The Ingenious Minds Behind Eternal Strands: Crafting a Bold Physics Experience with a Small Team

Image courtesy of Yellow Brick Games.

Yellow Brick Games’ Eternal Strands is undeniably among the key success stories to emerge from the numerous smaller studios formed by struggling triple-A developers during the impressive growth period of 2020-2022. This is indeed a third-person action-adventure title that distinguishes itself through a remarkable physics framework that allows players to combine magical abilities to combat foes and traverse intricate landscapes—often when the “landscape” is a massive creature.

A decade past, this kind of game would have been viewed as a feat achievable only by a team of hundreds of developers, yet Yellow Brick Games is delivering Eternal Strands with fewer than a hundred employees (and a shift from being published by Private Division to self-publishing). Advances in technology have certainly simplified this task, but Unreal Engine has not made that framework more efficient over time. So what contributed to this game’s success?

The insights provided by game director Frédéric St-Laurent, creative director Mike Laidlaw, and executive producer Jeff Skalski will resonate with most of our readers (Laidlaw and Skalski also serve as Yellow Brick’s chief creative officer and chief operating officer, respectively). They can essentially be summarized as “constraints, innovation, and teamwork.”

However, diving into the specifics reveals a project that resulted in such efficient design over four years of effort. Like a well-navigated snowball rolling downhill, the studio harnessed a temperature system that would become central to its magical gameplay and developed a framework for producing well-defined content that brought this game to life.

Eternal Strands’ magic system is based on temperature tracking

When the Yellow Brick Team united in 2020, the proposal for what would evolve into Eternal Strands was remarkably close to what it would become in the final game. The fundamental mechanics of crafting weapons, defeating huge monsters, and utilizing physics-driven magic were all present from day one, set within a narrative world led 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 mystical group known as “Weavers” who find themselves in a forgotten land called The Enclave, where she must uncover its secrets and restore the land, and more importantly, her friends. She accomplishes this using magical abilities that interact dynamically with the environment, weather, and adversaries.

St-Laurent explained that the core of the magic system is fundamentally a temperature monitoring tool. After creating a physics-based controller for the player capable of fueling procedural animations for climbing on significant creatures, the team developed a method to track the temperature within every two-meter by two-meter section of air in the gameplay environment. Then elements such as plants, rocks, and collectible items required “sensors” to detect that temperature and determine what behaviors to trigger. Hot items commence to burn, cold items become brittle, creatures slow down in the chill or freeze in place due to ice, among others.

The goal was to ensure that magical and creature attacks could naturally influence the environment. One example would be a dragon igniting a massive wildfire with its fiery breath due not only to the flames but also the convection generated by the heat. Another scenario might involve a towering “Arc” automaton striking a wooden structure and causing it to collapse to the ground.

Or it is a smaller-scale version of what Nintendo achieved with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. And as it is smaller-scale (and developed by a smaller team), these two-by-two measurement units quickly began to enforce constraints.

“It led to intriguing decisions,” Laidlaw remarked. “Our game cannot be open world because we cannot simulate all those temperatures across a 25-kilometer square area.” Instead, players explore a variety of distinct “zones,” each filled with different enemies and resources, which, combined with quests, compel players to continually revisit previously explored areas.

The essence of Eternal Strands‘ “epic” confrontations with giant monsters followed a similar pattern. While certain creatures, such as various types of dragons and towering magical automatons, were conceived from the start, the Yellow Brick team approached their design in a top-down manner, rather than merely compiling a list of enemies to include in the game.

To create these creatures, St-Laurent and his team first developed the primary locomotion and health systems that could be universally applied to all creatures. They then established a “language of elements” that could serve as a foundation for everything in the game (fire, ice, telekinesis, acid, etc.). Following that, they employed what he termed “subtractive design” to define the characteristics of each creature, allowing them to use in-development systems to clarify the traits of each enemy.

So if “flight” is one ability, then a creature that “flies” and “breathes fire” serves as the basis for a dragon (or “breathes ice” for an ice dragon). The creatures are further differentiated by their AI and the environments they inhabit. Most move in a pattern, but some will engage the player in combat, leading to more dynamic encounters.

“`once while others engage from afar, creating a realm where they intend to accumulate the exit.

Yet again, limitations arise. Crafting beings in this manner excluded entities that could employ various methods of movement like rolling or gliding. Therefore, no boulder-themed or serpent-like creatures could be incorporated into the ensemble. “I remember humorously suggesting a perfect sphere that had a tessellating number of polygons, and it would cause you to lag,” Laidlaw shared. “The ultimate challenge was optimizing your system in real time.”

Skolski mentioned that this endeavor—and constructing the magical framework in a similar fashion—enabled unexpected gameplay opportunities to surface mid-cycle that the developers hadn’t even considered. He recalled testing the Ice Wall ability against a colossal automaton foe referred to as the Arc of the Earth, directing a flow of ice at it while it charged to smash him with a massive mace. Unexpectedly, he directed the ice from the creature’s chest up to its larger arm, immobilizing it in place the way ice can pin foes to the ground.

“I simply lowered my shield because I thought ‘it can’t hit me. It’s attempting, but it can’t until it breaks the ice or [the ice] melts.'” Laidlaw explained that moments like this emerged throughout the development process—but then it became crucial to ensure the player grasped the sequence of events that led to these surprises occurring.

Eliminating elements before anyone invests time on them

When Eternal Strands was initially planned, the aim was to develop 12 legendary creatures. The game ultimately launched with 9. Cutting appealing features is part and parcel of game design, but Skalski stated the goal with Eternal Strands was to do as little work as possible on a feature before it was cut. In other words, to eliminate components before they hampered production, not afterwards.

“We were constantly reducing scope during offsite meetings with directors,” Skalski commented. “It was a regular practice since we aimed to be as efficient as possible.” Laidlaw added that it was vital for developers at Yellow Brick to observe leadership making these reductions, so they would genuinely feel confident presenting proposed features as out of scope, knowing they’d take it seriously.

“At the start of every major phase of development, we’d convene with each director and some of the lead developers and say ‘okay, here’s what we envision the end of [this stage] to look like, does that fit, yes or no?'”

For instance, at the conclusion of a six-month pre-production period, the team desired all of Brynn’s armor designs completed by the end of pre-production, so they would approach the team and inquire if that was feasible. If the team replied “we can’t produce that much armor,” they would reduce the number of assets or adjust the armor design as needed, instead of jeopardizing the overall production goal.

This strategy was implemented to ensure developers wouldn’t labor on a feature for a year only to have it entirely removed from the game. Thus, when Yellow Brick reduced the number of legendary creatures from 12 to 9, the 3 discarded monsters did not see “a single minute” of additional effort. St-Laurent reflected on his experiences at previous studios (making an effort not to specify which) where developers would invest months into some aspect of a game, only to later realize it either wasn’t good enough or management simply neglected to remember it was being developed.

What a process like this enables

One of Laidlaw’s cherished memories in development arose while experimenting with the interaction between temperature and loot—the crafting components that fall onto the world that players use to create and enhance weapons and armor. He recounted how “rich boulde