ageofaincrad
Patreon Devlog #9 - April 2022
Published: April 23rd 2022, 10:33:21 am
Hello Patrons!
We hope you had a nice break this Easter!
March was a pretty wild month for us on all fronts, especially when it came to growing our team, but more on that a bit later. This month we got new additions to our team, camera & controller updates, some QOL improvements, some dungeon updates, a new handsome elk, character improvements, and finally, info on the next few weeks.
This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:
Lethiferous!
We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.
Reminder: Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.
We still have a few winners who skipped their turns, so please do let us know if you want to jump back into the queue and we’ll get right away to work on your picture.
The Team:
As mentioned before, March was a pretty insane month for us because we welcomed 3 new people into our team.
As luck would have it, all 3 of them are primarily programmers, one having multiple games published under his belt already. A real man among the men, so to speak. Other than programming, one of them comes from a game design background.
We’ve also been training up a level designer and he’ll help us bring the most out of the environments with a few more weeks of training, hopefully.
We’re still on the lookout for additional 3D artists and animators especially, be it for weapons, structures, or mobs. Nevertheless, the team is growing at a magnificent pace and we’ll hopefully release another client in the next month or two depending on a few factors.
Movement, Controls & Camera:
All of March we’ve been heavily focused on laying the groundwork for updating the movement system, finally.
The movement will be what we announced quite a while back - Jumps, Double Jumps & Gliding. We also announced climbing but that’s on the backburner for a while longer due to how immense of a time-sink that will end up being.
The double jump and gliding already work, though we don’t have a finished video with animations set up to showcase due to some external circumstances. Trust our words though, it’s there and looking good. We’ll get a video of it going as soon as we possibly can.
After a big upcoming update to our primary framework, we’ll have more options to look into the climbing aspect.
We’ve also done some work on the camera, keybinds, and controls. The control layout is a lot more cleaned up and streamlined than it was before and will hopefully make more sense to you in the tests to come.
To top it off, we implemented a Lock-On system quite reminiscent of Dark Souls that put your target in the middle of your screen and makes you walk/rotate around it so that you can focus on only one enemy at a time. There are still some slight improvements needed, but already quite good.
Finally, there’s also a proximity interaction implemented now, so instead of having to click on objects & NPCs, you can press an interaction key to just get straight to talking or mining, whatever you like. A massive QOL improvement which we hope you'll get to experience soon!
Engine & Frameworks:
The Engine we use (Unity) has released its massive yearly update, so we’re slowly migrating the entire project to it. It’s a wonderful release coming with performance and feature updates, a full year of tech all at our fingertips.
Sadly migrating a project of this size takes a bit of time and that was a bit of a time-sink. We’re also still not done with it, expecting it to take another week for a full migration.
Once that’s done, our primary framework also has had its first massive update of the year coming this week (after a bunch of delays) and we’ll also spend a lot of time upgrading to it, merging our code into their base. Bunch of new features, improvements, optimizations, and so on. Boring tech-speak, but quite important for us to go through with it to make your experience with the game better in the long term.
Continued Dungeon Improvements:
We finished laying out the first cave dungeon and got most of the structure & layout down. One room remaining, then visual detail placement left as well as a water area to add.
A few sample shots:
Character Model Finalization:
It’s been coming along somewhat slowly, but we finally finalized the character model after months of back and forth. We ended up grabbing a reference rig from an AAA game and rebuilding a few pieces of our model to make it more in line with what a professional rig should be and it’s finished.
We weight-painted the logic for clothing from scratch and made sure it’s all looking great without issues or clipping.
Attached is a video we posted in insiders (our preview channel on Discord, join in if you haven't yet!) regarding the way the body can move now without issues and clipping, which will allow us to create way more complicated animations than before, as well as some shots of the fixed-up clothing on the new model.
New Mobs:
Introducing: The Elk (name in progress).
This creature is a mix of a few animals we are surrounded by in real life.
Its tail is like that of a peacock as you can tell. It uses it in quite a similar way. The eyes on said feathers are capable of emitting a glow, similar to its eyes. As for those, the elk has no need to keep them open and most of the time they stay closed completely.
While they are able to view their surroundings like normal, they don’t need to. They are able to see the leylines of the world without the need to have their eyes open. While in combat, they will open their eyes, as their keen instincts and ability to see the tiniest details let them predict the future movements of their enemies. That puts considerable strain on them, however.
Their primary predators are creatures from the Rift Valley, like these two candidates:
The rift itself is a location between Rathos and Wimbourne - locations which you’ll get to explore in the future.
Finally, related to our lovely gremlins, these creatures tend to be quite friendly with one another. No one in Arthuax dares to mess with even one of them - these birds of a feather truly flock together in every way.
Just like the majority of gremlins, they get along quite well with humans. They pull carriages but do not agree to be kept as mere pets. They are prideful and intelligent creatures. Rather, they work alongside people.
Here's a 3D peek at our newest creature - without anime shading applied. There are still a few modifications left to do, but it will be ready and animated soon. Look forward to seeing how it looks in-game!
Night Visuals:
After some prior requests, we improved the night visuals to be less of a mess. Alongside that, we also finished some issues we encountered before like the missing moon thankfully nobody noticed in the prior test client release.
We’re also currently trying to decide on how to handle the visuals themselves. The first sample keeps the colors nice and popping, but also shadows are a lot darker and visibility might not be as perfect (then again, it is supposed to be night, right?).
The second sample unifies all colors with a bit of a blueish tint, but visibility at night is a bit better all-around and you don’t really need much in terms of torches or light sources on you.
We haven’t decided which color profile we prefer, so we would appreciate your feedback on this. If possible please let us know in the comments which you like more so we can go with the more pleasant one.
1:
2:
Endword:
We really had hoped we could get the engine migration and framework update done faster, but it will most likely be done by the next Patreon update at the earliest.
Other than all the above updates, we fixed a ton of miscellaneous features and bugs (like that one where one person pulling out their weapon made the entire server pull it out - that one was great).
A feature we are working on but didn’t bother elaborating on will be a GPS tracker for quests. It’s somewhat hellish to set up and quite a hassle to get working right, but we’ll get it done - hopefully at max 2 months from now. It’s quite complex and needs tons of testing for dozens of use-cases and quest types.
Next month you can expect samples of the movement system improvements and all the shiny new camera features we got for you - we’ll try to post some mid-month as well. Additionally the Elk, maybe some more in-game clothing if we get the chance. The concepts are already done, you can check them out in last month's update if you haven't yet!
We’re also hoping to get at least 1 more 3D artist on board to accelerate prop and weapon production - that part of dev is suffering a bit, as our focus shifted to buildings and mobs & characters.
Also, regarding those night pictures - we’d really appreciate your input and thoughts, as it’s important for you to be happy with it more than anything :)
Till next time! <3