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Celyne is an amazing artist who has been playing RIFT since 2011. She’s also a member of the TRION Creator Program. Learn more about her!

• Q. How long have you been playing RIFT and what do you like about it?
• A. I’ve been playing RIFT since it launched in March 2011 and there are so many features to like about the game that keeps me interested.  First off is the GORGEOUS artwork with layers and layers of detail. I am still in awe each time I enter Meridian or visit Mount Carcera in Ember Isle. Then you have the brilliant wardrobe and Dimension system that rivals other games built specifically for that. But what I really love about RIFT is the core Soul System that allows you to switch roles or create your own to suit any instance. Because my gaming time was limited, it was such a pleasure to be able to stick with one main character who is skilled to fill any role needed for a raid at the same time hold his own on solo adventures.
• Q. What calling/souls are your main character in RIFT and what do you enjoy about it?
• A. My main character is a Rogue. I enjoy playing stealthy and speedy-hitting character types.  When I used to raid, I had to master multiple builds to be efficient for max DPS or healing. I enjoy all of them. But my real favorite is the bard soul.  I know other callings replicate the function of bards nowadays, but back then, this was such a vital requirement in a raid because of the massive support in buffs/debuffs it provided.  I had over four bard builds for raids for extra DPS or heal numbers or just for fun. There is a sense of pride when the raid master says “the bard did more damage than…” One little peeve I have about the bard is the lute. Maybe one day we have an option to change the skin to an electric guitar or something that matches better with Storm Legion such as the Tactician’s weapon. Maybe…please???

• Q. How long have you been a part of the TRION Creator program and how did you first get involved?
• A. I became a TRION Creator back in July 2016. I heard about it through the livestream and I was very excited because this was an opportunity to share my work at the same time as making players happy by giving away in-game goodies. When I first applied, it felt like submitting a job application and I was really nervous. First of all, I didn’t stream and the content I provided was ‘static.’  I wasn’t even sure if I had enough RIFT fan art to show and most of them were of my Rogue who was just another face in the crowd. When I received the welcome letter, it was really one of my best days! I was unemployed at that time too so that ray of light changed my outlook towards the situation I was in. A few months (and Lancerdoodles) later, I joined the ranks of Trion Creators for Atlas Reactor as well.
• Q. What got you into drawing and doing art as a profession?
• A. Drawing and art have been a part of my life since I was very little. According to my mom, I’ve been drawing people figures since I was two and I kind of remember what they look like with a line for hair and ten sticks for fingers in each hand. I also like telling stories through my drawings and was very into comics, manga, and picture books (although I am bad with layouts and paneling my comics until now). And that has been the fuel to my passion. For example, I would start drawing a random character and slowly a backstory would form around it.  Or, I draw out my “what if” scenarios about canon video game/cartoon/book characters and so on. I would share them on my website, forums and on DeviantArt, which lead me to be asked to do commissions of OC’s and other fan art. I’ve had a really positive run for commissions and plan to expand my offerings such as prints, stickers, and other physical goodies.
• Q. What is your favorite type of thing to draw or color?
• A. People/Humanoids (that includes elves, bahmis and dwarves). The human body is amazing, beautiful, and complex in all forms, shapes, and sizes. Usually the challenge for me is to be able to convey a story or message using only facial features, gestures, and poses. Recently, I’ve been practicing how to draw armor better. And what better way to get inspiration than from RIFT’s armor system which is very intricate and detailed? Each time I get a commission request for a RIFT toon, I encourage my client to wear their best armor and I will draw it!
• Q. What type of instruments do you use to produce your art? Do you have a preference between traditional and digital?
• A. For digital art, I use Photoshop and a Wacom tablet. These are my preferred tools because I’ve used them for a very long time and have an established workflow for creating art. For traditional media, I go from pencils, colored pencils, inks, and markers. Recently, I’ve discovered the joy of using brush markers such as Copics.I prefer to do most of my art and commissions via digital, but I make time to draw using traditional media. The skills you learn from both go hand in hand – literally, they go into your hand’s muscle memory. A few years ago, I was in a situation where I had no access to a drawing tablet for two months. I had to use pens, inks, and colored pencils to satisfy my cravings to draw. When I got back home, I was surprised by how that experience improved controlling my stylus. My line art had become much cleaner and I have become more confident with each stroke.

• Q. What have been your favorite commissions to do and what do you love about them?
• A. Oh, that’s a tough question! I have a lot of favorite commissions like Mobi’s Tol-Ren vs. Kenshin, my guild mate’s Dancing Diaper Dwarf, and the Kalmar Trio I drew for Samuraiko. What I love about commissions is interacting and forming relationships with my clients. I get to learn their character’s back stories and sometimes, a little about the client as well. Usually I get requests to draw a relative, boyfriend/girlfriend, best friend, or spouse as a character in their favorite game. It’s such an honor for me to be chosen to draw them and help them share their love and friendship or to brighten their day.  It makes me very happy to know that I am able to spread positivity and cheer in my own, little way.
• Q. Do you have any advice for people who want to get into art?
• A. Yes, two pieces of advice:First is, pick up your pencil and paper and start drawing! Art and creativity are within each and every one of us and it doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 55. As long as you have something you wish to express, pick up a pencil and paper and start drawing.  It’s never too late to start!The second piece of advice and perhaps, the most important is to practice consistently. One of my favorite artists, Stan Prokopenko said, “fluency allows you to be more creative.” This has really stuck with me. The more fluent you are, the more efficiently you will be able to translate what your vision is. There are a million ways to approach this and a million more art video tutorials and resources out there. But there is one clear message, and that is: keep drawing, drawing, drawing!

Want to connect with Celyne in more places? Follow her on Twitter and don’t forget to check out her website for commissions, fan art, doodles, and more!

We greatly appreciate Celyne taking the time to interview with us in our second RIFT community interview series. Would you like to be interviewed in an upcoming segment? Tweet us @RIFTgame with the hashtag #CommunityQA and what you enjoy most about the game for a chance to be featured!

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Meet Chris “Keyens” Meyer, System Designer for RIFT. He works tirelessly on callings and souls. Let’s learn more about his craft!

Chris “Keyens” Meyer is a video game industry veteran with six years of experience in MMORPGs. He loves skateboarding, great food, and of course, playing games. We sat down and asked him a few questions about what goes into the making of souls in RIFT. Enjoy!

• Q: What is your inspiration for creating new souls?
• A: It depends on each soul, but I devour media so that I have a constant stream of different depictions of various power sets. Once we decide we are doing new souls one of my first steps is finding anything I can that might contain even a small amount of inspiration for their development.
• Q: Do you ever over-analyze classes in other games?
• A: All the time. I actually quite enjoy playing every new class or character that comes out in a game and looking at them as part of the design of their game as a whole. It’s incredibly informative, and I believe it is critical to finding more and more interesting design spaces to work in.
• Q: How do you get into the mind set of creating souls for RIFT?
• A: I generally start by getting a rough image of what kind of power fantasies we haven’t served for a particular calling, or otherwise investigating interesting twists on archetypes that appear in various media.

• Q: What is the process you use to map out the creation of a new soul?
• A: Once I have a clear mental image of what the soul feels like, I open a blank text pad and begin jotting down ideas and mechanics. This phase is mostly stream of consciousness, and generally leaves me with walls of text in varying states of design cohesion and completeness. Once this is complete, I break down the various ideas until something starts to resonate with the image I have in my head of the new soul. Once I find that mechanic or ability or whatever text it was that caused that resonance, I begin to flesh out additional ideas until a soul starts to form. Once that happens, the process gets a little more formal by constructing a document that shows the actual root and talent tree, with levels at which everything can be obtained. This document is then used for the approval process. After that, assembly of the soul begins.
• Q: How do you work with internal and player feedback?
• A: Internal and player feedback are handled slightly differently, although this is largely owing to the methods in which they can be given and where in the timeline they go. Early on many souls have crazy ideas or gameplay and we don’t know if they will work. Once a prototype is assembled and generally ready (this might mean it only has some abilities, or doesn’t have a talent tree yet, etc.) it goes out for internal playtesting. This is the period where gameplay feel and how well it serves the power fantasy are tested and iterated on. This generally leads to adding or removing abilities, or otherwise tearing out and rebuilding large chunks of functionality to iterate and update it. Player feedback, on the other hand, is much more focused on balance and the intricacies of the rotation. This is the period where the bulk of tuning happens and small focused changes are made to update the rotation and gameplay to remove unintended friction or stress that don’t add to the soul.

• Q: How do you consider balance when creating new souls?
• A: During the initial design process, certain balance considerations are made, although it is largely about getting the mental image of the soul translated into the game. The main concerns during the design process are accessibility of certain abilities low in the tree (and the risk of runaway hybrids), as well as making sure no single ability seems to be designed to subvert some of the core combat rules in the game. This is a more nebulous thought that tends to come up more frequently during iterative testing, rather than during the design process. Once we are out of that initial time however, balance comes to the forefront. One of the largest difficulties of this phase of design is making sure that the soul is accessible to most players and provides satisfying gameplay, while still having some level of depth that lets experts show mastery by extracting effectiveness out of more complex interactions.
• Q: What goes into revamping a soul?
• A: As it turns out, soul revamps generally follow the same process as a new soul. Often we won’t use everything that comes out of such a redesign, but we try to keep the process similar.

We hope you’ve gained some insights with an insider’s look at how souls are made in RIFT and enjoyed this peek inside Keyens’ brain. Share your thoughts in the official forum thread. We’ll continue to bring stories and interviews from our team, the community, and more. Have ideas you’d like to hear more about? Let us know on the forums or Twitter.

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Seshatar is a German player who has been playing RIFT since 2011. He’s currently an avid streamer and community member. Learn more about him!

We want to get to know the community better and get you to know them, too! Welcome to our new monthly series where we interview various community members including fan artists, streamers, fan site owners, guild leaders, and more. For our first interview, meet Seshatar! You may remember him as the guy putting on the Celestial Storm Twitter contest going on from now until August 13, 2017.

• Q.: How long have you been playing RIFT?
• A.: I started RIFT in July 2011, I think it was between Patch 1.3 and Patch 1.4 when I began my journey through Telara. I remember when the original Hammerknell Fortress raid was launched while I was still leveling and I really enjoyed the pre-event for it. Now, over 6 years later, I have around 9,000 hours of play time just on my main character and still enjoy to hang out in Telara almost every day.
• Q.: What calling/souls are your main character in RIFT and what do you enjoy about it?
• A.: My main character is a Cleric and so are my other two max level characters. I chose the Cleric because I love to heal in MMORPGs and in 2011, where only Mages and Cleric could heal, the Cleric just had way more healing options. Back then I painfully leveled my Cleric as a Sentinel (I mostly leveled with dungeons). Nowadays I usually play Purifier or Warden in group content. Oh, and of course my famous 1-button Shaman. 
• Q.: What keeps you playing RIFT after all these years?
• A. The community. I think Telarans are the most awesome people to hang with! Oh, and of course the excellent and regular content updates we get from the dev team that give us new things to do and explore every few weeks. Special shout out to my girlfriend and worst Mage EU Kira, my guild <Skins on Farm> and all my in-game friends!
• Q.: What got you into streaming RIFT?
• A.: I have always been helping newcomers in game and tried to drag more people into Telara by posting news and articles in forums and online magazines and was brainstorming about other ways to promote my favorite game. I personally love to watch Twitch streams and RIFT didn’t have many active streamers, so I decided I’d just stream some of my game play to give interested people an insight into the game and the option to ask questions and directly get answers during the live stream. It didn’t take long and I had regular viewers that motivated me to continue and to improve my stream quality. After all, it was the best decision of my life to start streaming RIFT, because I met my girlfriend during one of my streams. She’s also supporting me in every possible way with my streaming. 

• Q.: What is your favorite thing to stream in RIFT?
• A.: I personally enjoy the BIG events most. Preparing cool stuff for the community, from 24h Extra Life streams to dimension PvP events, live cooking shows or in game contests is what I’m really passionate about. On the other hand, the more regular streams like raiding or casual gameplay allow me more interaction with my viewers, which I also love. If my community is happy, I am too.
• Q.: Do you have any advice for new streamers who want to get into streaming?
• A.: Be yourself. Be passionate. Be patient. If you love what you do people will notice that and enjoy watching you. At the beginning you might be nervous and only have a few lurkers coming to your stream. What helped me in the beginning was to close the Twitch window, so I couldn’t see how many viewers I currently had. Take a friend or guildie with you in voice chat and just play and joke around as you would usually do. Don’t look at the chat every 5 seconds. Networking is also very important. Watch other streamers and interact with them; maybe they’ll give you some support if they get to know you and enjoy your content – or might even be in for a co-op project. From a technical point of view, make sure the video and audio settings are appealing to viewers. You don’t need Ultra graphics, but stuttering video or a bad microphone can destroy your whole stream. Make the people come for the game and stay for YOU.
• Q.: Do you have any advice for new players coming into RIFT after watching your videos?
• A.: Be social, make friends, find a guild. RIFT is most fun if you play it together with others! If you like, feel free to add me on your friends list: [EU] Volturnus@Gelidra [NA] Seshatar@Faeblight.
• Q.: What got you into running contests for the community? What’s the best part about it?
• A.: I love to create contests! Working out the basic concept, the rules and prizes really challenges me as it requires a lot creativity to get people interested in participating. But when I’m done I can just relax, sit back and enjoy all the cool stuff the community is sending in. I’m always super impressed how people work on the task in different ways and create so awesome entries that I would love to give everyone a prize for their work! Checking the new entries for a contest every morning on the phone when I’m sitting in the train to work is really the best part about it!

Want to connect with Seshatar in more places? Follow him on Twitch & Twitter and don’t forget to check out his website for upcoming events, wardrobe services, monthly RIFT giveaways, and more!

We greatly appreciate Seshatar taking the time to interview with us in our first RIFT community interview series. Would you like to be interviewed in an upcoming segment? Tweet us @RIFTgame with the hashtag #CommunityQA and what you enjoy most about the game for a chance to be featured! Chat with us about this interview on the official forum post here.