Hello everyone!

The new customer support system is running and is accessible from the bottom right ofwww.novusaeterno.com, www.taitale.com, and http://forum.novusaeterno.com/. If anyone is having issues with getting access to the game or any other problems, feel free to send us a ticket.

This week I’ll be talking about the various Design-a-X backer rewards in more detail. Next Monday we will begin allowing backers to submit their designs. Please note that all designs may be altered at our discretion for balance or lore reasons.

Design Flow

We will be doing the Design-a-X backer rewards in 3 major stages split by the type of game object to be designed: theories, artifacts & components, and prototypes. Each major stage will be split into 3 subgroups: Direct submissions, group workshops and one-on-one with developers.

Direct submissions are for those people who are positive that they know exactly what they want. They’ll be able to submit a design to us with no developer involvement.

Group workshops will begin with all the devs helping explain the guidelines for designing something. At the end of the workshop there will be one-on-ones with the devs in order to make sure everything is in order.

One-on-one with the developers is just the end portion of workshops. In theory, each of these will take up less time than the one after it.

There are over 1000 Design-a-X backer rewards to be redeemed so the one-on-ones will have a time limit on them depending on the complexity of what is being designed; theories are the least complex, while artifacts and components are the most complex.

Theories

For now I’m only going to talk about theories as direct submission of theories is what we will be opening up next week. Artifacts & components, and prototypes will come when we are about to start those stages. The theory system only exists for human research, but some of the other races have analogous systems. The three races that theory design applies to is human, Acean and Cauldron-born. Theories do not directly unlock anything in game, but are considered stepping stones to doing so. Each races “theory” has two things associated with it. A title and flavour text.

Human theories are exactly that as they are the race which uses the theory system. These are ideas or something thought provoking. The flavour text could be a scientific proposal, a book excerpt(Your own fictional excerpt, not copywritten material), a journal entry or anything that portrays something that could be investigated further. Human players will choose which theories to fund in order to develop better understanding which eventually leads to new technologies.

Acean “theories” are indigenous species of various planets from which Aceans examine, probe and replicate assets they find advantageous. The flavour text for these may be a description of the creature or its behaviour, new or battle reports with the creature or journal entries on civilian encounters with it. Take note that the flavour text does not say what assert a player gets from the creature. Acean players will have to find or trade with other players for exotic creatures to take back to one of their labs in order to advance their technology.

Cauldron-born “theories” are programming functions, akin to the skill system in Transistor. Titles appear as function names with no parameters like so: Queue(), Open(), Shutdown(). The flavour text describes the task of the function or documents it. Unlike humans and Aceans, Cauldron-born begin with most functions and can invest time programming them with existing components in order to produce new ones.