Constraints and constant cutting are good for creativity.
Yellow Brick Games' Eternal Strands is one of the first success stories out of the many small studios spun up by former triple-A developers in the gold rush of 2020-2022. It's a third-person action-adventure game that stands out thanks to a striking physics system where players chain together magical abilities to battle creatures and navigate complex terrain—sometimes both when the "terrain" is a giant creature.
A decade ago, this kind of game would have seemed only possible from a team of hundreds of developers, but Yellow Brick Games is shipping Eternal Strands with less than a hundred workers (and a pivot from being published by Private Division to self-publishing). Technological advancements obviously made this task easier, but Unreal Engine hasn't gotten that much more efficient over the years. So what made this game possible?
The answers offered by game director Frédéric St-Laurent, creative director Mike Laidlaw, and executive producer Jeff Skalski will seem familiar to most of our readers (Laidlaw and Skalski pull double duty as Yellow Brick's chief creative officer and chief operating officer). They can be summed up simply as "constraint, cutting, and collaboration."
But diving into the details, you start to see a process that led to such efficient development over four years of work. Like a well-guided snowball rolling down hill, the studio took a temperature system that would be at the heart of its magical gameplay and built a process for cooking up properly-scoped content that brought this game to life.
When the Yellow Brick Team came together in 2020, the pitch for what would become Eternal Strands was exceptionally close to what would make it in the final game. The core game mechanics of crafting weapons, slaying giant monsters, and wielding physics-based magic were all there on day one, all to be set in a fantasy world spearheaded by Laidlaw, a veteran of BioWare's Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises.
In Eternal Strands, players take on the role of Brynn, a member of a magical band of "Weavers" who stumble into a lost land called The Enclave, who's tasked with digging up its secrets in order to save the world, and more importantly, her friends. She does this with magical powers that dynamically interact with the environment, weather, and enemies.
St-Laurent explained that the beating heart of the magic system is actually a temperature tracking tool. After producing a physics-based controller for the player that would fuel procedural animations for climbing on titanic creatures, the team got to work on a method for tracking the temperature within every two-meter by two-meter cell of air in a gameplay environment. Then objects like plants, rocks, and collectible ingredients needed "sensors" to track that temperature and determine what behavior to display. Hot objects start burning, cold objects become brittle, creatures slow down in the cold or freeze in place by ice, etc.
The goal was to ensure magic and creature attacks could organically impact the environment. One example would be a dragon starting a massive wildfire with its fire breath thanks not just to the flames, but the convection put out by the heat. Another would be if a towering "Arc" automaton swung its mace into a wooden structure and send it crumbling to the ground.
It's a smaller-scale version of what Nintendo pulled off with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. And because it's smaller-scale (and made by a smaller team), those two-by-two measurement cells began sprouting constraints really fast.
"It drove interesting decisions," Laidlaw said. "Our game cannot be open world because we cannot simulate all of those temperatures in a 25 kilometer-square [area]." Players instead explore a number of different "zones," each populated with different enemies and resources, which, along with quests, drive players to regularly double back to explored areas.
The design of Eternal Strands' "epic" encounters with large monsters followed a similar pattern. Though some creatures, like different types of dragons and towering magic automatons, were there at the start, the Yellow Brick team approached their design in a top-down fashion, rather than just creating a list of enemies that had to be in the game.
To make these creatures, St-Laurent and his colleagues first created the classic locomotion and health systems that would be universal to each creature. Then they created a "language of elements" that would be common to everything in the game (fire, ice, telekinesis, acid, etc.). Then they did what he called "subtractive design" to decide the traits of each creature, allowing them to use in-construction systems to define the traits of each enemy.
So if "flight" is one system, then a creature that "flies" and "breathes fire" is the foundation for a dragon (or "breathes ice" for an ice dragon). The creatures are further differentiated by AI and the environments they're placed in. Most wander in a pattern, but some will engage the player directly while others attack from a distance, creating a challenge where they have to close the gap.
Image via Yellow Brick Games.
But again, the constraints appear. Building creatures in this manner ruled out monsters that would require other forms of locomotion like rolling or sliding. So no boulder-themed or snake creatures could be part of the mix. "I remember joking about adding a perfect sphere that had a tessellating amount of polygons, and it would cause you to lag," said Laidlaw. "The ultimate challenge was optimizing your system in real time."
Skolski said this process—and building the magic system in a similar way—allowed emergent play possibilities to pop out mid-cycle that the developers hadn't even considered. He recalled testing the Ice Wall power against a giant automaton enemy called the Arc of the Stricken Earth, and blasting a stream of ice at it as it wound up to smash him with a giant mace. By accident, he aimed the ice from the creature's chest up to its upper arm, holding it in place the way ice can freeze enemies to the ground.
"I just put my shield down because I went 'it can't hit me. It's trying, but it can't until it breaks the ice or [the ice] melts.'" Laidlaw explained that moments like this emerged all over the development process—but then it became a challenge to make sure the player understood what chain of events caused these surprises to happen.
When Eternal Strands was being scoped out, the plan was originally to create 12 epic creatures. The game shipped with 9. Cutting interesting ideas is part-and-parcel for game development, but Skalski said the goal with Eternal Strands was to allow as minimal work as possible on a feature before it was cut. Or in other words, to cut features before they slowed down production, not after.
"We were constantly cutting every time we had an offsite with directors," Skalski said. "It was a normal practice, because we wanted to try and be as healthy as we could be." Laidlaw added that it was vital for developers at Yellow Brick to see leadership making these cuts, so they would feel confident presenting planned features as being out of scope, knowing they'd take it seriously.
"At the beginning of every major phase of development, we'd sit down with every director and some of the leads and go 'okay, here's what we'd like the end of [this stage] to look like, does that fit, yes or no?"
So if the end of say, a 6-month pre-production sprint, the team wanted all of Brynn's armor choices completed by the end of pre-production, they'd go to the team and ask if that was possible. If the team said "we can't make that much armor," they'd cut the number of assets or otherwise reshape the armor system as needed, rather than sacrifice the top production goal.
Image via Yellow Brick Games.
This process was done in service of ensuring developers wouldn't work on a feature for a year, only to have it completely cut from the game. So when Yellow Brick cut the number of epic creatures from 12 to 9, the 3 lost monsters didn't see "a single minute" of additional work. St-Laurent alluded to his experience at previous studios (going out of his way to not specify which ones) where developers would pour months of work into some portion of a game and then eventually realize it either it wasn't good enough or leadership just plain forgot it was being worked on.
One of Laidlaw's favorite memories in development came while toying with the interaction between temperature and loot—the crafting components that drop in the world that players use to craft and upgrade weapons and armor. He described how "rich boulders" in the game were a prime example of this system. After they were heated up, they were meant to drop rarer, better metals because they'd been magically "refined or smelted" by the heat in the world.
"I always joked with [St-Laurent]...I said 'my dream is that I can use telekinesis to hold a boulder in a dragon's breath so it produces excalibur-level materials.' And I remember one day he messaged me and he says 'hey, remember your jokes about combat smelting? I did it. It's in, and it works.'"
And so "combat smelting" was born, allowing players to manipulate loot drops using the laws of thermodynamics. It's an example of how this systems-focused approach created "efficiencies" later in development after spending extra time early in the process. Not only was the team creating new content as the game went on, each new element introduced to the game had additive properties that didn't need to be designed by hand.
With Eternal Strands now out in the wild, Yellow Brick Games and the game development community have a case study for what smaller teams of experienced developers can produce. It's still yet to be seen if these smaller teams will ultimately produce more successful games. But for now, the team can take pride in releasing one of the first exceptionally unique games of 2025.
You May Also Like
