Author Archives: dallas

About dallas

Made some games. Lots of games.

Update of the Avatar #45 – 10/25/13: Unity Scene Jam #3 Winners, Story Sneak Peek, City Basements, Wizard Tower, Baron 3 Pledge, and More!

October 25, 2013

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Welcome to another edition of Update of the Avatar! Here’s what we have for you this week:

Unity Scene Jam #3 Winners
Story Sneak Peeks
City Basements
Wizard Tower Village Home
SWAG: More T-shirt sizes & multi-item discount
New Baron 3 Pledge
Recruit-A-Friend Promotion 6-Day Countdown

Unity Scene Jam #3 Winners

[Chris Spears narrates a walk-thru of the Scene Jam #3 Winners]

The Unity Scene Jam #1 challenge was to build an ancient lunar rift. The second scene challenge took a step forward in time to when people retreated underground and created the catacombs. For Scene Jam #3 we took another step forward in time to when people moved back to the surface and rebuilt villages and towns, so the challenge for Jam #3 was to build a village scene.

Update of the Avatar #44 – 10/18/13: Lord of the Manor Home, Crafting Sigil, Story Sneak Peek #2, Avatar Outfits, Basements, Scene Jam Results, & More!

October 19, 2013

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

Welcome to this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar! More cool stuff to share, including:

The Crafting Sigil
Another Story Sneak Peek
More Avatar Outfits
SWAG: T-shirts and Coins
Lord of the Manor Event
Lord of the Manor City Home
More Basements
Unity Scene Jam Results
Recruit-A-Friend Contest

The Crafting Sigil

The Crafting Sigil displays the three rings of Crafting: Gathering, Refining and Production. Each ring contains five different skills. The innermost ring is the Gathering Ring and includes: Mining, Forestry, Agriculture, Field Dressing, and Foraging. The middle ring is the Refining Ring and includes: Smelting, Milling, Textiles, Tanning, and Butchery. The outermost ring is the Production Ring and includes Blacksmithing, Carpentry, Tailoring, Cooking, and Alchemy.

Update of the Avatar #43 – 10/10/13: Combat Sigil, Story Sneak Peek, Basements, Druid Home, Bonus Rewards, & More!

October 10, 2013

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

We have some amazing stuff to share in this edition of Update of the Avatar! We’re revealing the awesome looking Combat Sigil, we’ve added player housing basements (and included them as bonus rewards in the Citizen level pledges and up), we have more to show on the Druid Home, as well as a long-awaited sneak peek at a snippet of the story that Tracy Hickman and Richard Garriott have been secretly crafting!

Combat Sigil

Followers of the martial path use this mighty combat sigil as their symbol. The sigil shows the eight schools of combat that a warrior can follow. There are four armor schools: Light Armor (Cloth & Leather), Medium Armor (Chain & Scale), Heavy Armor (Plate), and Shields. There are four weapon schools: Blades (Swords & Axes), Polearms (Halberds & Spears), Bludgeons (Hammers & Clubs), and Ranged (Bows & Crossbows).

Stephen Daniele (lead concept artist) provided these different treatments of the combat sigil:

October 9, 2013

We are determined to help Tracy and Laura get to the $55,00 Stretch goal where they will produce a set of three, linked Story Modules set in the world of Shroud of the Avatar, to be released exclusively to the backers of each project. To help reach this goal, Shroud of the Avatar and Sojourner Tales are excited to announce a very special offer to celebrate the final day of Tracy and Laura Hickman’s Sojourner Tales Kickstarter! We will award each and every Shroud of the Avatar Adventurer* who pledges to Sojourner Tales at the $20 and above level a UNIQUE Sojourner themed in-game item.

So jump on over to the Sojourner Tales Kickstarter campaign and make your pledge! Better hurry because today is the last day!

[*Adventure Tier is $40 for Founders, $45 for Benefactors.]

Update of the Avatar #42 – 10/04/13: Founder Lord Home, Benefactor Edelmann Home, Avatar Outfits, & Scene Jam #2

October 4, 2013

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

This edition of Update of the Avatar continues our Parade of Homes, showcasing the Founder Lord Town Home and Benefactor Edelmann Village Home. Also have some new female avatar outfits to share, and news about this weekend’s 48-hour Unity Scene Jam #2!

Founder Lord Town Home

Artists Bob Cooksey and Michael Hutchison came up with a dignified design for our Founder Lord Town home! Only available to Founders (included as a reward in the Lord level pledge). An extremely spacious two-story dwelling, with an open-air roof deck suitable for crafting or entertaining:

Update of the Avatar #41 – 09/27/13: Sigil of Magic, Collector’s Coin, Crafting Stations, Unity Scene Jam Winner, & More

September 27, 2013

Greetings Fellow Avatars!

More cool stuff to share with you in this edition of Update of the Avatar, including the Sigil of Magic, progress on the crafting stations, results of our first 48-hour Unity Scene Jam, Founder Collector’s Coin, updated FAQ, and more!

Unity Scene Jam #1 Winner

Our first Unity Scene Jam was a great success! This scene challenge involved a design that included a “Lunar Rift” and the ruins around it. We asked for the Lunar Rift to be one up on a plateau or at least on top of a very steep hill (see challenge design description here). We received a total of 48 submissions, with some awesome talent participating!

It was tough to choose the winner from among the top entries, but after much deliberation, Richard, Starr, and Chris unanimously chose Richard Matey as the First Place winner of our first Shroud of the Avatar Unity Scene Jam! Chris Spears prepared this video walking you through Richard Matey’s sweet looking scene. So crank the quality up to HD, switch to full-screen, and enjoy!

As one of our First Place weekend winners, he will receive a Knight Level Pledge, signed game box, and SotA t-shirt! Congratulations Richard Matey!

Coming in at Second Place is the team of Charles Howell and Mark A. Barros. Check out this cool image from their scene:

And Third Place goes to Melchior Meijer:

We were so impressed with the top entries, that we decided to award pledge credits to the second and third place winners! Congratulations to Charles, Mark, and Melchior!

The Sigil of Magic

There are nine schools of magic in Shroud of the Avatar: the eight elemental schools of Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Sun, Moon, Life, and Death with the ninth school of Chaos in the center of them all. Each school has a focus. Fire magic, for example, directly damages your enemies but also has a tendency to light them on fire, prolonging the damage dealt. Water magic on the other hand is about slowing your opponents with ice and healing your allies with soothing rains. The sigil represents how all the schools relate to each other and it will appear inked on parchment, carved into stone, sewn into cloth and minted into metal coins.

Pledge Grace Period Ends May 20th, Updated Tier Prices & Descriptions, Modified Titles

May 17, 2013

It took us longer than expected to finalize the changes to the pledge tiers, but after much brainstorming, editing, debating, re-editing, soliciting community feedback, editing again, staring at them some more, tweaking here and tweaking there, we’re finally ready to make the updated pledges public! We did our best to walk the tightrope between ensuring the modified rewards are appealing to new backers while showing our deep appreciation for our special early backers with lots of Exclusive Early Founder rewards. If we were ever in doubt about whether a reward should be reserved for our Early Founders, or made available to new backers, we leaned towards reserving it exclusively for our Early Founders. As you read through the updated tier descriptions outlined below, we feel certain that most of you will agree the new tiers contain enough great rewards to attract new backers, while reserving a great many awesome rewards for our very special Early Founders!

Title Changes

We also want to thank all of you that provided feedback about how we should handle in-game honorific titles for new backers and Early Founders. There is quite a lively thread filled with great title suggestions over on the forums (https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=community-feedback-request-for-new-tier-titles). We did our best to weigh all the suggestions, and balance the varied considerations. Our primary goals for the title modifications were 1) Provide special, easily identifiable, titles to the Early Founders, 2) clean up some of the title ranking inconsistencies and generic titles, and 3) allow Early Founders to choose from any of the titles, including the new backer titles, the special founder titles, and even the inconsistently ranked and generic titles originally described in the Kickstarter tiers.

There were several suggestions to make the Early Founder titles stand out visually by using a different colored font, which is a great idea! Thus, all Early Founder titles will be in gold colored font when viewed in-game! Additionally, most of the Early Founder titles either have a special prefix, or are ranked higher than the new backer title for the same tier. Several community members posted the proper ranking of titles, which we also cross-referenced with Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_and_noble_ranks). The biggest changes were with the Lord tier and above (where we didn’t adequately research proper ranking when we originally named those tiers and titles). We did our best to balance the divergent community opinions regarding these title changes.

Grace Period Ends at 12 pm CST on May 20th; Early Backers Lock-In Lower Tier Prices

The new tiers will go live at 12 pm CST on Monday, May 20, 2013. The prices for the tiers have increased an average of about 10%, but all backers that have pledged any amount prior to the end of the grace period will be able to upgrade their pledges thru April 7, 2014 at the old, lower prices! So if you haven’t already pledged, then hurry up and get your pledge in before the end of the grace period so you can lock in the lower prices for your future tier upgrades!

NEW TIER DESCRIPTIONS

Announcing Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues!

March 8, 2013

Did you miss today’s Live-stream Broadcast by Lord British (aka Richard Garriott), announcing his return to the Fantasy RPG genre with Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues! Not to worry! You can watch it here:

You can also head over to our Kickstarter page and learn more about the project there.

Pledge Your Support of Shroud of the Avatar on Kickstarter!

March 7, 2013

Award-winning game designer Richard Garriott and creator of the highly successful Ultima® series of games announced today that he plans to reinvent the fantasy RPG genre during a simultaneous live stream on Rooster Teeth and the Shroud of the Avatar website.

The game is being backed on Kickstarter, where supporters will have a chance to help fund the project. One of the most anticipated pledge levels will include access to in-game player houses, which are available in multiple sizes and styles. The houses provide players a chance to own their own virtual property in the game.

Shroud of the Avatar on Kickstarter!

Lord British adds, “We couldn’t be happier to be introducing the game on Kickstarter, which has really changed the landscape for game developers. It allows us to connect directly with our fan base and it keeps us from being so dependent on the traditional publishing model. There’s now a direct feedback loop with people who like our game and have decided to back it. With Kickstarter we can listen to what our fans are saying about how we are developing the game and make changes and additions based on that feedback, before the game launches. We hope people will like what they are seeing and hearing about Shroud of the Avatar and back the project on Kickstarter.”