Introducing the all new 2016 Elite Guardian Rider. Comes standard with an authentic "brown" horse leather exterior with lovingly hand polished armored trim. Includes factory standard 4-hoof drive. It is exactly... one horse power. Goes from 0 to 120% travel speed in 0 seconds. Infinite MPG (better than Frogzard hybrids!) It is a true convertible (Since you actually transform into it) and comes with auto-drive standard... just click the middle mouse button. Features self parking and fits in even the smallest backpack. High performance ON or OFF road. No insurance required or license required to drive... especially since we know you are going to drive it straight into some monster laden dragon lair... you crazy rider you. MSRP <Collector's Edition Guardian Package>
Tonight, we ride!
"Tonight, I'm riding a brown armored horse... down the side of an erupting volcano.... and I drink, drink, drink, from a chalice filled, with the laughter of Guardian Padawans... " [<3 Voltaire]
A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can morph to a horse of course...
Unless that horse, is a Guardian Horse...
Or the famous Mr. Undead. (We need to make this... Mogloween?)
If you are too young to get this reference >_> Then behold, the old black and white TV show about a talking horse.... Mr. Ed.
'Hold your horses' and make sure it is 'stable' before you release it! - @ChristianGriem
+10 points to this player...
Cysero says, "Avoid the word 'Mount' to avoid broken dreams"
Best "wrong use" of a new feature ever! I was reminded MANY times today by Cysero to use the term "Travel form" because this is not a mount. If you have been following the previous design notes then you already know-- Epic Guardian Rider is one of the best game-dev hacks of all time! See, we do not have mounts coded nor working yet. (Although, when we do, I think we should make it possible for other players to hop on and ride players in certain travel forms which would be SOOOO COOOOL!) But since we have the Travel Form (Transformations) working-- as seen in the wicked cool and now ultra rare Shadow Wolf form, we had an idea. We built an entire travel form morph which includes the armored horse, and armored you.
Boy vs Girl riders!?
One issue we quickly discovered was... because the armored guy was attached to the 3D model everyone was a boy O_O. We fixed that by adding both male and female versions of the rider armor! #GoodMove. The gender of the rider is now based on your characters gender.
A pretty neat & highly unexpected bonus
While this travel form was never promised or expected, it is a great addition to the game and we hope you love it. Which is why we bumped up everyone who pledged/bought Guardian through Kickstarter or our website to the Collector's reward items so that you can get it :D You can read about the "surprise bump up we gave you and more." Thank you for supporting us early! <3 If you missed out on that, you can still acquire by getting the Collector's Guardian package in game.
The Elite Guardian Rider was modeled by Xero, painted by Dage, and animated by Korin. It is beautiful. It has 41 3D-bones... which was more than we expected, but the resulting animation was worth it. Zhoom coded it and Oishii added it into the game... asked me what to do about the SoundFX since it is weird to have a "Roar" sound play for the horse. The options were to replace all transformations with a single magic sound or build some special code to allow us to use multiple sounds-- which is naturally what we are going to do :D His backlog is impressively large so if your horse ROARS when it first goes in the game, embrace it for the time being, OK? One really interesting thing to witness regarding the creation of this mount was how the assets evolved and were handed off from concept, to model, to texture, to animation, to code. Our development flow while simultaneously working on a lot of things at once is improving.
We have been working on the fixes and changes we have been discussing earlier this week. Changing the exp/stat/itemization of the game is a pretty big deal and some of those changes are dependent on the quest system fixes. I want to make sure we nail it on the next shot. Join us on Monday for a fresh new design notes about either game things... or maybe I will tell you about how I had to go to the dentist to get my teeth fixed after the sword fights on our "bring the babies along for a team building exercise." Thyton lost the most about of blood though!
Have a great weekend.. I recommend "Horsing around!" BATTLE ON!
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