Icarus Studios News

Terra Firma 

At Icarus, a game designer can create an entire virtual world in a matter of hours.¹ How did I attain this amazing ability to shape entire planets, you ask? Icarus Tool Suites. Pretty much anyone with a pulse knows that the look and feel of a virtual world or an MMO game is a fundamental part of its appeal. No one wants to date the ugly, balding, club-footed stepsister of an online game. If we’re going to pay to subscribe to a shared universe, we all want something eye-catching, with multiple levels of content that appeal to a variety of tastes and play styles. With that in mind, Icarus Studios developed a series of tools to create unique virtual experiences with engaging social elements, entertaining game activities, and customized environments.

The World Editor has an intuitive interface; it requires no programming experience, so even a complete techno-tard such as myself can make a virtual world with relative ease. It’s a collaborative tool, allowing multiple designers to work simultaneously.² For instance, I can open up the world map and check out a specific area—which means it’s mine, mine, mine—and as long as I have that area checked out, no one else can play in my sandbox. When I’m done, I can check it back in. And, because I am forgetful in an endearing way and not at all in a “who has the power of attorney over her?” way, World Editor has an easy bookmarking system, so I can always return to my previous work without having to memorize coordinates.

Adjusting the terrain is easy; I can lower and raise sections of the landscape to meet the needs of the game.³ After I plot out terra firma, I need to cover it with flora, which I use Icarus’ EcoSystem Editor to accomplish. There are specific rules and procedures for generating things like trees, plants, debris, and other types of groundcover, all of which optimizes processing and data-transmission time.⁴ Each color on the Eco-Map is associated with an ecosystem that determines things such as the models for vegetation, the textures applied to objects, and the smoothness of the terrain. For instance, I can look up the color index for trees, select “tall oaks,” apply them to the world, and, suddenly, I have an old English forest—which I can explore from a topographical (bird’s-eye) view. I can cluster and group multiple elements, such as trees and scrub, and adjust their tints and sizes to make the forest a bit more varied and realistic.

(Continued in Part 2)

¹ I’m not saying it’ll be a good world—it might actually look like something a two-year-old, armed with Sugar Stix and a 64-pack of Crayola crayons, came up with—but it will be a world! And it will be populated with content! And that, my friends, is occasion enough for me to brag about my awesome, deity-like powers within virtual universes.

² Which is good, because most of us are very bad at waiting to take our turns. Admittedly, by most of us, I mean me. I’m an Aries; I don’t do “waiting.”

³ My boss keeps telling me I can’t make dozens of Mount Doom rip-offs, but I think I can turn him around on that, because, you can never have too much flowing lava. Ever… Obviously. But I digress.

⁴ If you’re curious about how those procedures actually work, all I can tell you is that two unicorns go into a room; only one unicorn comes out. The blood of the slain unicorn is then used to import a color-coded Eco-Map to create vast, seamless worlds that require no portaling or loading times.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team