Icarus Studios News

One of the things I love most about America is that we are a consumer culture, and we have absolutely no shame about it. Nowhere else in the world does there exist a people so obsessed with amassing such a great amount of stuff. Intellectuals might make arguments about the dangers of expansionistic manifest destiny societies or the emptiness inherent in an individual’s pathetic attempt to add depth and meaning to life by accumulating various trophies of status and symbols of desirability—but, thankfully, hardly anyone listens to intellectuals anymore. Because, when you get right down to it, stuff is fun. Especially the stuff you can get or create in a virtual world. That kind of stuff is always new and exciting, and sometimes you can learn useful things by interacting with various stuff, and sometimes you can just use stuff to bludgeon your enemies to a pulpy, miserable lump of fleshy demise—and, frankly, I don’t want to live in an America that doesn’t allow for virtual venues in which I can bludgeon other people with my stuff. (“Stuff,” of course, is the laymen’s term I’m using for what we experts in the industry call “objects.”)

After a game designer has generated a virtual world’s interior spaces, it’s very simple to then import a variety of objects that make each location unique. Icarus’ Object Editor allows content to be quickly created by relying on a vast number of similarly designed templates. You can generate items, non-player characters, system events, and complex dialog trees with a minimum of effort. (Which is great, because if I’m making an effort for any reason at all, it better be to get more stuff.) With the creation of one-click, linkable 2D icons for every object in the database, formatting and placing art in the game world is a cake-walk for designers. For example, if I’m making a virtual tourist version of Ancient Egypt, I can easily open any number of directories and just drag and drop papyrus rolls in the library of Alexandria, line up NPC guards along the palace walls, and scattered various pots and pieces of treasure in King Tut’s tomb.

Objects can also associate with specific sounds; for instance, when a player buys an item and drops it into the pack located on his user interface, the sound I want to associate with that action can be selected via a simple drop-down menu. Like, if a player visits Ancient Egypt and purchases a sword from an NPC merchant, the sound of coins clinking together will indicate to the player that the transaction has taken place. If the player goes into his pack and clicks the sword, as it appears in his avatar’s hands the sound of scrapping metal will occur to indicate the brandishing of a weapon.

Most of the time, my job is pretty easy, because Icarus already has thousands and thousands of previously generated objects neatly organized by name and function. But, for every new client, new, project-specific stuff needs to be rendered; thankfully, that’s all up to the artists and animators*. Anyway, after each new model has been defined as an object, I simply select the “Make Database” function, and my objects are exported to a single database file, so that other designers can search, edit, or implement my new, really cool stuff whenever they so desire.

* I once drew a stick figure that traumatized an entire kindergarten class—probably for life—and the sad thing is: that actually wasn’t my intention. I’m a writer. I like words. Asking me to make art is like asking a blind man to throw daggers at your head—chances are that it’s not going to be easy on the eyes.

-Kara Stambach, Virtual Worlds Team