Spry Fox Making Happiness

The primary verb in our game is connect. This is the heart of what we are building and how we measure success. Did you make friends? Did you create a meaningful connection? Did you joyfully spend time with people you like? People you adore?

Everything we’ve added to the game exists to serve this goal. 

When you dig into it, friendship is a process with many stages. And in order for trust to grow and friendship to thrive, we need to build a game that serves every step along the way.

• Step 1: Welcoming new players: First, we want players to feel comfortable walking in the door. Settle in. Get to know the pace of this delightful new world. Be yourself. It is okay. 
• Step 2: Safe connection with strangers: Inevitably you’ll meet strangers in the Crosslands. But it needs to be safe and on your terms. At some point, you’ll acknowledge a stranger or they’ll muster enough courage to say “hi” 
• Step 3: Helping one another: You can still play your game, do your quests, harvest your resources. But you’ll find a helping hand when you need it. It should always be a joy to play with others. You support each other. Maybe, you decide, humans aren’t so bad.  
• Step 4: Hanging out: You’ll eventually connect with some folks. Same humor, same taste in fine clothing, same play schedule. Sit down, have a conversation. Spend time riding fluffalo together. 
• Step 5: Building a community: We can accomplish amazing things when we work together as a group. Your waystation is like your local neighborhood. By pooling everyone’s efforts, you can hold back the storm, make your space beautiful, hold festivals and build a forever home. 

Not everyone will go through every step. Some folks will be happy just vibing with others while harvesting. Others will invite existing friends into the game and jump immediately to building a happy home. But every step builds trust. Every step builds connection and caring. 

The folks here at Spry Fox are rather idealistic. I personally believe that the world could use a little more connection and trust.

I like to imagine: 

• “What if I could go online and hang out with kind, understanding people? 
• “What if we could tune down all the toxicity and anger?”
• “What if we could amplify the joy that comes from spending time with good people?” 

Look around and it is pretty obvious the world can be a stormy place full of discord and isolation. I don’t deny that. But we want to create an alternative. A place where you have the space, tools and encouragement to make and maintain meaningful friendships. 

Do you want more friendship and connection in your life? Spirit Crossing welcomes you. 

With much love, 
Danc and all of Spry Fox.

Hi there Wanderers! Today we’re going to do some light spelunking into some of Spirit Crossing’s visuals. Specifically, how we arrived at the look of the Shrineworks!

The “Shrineworks” in Spirit Crossing are monolithic industrial structures of living stone, emerging from the terrain of the Crosslands to facilitate the bond between Spirits and Humans.

As developers, it is also our “abstract” faction- a flexible visual language that can be skinned around game mechanics to create coherent and emotionally resonant layers of visual logic.

The development of Shrineworks required threading several needles simultaneously; 

• Robust kit of flexible, modular parts
• Evokes mystique and awe with a sense of hidden infrastructural functionality
• Predictable climbability and grid alignment
• Adaptable to unknown gameplay needs in the future

It is also crucial to identify what Shrineworks are not:

• Not: Fabricated architecture build by an ancient culture
• Not: Whimsical Fantasy Magic
• Not: Religious Architecture

One of the most critical lenses we applied while iterating on the language of the Shrineworks was considering the Negative Space the visuals created in the worldbuilding. For example, our original pass was inspired by the incredibly large Incan stonework in Cusco, Peru.

We quickly realized while iterating through what these components looked like that we could not outrun the shadows cast by these concepts in the viewer’s mind. Temples, Courts, Castles, Gardens. Who built them? Why is it here? What is its relationship to humans or spirits?

But all of these visual implications were a distraction. We aren’t making a game about an ancient fantasy culture. We are making a game about connection. We don’t want to have to grapple with navigating this lore when trying to prototype new mechanics. And maybe most of all, where’s the weird? Where is the unexpected? How is this surprising, or memorable?

After more iteration and an increasingly deep forehead-shaped depression on my drawing tablet, a sketch extruded itself through the narrow die we had shaped for it.

Hmm! Interesting.

✅ Clear modular blocks 
✅ Sense of detail and clear climbable surfaces.
✅ Tubes imply a sense of functionality and break up the otherwise square surfaces while adding organic flavor
✅ Implied faces create a sense of personality and emotional read

One of the keys to cracking the puzzle was shifting the lens from looking at base blocks not as an architectural kit of walls and windows, but almost as a second terrain kit built of solid masses. The masses could be walls, but they have the adaptability to be anything; Aqueducts to air vents, parapets to power plants, shrines to server farms!

This also began more successfully straddling the line between sci-fi and fantasy: the sci-fi offering a sense of weird yet moored, physical functionality we sought, with the fantasy offering us a sense of organic appeal and timelessness. As one artist recently remarked, it’s kind of like an alien space ship that grows out of the ground.

But the journey did not end there.

See you next time 😉

This blog was written by Justin Oaksford (Art Lead) at Spry Fox, with credits to Shaun Martin (Art Lead) and Ted Terranova (Senior 3D Artist) for their incredible work bringing the Shrineworks to life.

Wait! Before you go..

Here are a collection of beautiful Shrineworks wallpapers for you to decorate all of your devices with. 🧡

See you soon for part II!

We know, from playing many online games, that communication with strangers can feel a bit scary. In particular, toxicity thrives in the wild world of open game chat. In many games, anyone can say anything to everyone. And goodness, they certainly do. If you have even mild social anxiety, all it takes is one rude comment and you may never want to speak up again. 

We tackled this issue in Spirit Crossing by starting new players out with a set of safe communication tools like expressions and emotes. And then, only once you’ve slowly built up trust with another player, you can opt in to more open communication channels like chat. 

There’s a psychological model behind this:

• Limited communication with low trust strangers: You can communicate basic needs, but there’s no opportunity for griefing. 
• Open communication with High trust friends: We’ve discovered that the risk of drive-by abuse is dramatically reduced if you are chatting with a close friend. 
• No open communication with strangers: The vast majority of online toxicity shows up here.  Especially in large groups. 

	Limited Chat	Open Chat
Low trust: Strangers	Good	Toxicity Generation!
High trust: Friends	Good	Great

With this model in mind, we’ve added a lot of tools in the game to help players along this long journey towards trust. 

Expressions, emotes, chirps and pings

There are a variety of tools that are safe to use between strangers

• Expressions: Canned phrases that are the main way you can say something to a stranger. In the most recent build, we’ve done an editing pass to make them even more useful. You can ask for something, offer help and show your appreciation. 
• Emotes: Emotion-focused animations let you express yourself with canned animation. Do a dance! Strike a pose. 
• Pings: Sometimes you need to market something on a map on the map if you need help. Or you can chirp! A simple and safe form of yelling without the noise. One of the most amazing moments in Spirit Crossing is when you are all alone and you ask for help. And people come running. 

Player friendship leveling

Every player can upgrade their friendship level with any other player. Doing so unlock new social tools. Grow trust by offering gifts to players you want to get to know better. This takes time. Often days or weeks of playing together. It is okay to say “not now” or that you are out of friend gems. We want your high level friends to be authentic, trusted friends. 

As you grow your friendship, you’ll unlock emotes that showcase your relationship. And you’ll eventually be able to teleport to one another. And at the highest levels, decorate each other’s homes. Expect to see more work coming in this area. 

Seats (chairs, benches)

Sometimes you need to chat with a stranger. Two players can choose to sit on the same bench together. At any point either player can choose to leave. This is intentionally a temporary, small group conversation. This tends to be a safer form of open chat just because it involves two-way consent to participate. And you never get crowd dynamics because the seating spaces are intentionally limited to 2-6 players. 

Fluffalos

If you join a fluffalo train (once you are a level 1 friend) you can chat with other folks on the fluffalo train. This helps you coordinate when doing small to medium group activities. Again, this is opt in. 

Bulletin boards and signs

(Oh, did I just reveal a secret upcoming feature?!) Players, especially those organizing a waystation, need an asynchronous means of discussing a topic when not everyone is online at the same time. Or on Discord. We’ll have more info on this feature in future posts! 

Blocking and muting

You can always block or mute another player. We want to give you control over your social space. 

What isn’t on this list?

There are a bunch of common online game features we’ve intentionally left out. 

• No open guild chat. 
• No open server-wide chat. 
• No private messages between strangers

All these fall under the category open chat with one or more low trust strangers. We are going to continue to err on the side of safety. 

Why even include chat?

You may ask why we include chat at all when it clearly results in uncomfortable situations. Okay. Another secret. To form deep friendships, humans need to communicate freely. We need to tell jokes and laugh with one another. We need to tell a friend that we are having a hard day and know there is a human on the other end who is really listening. A free flowing conversation allows us to be vulnerable to other people. And in the best of friendships, that vulnerability is met with support and understanding. That’s now we bond. How we make connections for life. 

When we cut away those difficult parts that make us human, we often end up in a lonely place. Running away from rich, real human contact is not the answer. 

At Spry Fox we make games not just to entertain, but to make human lives better. We want to build a space that forges deep human friendships. The sort that elevates our lives. So we embrace the messy and scary nature of people playing online. And we can all try to make it just a little better. 

Thank you for joining us on this friendship journey. You are brave and wonderful.  

Daniel (Designer Fox) 

Mini World Events

Hidden Lanterns and Hidden Bells are two of our hidden-object mini world events in Spirit Crossing. Mini world events keep the Uplands different and interesting, and aim for something new nearly every day. We want a wide range of small events, some of which we announce and some only until you stumble upon them in the wild. 

These two events play on the non-harvest activities… aka activities that don’t give you anything. Lighting a lantern and ringing bells are fun to do just on their own, but with these events every once in a while you get something making the events delightful and more rewarding. Lanterns in particular are interesting because the normal ones light up for everyone. Just by playing by yourself you can indirectly end up helping others find the hidden objects by process of elimination.

Spirit Vaults: the Original Mini World Event 

When we started setting up our event system, the first experiment at a hidden-object event that we created was an event called Spirit Vaults. We had 5 different colored statues spawn in the wilderness, each in a different place on the map: a peak, a cave, a field. You had 3 days to find all 5 and you’d get a big reward at the end if you found them all.

Every week, we have a team-wide playtest to stress-test the game, find bugs and to get feedback. We tested this event several times and this event had a strong response. Either people loved it or… strongly disliked it, splitting the team in half. This seemed to break down along the different playstyles team members had.. The people who liked it loved the challenge of the hunt. They would tag things on the map for their friends and loved the challenge of finding very hard hidden statues. The people who disliked it were completionists or more casual players who didn’t like the challenge of finding every single one and were frustrated in not being able to complete things in a reasonable time frame.

(↑ screenshot taken from an older build!)

Lessons from Playtests

One of the hardest parts of a designer’s job is processing feedback. Not reacting in an immediate way, especially if the feedback is negative, is really hard since we want to make our events as great as possible. Sometimes designers need to sit with the feedback. We need to review what our goals are and what we hoped to accomplish. Sometimes we need to break down the feedback so we understand the root cause. Is this actually pointing to a different fundamental problem, or can this be taken directly as suggested? Once we take time to process it we can iterate on our initial designs and make them better. 

It can be challenging to make events that satisfy all players. We all have various activities we like more than others, and we want to offer a variety of content that will appeal to an array of play styles. But there were some clear takeaways from that first “Spirit Vault” event that we used to make Hidden Lanterns better when we created this second hidden-object mini event: 

• Add rewards to each one found instead of waiting until you’ve found them all. This reduces the frustration of having to find every last one. 
• Stick to easier places in the Wilderness. Some of our Wilderness maps can be harder to navigate than others, and finding a small item in any huge Wilderness can be plenty hard on its own. We don’t need to add extra frustration to satisfy the folks who want to find them all. 
  

To Quest or Not To Quest

We still have this tension between folks wanting to have a checklist to find all the things and others who just want to casually explore and not be pressured into finding everything. One way around this that we do in Hidden Lanterns is to have more items in the world than the quest actually requires you to find. This way, it becomes slightly easier to complete the quest. And since you get a reward from each find, having additional ones is a bonus. With Hidden Bells, we don’t even advertise how many there are, nor do we have a quest at all.

There is no pressure in finding the bells, but if you do, you get an extra bonus. We chose Hidden Bells for this pattern because there are fewer of them out in the world, and they don’t have the same persistent visual effect as the lanterns do. You can ring them for all to hear, but their state doesn’t change for as long. 

We hope you enjoy both types, and as always, we really appreciate your feedback. If you have a strong preference between the two styles of events, let us know in the Discord! And if you’re wondering about that original test event, Spirit Vault? After experimenting with the Hidden Lanterns and Hidden Bells events, we used what we learned from these and other events to redesign the Spirit Vault entirely. It ended up turning into the Lost Spirits event. Rather than five differently colored statues, you now find three differently colored spirits trapped in Shrineworks urns and bring them back to their companion spirit by the trolley station. 

Concept art illustrated by Justin Oaksford

Warm and well-lit wishes!

This blog was written by Julia Keren-Detar, a Game Designer at Spry Fox.