Meet the FK'ers - Jordan Leithart

Translation into Russian: https://vk.com/frostkeep?w=page-142823387_53102771

Well now that the website is finally back in order, I feel like I can blog about Rend again. I apologize that it’s been so long since I last posted. When websites break, I get called and blogs get delayed. Today, we’re gonna take a look at what I personally have been doing. Everyone else has some amazing things to show off, but we’re saving that for a big reveal, while no one cares about the UI (*sniff*). Rend has a lot of familiar systems to survival players. These players logged into Rend for the first time and were met with a relatively familiar albeit complicated HUD. And that’s about where the similarities ended. From the get go, we had decided to design UI widgets from a more MMO standpoint. This meant to have individual windows for each widget. You would have a crafting widget, which could be opened without opening another window. Having been MMO game developers this felt natural to us, and the UI was designed and developed with that in mind. However, one of the biggest pieces of feedback that we received from players was how confusing and un-intuitive our UI was. A large part of this was the how we conveyed the information (the recipe unlocks system was a major offender of this). So Sol and I took a step back and re-evaluated the whole UI to figure out the best way to lay things out. This will be the first part of a multi-blog series about my developing the UI and our decisions on why we decided to lay things out the way they are. As always, I am available to chat with you on the community Discord, and our social medias, Facebook and Twitter . To start, we decided to change the widgets from solo windows to being in their own menu. The reason for this is two-fold. If we decide to release on a console at some point, we won’t have to change the UI around too much (though that’s a future us problem). The second and much more important reason is this: By choosing which widgets to show with which widgets, we can help the user determine what is important. With our previous UI, the amount of information that a player could have on the screen was overwhelming. By only showing widgets that interact directly with other widgets, we can simplify the UI significantly, without simplifying the systems that it is supposed to convey. We want our game to be deep and complex, not impossible to interact with due to the complexity. The first grouping that we are going to look at is the Inventory grouping. When a player accesses the inventory, there are a few things that they’re looking to do. The first is to see what’s in their inventory, so we should probably have all the inventory slots available. The second is to equip an item from the inventory. So we had to show equippable slots (both equipment slots on your character and action bar slots). Lastly, if we’re showing the equippable slots, the player needs to know what stats change when they equip the items. The end result was this mockup. As you can see the top tabs will have grouping for different UI groups, and the Inventory group is selected We have the inventory on the left, the paper doll (equipment slots/actionbar slots), and the stats on the right. Looking forward to hearing feedback on our latest iteration! read the original article

Meet the FK'ers is our new short interview format to get to know the folks working at Frostkeep who are responsible for Rend.  We're opening up the series with a brief chat with community superstar @FK_JarNod.      RF: What's your name and what do you do at Frostkeep? JL: I'm Jordan Leithart, aka JarNod. I do anything and everything, except art... and naming things. I had my naming privileges revoked. Mostly I'm an engineer/community person. I've written almost all the UI in Rend and some of the systems. I also answer as many community questions as I can, so if you tweet at Frostkeep, I'll be the one responding.   RF: Tell us a little about your backstory, where have you worked prior to joining Frostkeep, what games have you been involved in making? JL: I did all sorts of things before I got into the games industry, so I'll pass those by. I previously worked at Carbine on WildStar. I was a build engineer there. Then I moved over to AI, then I moved over to Combat/Spells for the F2P launch.   RF: What game most influenced you? Was it something in your childhood or in later years? JL: Vanilla World of Warcraft had a large impact on my life, but the game that made me want to get into the games industry was actually a more recent one, Dragon Age: Origins. It was the first roleplaying game that I played through again immediately after I finished it for the first time. A year after I played that I went back to school for my Computer Science degree, and 3 years later I was working on WildStar!   RF: What are you main influences in your work? Is there anything outside of the gaming world you feel has helped you become a better developer? JL: My whole life has been an influence on my work. In my opinion, games should reflect something about our world. I play lots of games, and I learn something from every single one, but outside experiences are how I became a better developer. Whether it's working at companies that weren't video game companies, to where I grew up and other hobbies I have. Everything I do helps me grow as a developer!   RF: There have been a lot of Early Access Survival games released over the last few years, what do you think makes Rend stand out from the rest of them? JL: The biggest thing that separates us is our performance. We're mindful of having as performant a game as possible and that helps guide our development process. Another aspect that separates us is our focus on making a faction based survival game. We want to create a community so new players won't be lost and veterans will always have people to play with.   RF: The team have been pretty fantastic at engaging with the community so far, is that something you feel is a real differentiator between Frostkeep and your competition? JL: I've seen many other studios engage with the community in a different but just as important way as Frostkeep. I've also been on the other side countless times, so it's important for me to treat the community how I wanted to be treated when I wasn't a developer. All I really know is that the Rend community has been amazing to work with so far. I don't think you can credit us at all when everyone has been wonderful.   RF: Being with such a small team, what benefits do you feel you have against working in a traditional AAA studio? What do you miss from previous work? JL: Instant collaboration. If there's a problem, we can solve it quickly. Ownership of the product. We all own the entire game, not just one pie slice. Family atmosphere. We get to know each other very well.   I think the biggest thing I miss from my previous work is actually the developers. I've worked with many fantastic people already in my short career and I would love to work with them again. But I know that Frostkeep is where I belong and so I don't miss much!   RF: What's next after Early Access, are there any extra features you'd love to implement in Rend? JL: The most important thing after early access launch is getting the game out of early access to a full launch. Once we've accomplished that, we need to figure out if we're gonna work on an expansion or a second game. I have a few ideas.   RF: And finally, which aspect of Rend are you most excited for players to get to experience? JL: With pre-alpha going dark, there are a few systems that I can't wait to talk about, but we're gonna hold off for now. Mostly, I love the faction based gameplay. I love being a part of something greater than myself. It's gonna take a lot of work for us to get it right, but it'll be worth it!     Stay tuned for more interviews with the team behind Rend!
View full news

Well well well. I figured now was as good as any to give you a look into the happenings at Frostkeep over the last month. Unfortunately, I’m not going to go into details on what exactly we’re doing (Need to save those for later blog posts when we have the designs/implementation more finalized), but I will provide some hints. One thing I want to do is introduce all of the new FKers that joined since the last blog post. In order of hiring: Travis Inman: Some of you may know him as FK_EvilRadish in the discord. Travis has been a contract artist working with us for the past 9 months. He played the most during our pre-alpha and was invaluable in fixing art bugs and interacting with our players. We’re very excited to have him here. I can’t wait to get our current players into the game (and new players) because they’re gonna be blown away. You can read Travis’ bio over on the team page!   Nick De Spain: For the last 12+ months, our artists have operated without a concept artist. That needed to change, so we went out and found the best one! Even better than being a concept artist, Nick has experience with outsourcing and is highly interested in UX design and art. We’re very lucky to have him. I can’t wait to show some of the concept art that he’s already come up with. Needless to say, Rend will be teeming with a higher variety of fauna when we open up the servers again. Nick’s bio is over on the team page!   Ron Roy: Whenever someone who has worked with or works with Ron is asked about him, they always talk about the same thing. His foot pedal. You see, the left shift key on a keyboard puts a decent amount of strain on the wrist, and programmers use shift a LOT. So Ron bought a foot pedal, and uses it as his shift key. The best way to describe Ron is that he thinks in multi-core processors, while the rest of us think in single core processors. His ability to multi-task and fix bugs is astounding. Ron will absolutely make Rend a better game with his engineering ability, and his game design sense. You can read more about Ron on the team page.   Tyler Fuchs: There are a handful of people in the world who I would play the game they created without question. Tyler is one of those. His ability to wrap his mind around games is astounding and whenever he says that a game should be played, I know I need to go play that game right now. The most recent example was a game called Dead Cells (highly recommended btw). Tyler brings some much needed player psychology analysis and systems design to Rend. We’re looking forward to seeing the systems that he designs and builds. Tyler’s bio is over on the team page.     As for what is being worked on in the game. There’s no problem with my talking about what I’m doing right now, because it’s not very exciting. I’ve been reworking the UI menus in Rend with the purpose of simplifying the experience of a new player without hiding too much information from the veteran player. I’ll happily go into more detail in a later blogpost if there’s interest. read the original article

YEAH IT`S MINE