Update:Blog - Clan Updates: Citadel Theatre
This blog was written by Mod Maz and dates to 27 September 2011.
‘How about a theatre?’ said I, not knowing what I'd be letting myself in for. Surprisingly, Mod Chihiro and the other clan designers/devs thought this was a really good idea. This was part of the brainstorming for the high tiered content of the clan keep. (The theatre is available from tier 5+ and today is the first day a clan can access it!)
Since then the idea evolved into a full blown emergent gameplay theatre with props, sound effects, spotlights, designated actors and technicians. In short, all the basics to put on a show! This part of the Citadel would then support those groups who we know to already be making plays and posting them to youtube, but had no custom area or tools to work with.
The first time Mod Matt M showed me the theatre map squares I was in awe - the beautiful area he'd created is just perfect as a theatre and has a really cozy feel to it. Making it come to life was a pleasure to do justice to well crafted graphics.
Teamed up with Mod Biscuits and his group, we created some really neat animations for things like the curtains and the backstage machinery, then I let him loose on the emotes! What I received back were some really creative and, we hope, useful animations for use both on the stage and for your appreciative audience. My favourite would have to be the death, followed by the speech.
Allowing technicians to run the show from backstage (or even be in the show at the same time) was a joint effort by Mod Roderick, our GUI team and I. Providing all the interfaces necessary to control your show's spotlights, sound effects, props, backdrops and actors was a challenge to try to get the interfaces simple enough to be intuitive, but complex enough to allow you to do some pretty neat things.
However, as we have no way of knowing exactly what you would want to do with this area, we have kept to a skeleton of basics for the props, sound effects and backdrops. I can't stress this enough really, this is only the beginning. I want your input, I want your creative minds to try to stage your own theatre shows. I want to know what props, sound effects and animations you need and also what costumes you need that we don't already have in game. I'll be setting up a separate forum thread for these here: here
I look forward with great pleasure to viewing your theatrical creations!
Discuss the blog here