How Eternal Stands Leverages The Industry Expertise of Yellow Brick Games

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home January 17, 2025 8 Views 6 Min Read
How Eternal Stands Leverages The Industry Expertise of Yellow Brick Games



The debut game from a new developer can usually be seen as a statement of purpose for the studio, especially when that studio consists of several industry veterans with impressive resumes. Following his departure from BioWare, former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw joined up with the team at Ubisoft Quebec, only for him, colleague Frederic St-Laurent, and others to later form their own studio, Yellow Brick Games. The team’s debut title, Eternal Strands, is now set for release on January 28.

In a recent interview with Game Rant, directors Laidlaw and St-Laurent described how the combined industry experience of everyone at Yellow Brick Games resulted in Eternal Strands having a consistent vision. The team’s experience on past projects also provided valuable logistic parameters that helped the project stay on target where it might have otherwise fallen apart. Both are important elements of any development process. With a collective history that includes working on some of the industry’s most beloved titles, Yellow Brick Games’ veteran staff quickly established a strong position to ensure that Eternal Strands delivers on both its narrative and gameplay.

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Eternal Strands is an upcoming action-adventure game from Yellow Brick Games, a studio comprised of BioWare, Ubisoft, and overall industry veterans.

Eternal Strands Has Maintained the Same Core Vision Since its Inception

The benefit of experience is that it gives the tools to know what works and what doesn’t in any particular field, and the same is true with game development. A consistent vision can help keep a game on track, but even then, sometimes games change. That’s what the development process is, after all. According to Laidlaw, the collective experience of the team at Yellow Brick Games is one of the main contributing factors toward the game landing on, and sticking to, a consistent vision throughout its development. As Laidlaw notes, Eternal Strands‘ definitive elements are all things that the team wanted to incorporate, pointing out that “…our original proposal — the physics, the large creatures, climbing…all of those elements are very much what we intended from the beginning.”

And though both Laidlaw and St-Laurent described Eternal Strands going through “one major evolution,” it was ultimately a “healthy change for the game” that saw the player’s toolkit expand in ways that supported the title’s main goal of emergent gameplay. Laidlaw notes:

“…in any creative endeavor…you need to keep a reasonably steady course but also be flexible enough on feedback to know when it’s time to course-correct, and threading the needle between randomness in your design and overt dogmatism. You need to know when it’s time to make some shifts.”

What Yellow Brick Games’ Combined Experience Meant for Keeping Eternal Strands On-Track

The formation of Yellow Brick Games and the beginning of Eternal Strands‘ development also happened to coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the studio to rapidly shift modalities in hopes of keeping the project afloat. This ended up being another area where the team’s combined experience and industry knowledge proved to be a major boon, with Laidlaw pointing out that “having the veterans in means that we had a little more discipline, I think, than some indie studios might have in terms of project management.” Laidlaw then elaborates:

“That kind of stuff is…you not only have to learn how to do it but there’s also the experience of having seen the benefits of being able to sort of be predictive about the schedule, being able to make cuts where necessary, being able to make changes where necessary, being able to reprioritize…All of those things are discussions that I think some degree of maturity is required, and some degree of experience to have seen how it really plays out is beneficial.”

With Eternal Strands now gold-certified, a demo forthcoming, and its release rapidly approaching, Laidlaw notes that “Fred and I have both been involved kind of from the beginning, so there is this sensation of thinking and hoping that we have managed to stick the landing on what was not just a leap of faith, but given COVID and everything, it was sort of like a backflip of faith.”

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