to make them work, and some in-progress travel features like gliders, jump pads, and a skeletal dragon mount.
One of the more interesting portions for players may be related to tank concepts, which saw the team considering new ideas on holding threat such as changing boss behavior by making it more docile or afraid of fire, making bosses focus on attacking the party instead of one player, or having dynamic reactions by the boss to things like the kind of armor a player is wearing. “We’re still asking these questions – and we’re excited to explore these layered interactions further,” the blog notes. “Even if they don’t all work out, we think we’re really onto something here to provide unique, exciting, and immersive combat experiences to our players in Ghost.”
Of course, all of this is just another incremental step towards realizing the MMO that the team wants Ghost to become, which reads like the game still has a very long way to go, but FPC is making sure it puts aside time to try new things instead of anchor itself to a to-do list. In the meantime, Greg Street is prepping for his next monthly podcast about the game today, and the studio is sharing what is (presumably) the accidental creation of an all-consuming ur-horse.
Possible names for this raid boss:
– Night Mare
– The Neighslayer
– Horseberus
– Force of Neighture
– NeighphelimDrop your suggestions! 👇 #totallynormalponies #justgamedevthings pic.twitter.com/Nv3FoIs5on
— Fantastic Pixel Castle (@FPCStudio) June 14, 2024
