Summer Daze Festival

By Ella Kårefalk (Narrative Design Intern)

Hey there Starfam! It’s me, again! Ella, your friendly neighbourhood narrative design intern at Star Stable (still). And I’m here to (once again) talk about some parts of creating our wonderful in-game festivals!

This time around, the festival team has been hard at work creating a new iteration of a summer festival. As some of you veterans may know, we’ve had some different summer festivals throughout the years, the beach festival, the rainbow festival, and midsummer. This year, we wanted to grab bits and pieces from these festivals and bring them together for a perfect mix of everything, creating a summer festival we can reactivate every year. This doesn’t mean this is the last time we’ll iterate on the summer festival. Next year, we might bring back even more content from previous festivals ;) The process of creating this festival has consisted of sorting through the previous festivals, evaluating what we can bring back, what needs to be updated in the content we bring back, and what new content we can create. Bla bla bla, I know what you're all waiting for: spoilers! So, get ready for the fresh, the funky, the fun festival we’re calling…

Summer Daze!

Summer Daze combines everything that makes summer great: beachy days, beautiful nature, warm weather, and dancing the night away with your friends. It really has evoked a hankering for summer in our spring-bound office.

When we had to combine all of these historical festivals, finding the red thread to have a consistent narrative in Summer Daze was quite vital. Oh, what may this red thread be, you ask. Well, what do you do over summer?... 

Sorry, right, I haven’t invented time travel yet, and this isn’t live, so I have no clue what you just answered. But if you answered travel, we’re on the same wavelength. Traveling! Touristing! Vacation! So, that became our reasoning as to why there would be a gigantic festival during the summer in Jorvik. We want tourists from all over the world to come and visit!

Location! Fort Pinta was the obvious choice for Summer Daze. With a gorgeous beach backdrop and a historical fort, of course this would be the location tourists were going to flock to! But what would a tourist destination be without a tourist attraction? Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a tourist destination then if there was no reason to tourist. Maybe the tourist attraction makes the destination…. Ahem-hem, tangent aside, we needed something super duper interesting in Fort Pinta!

And so, he fell into our hands, our little…well, actually not so little baby, our gleeful, finned son…

Bruce the shark!

Bruce has been a familiar face (or fin?) at Fort Pinta beach for years at this point, most notably playing a role in the beach festival. Therefore, he ticked a bunch of boxes on our checklist for Summer Daze. He comes from the beach festival with content and quests we can reuse, he’s a great tourist attraction, and he’s, like, really, really cute. Right?

Ah, such a charming old man…
Right??

Ah, I’m just pulling your leg! While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and while old Bruce had charm, new Bruce has beauty! That’s right, we had a new and improved Bruce lurking in the depths of the backlog, so why not give dear ol’ Brucie a facelift?

What a cutie patootie!
With such a cute face, we couldn’t help but use him in even more content! 

Thanks to the Equestrian Festival, we found that the “Impress the Baroness” content is really appreciated, as it gives you something fun to do every day when you log in! We wanted to implement something with the same system for Summer Daze: do daily quests, reach levels, and get rewards. So, the brainstorming about who we should impress this time began, and all the roads led to the same answer: Bruce. However, using Bruce didn’t come without issues.

I wouldn't say my shark knowledge is as great as a great white, but as far as I know, sharks don’t talk! A talking shark in our magical horse game would be toootally immersion-breaking, so Bruce needed an alternate way of communicating, and a translator! Early in the brainstorming process, a character whose job was “beach” was brought up for fun, and I immediately jumped into creating a narrative concept. Beach guy Ben was born, and he was, like, an incredibly fun character to write, dude.

Oh, and how does Bruce talk then? Well, I guess you’ll just have to wait and see. We might’ve taken a leaf out of Avalon’s book… ;D :O \o/

I’ll keep you in the dark just a tad longer, I’m not going to spoil everything that Summer Daze has to offer! But believe me when I say we’ve got so much fun stuff coming your way for Summer Daze. I can’t wait for you all to meet Ben the beach guy, Bruce the shark, Mariposa from BASTU, Winnie the PR agent, and more! But until then, eat some ice cream, enjoy the sunshine, and get in the festival mood for Summer Daze! Coming soon to an island near you.

Until we meet again, may it be at yet another festival, I wish you all a lovely summer!

Ta-ta for now!

Main Story Quest

By Linnéa Thimrén (Senior Game Designer)

Gather round, for I bring news of a new story, an exciting story, a… Main Story! We’ve been working on the next chapter of the main story for a while now, in two iterations, and that extra time and love have really paid off; the coming quest chain will bring excitement and feelings galore.

This post will contain some spoilers for the content of the quest chain, so if you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend doing that first!

The production of this content went a little differently from how we usually do it. We basically created the whole quest chain, and then we went back and remade it! Sounds inefficient? It actually allowed us to make sure the content was tip-top! We could test the whole thing— could see what worked and what didn’t— as a whole, which can be hard when you only have pieces of a quest chain ready!

We don’t have many boss fights in Star Stable Online, and I was excited to explore what we could do in that area. After all, if you’re gonna start swinging, then Garnok is a pretty good target! We started our exploration by putting every idea on the table, by gathering all the knowledge and tips and tricks we could find about how to design a good boss fight, and by deciding what we wanted the player to experience and feel. A main point here was to include gameplay that reflected the training that you’ve gone through with the different Soul Riders leading up to this. And we wanted the whole fight to feel epic! Fairly quickly, we settled on the idea of a two-part fight, one part to rescue your friends with the Dark Riders working against you, and one part to properly fight back against Garnok. By doing this, we could highlight the importance of the whole sisterhood working together, add some gameplay variety into the fight, and allow each Dark Rider to shine on her own. Not to mention raising the stakes; your friends are captive and only you can save them! It’s all the Soul Riders against all the Dark Riders! Darko is there, blasting away! It’s all going down!!

We also had some difficulties to face; it’s all well and good to fight a malevolent extraterrestrial deep-sea tentacle creature, but to do it while manoeuvring on horseback? Shudder the thought. Luckily, that could be solved by extending the area of the fight to include almost the whole of Guardian's Dale, so you have room to take those turns! We also wanted to get rid of poor old Mr. Sands, to let Darko make a grab for power after his return to Jorvik, and to highlight some of the politics at play between Mr. Sands, Darko, and the Dark Riders. But who knows how long Darko will be able to hold onto that power? And what really happened to Mr. Sands…?

One of the most interesting aspects of working in this was the balance we had to strike between the feeling of failure, as you have to destroy the Light Book, and triumph, as you banish Garnok (for now). You kinda succeed, but also kinda not… We wanted you to reflect on all that has led you here, all that you’ve done and overcome to stand here with your friends.

And on that note, friends, I want to say thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings about the new main story quest. I hope you enjoyed playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it!