Update 20: April was no joke
Hello everyone!
Even with the holidays (Ramadan Kareem!), some good weather, and other real life demands creeping in, April was still a busy month for all of us on the MnM front.
Despite a lot of the work being preparatory for things you’ll see coming online in May, there’s plenty to see below.
This month, we’ll kick it off with a list of feature & systems work, and then there’ll be a ton of images of concepts, environments, character UV work, and animations to look at.
If you’re still using that 56k modem, apologies in advance… the page is gonna load slow today.
Go grab some coffee and enjoy!
Tech
Ali, Gary, and John worked on:
Initial fishing and foraging implementation
Harvest Node functionality added
Refactor of melee and ability casting code
Rework of combat formulas for better scaling
Enhanced the resurrection system to allow customizable rez sickness debuffs/affects for supporting how resurrection will work for various classes
Support for shrink/grow buff affects (initial pass - still some issues to work out)
The volume level of our UI sounds is now customizable per sound
Added support for abilities to damage and heal by percentage of current and max health
Activatable (toggle-able) abilities can now be toggled off during the ability cooldown
When using an ability you can now gain skill ups for the ability's primary skill.
Fixes:
Activatable (toggle-able) abilities are now properly toggled off when their buff is removed in various ways (example: stealth break on taking damage)
Fixed a vulnerability around character deletion
Fixed issues around combat misses, where misses were being calculated and displayed in cases they should not
NPC casted hostile point blank area of effect, and cone area abilities no longer hit the NPC itself
Feign death no longer triggers the death camera
Fixes to blink teleportation
Various fixes around GM invulnerability
Lots and lots of bug fixes
As you can see, not only are we implementing new features, but we’re tuning, refactoring, and keeping an eye on our bug database as we go.
Concepts
To help us get a feel for the various player races, Alex (Goblin) worked on some “post card” images.
We’ll continue to iterate as we get closer to building out different regions, but don’t be surprised if you see some of these aesthetic elements worked into Night Harbor as well.
Be sure to click on these to see the full image.
Character Art (UVs)
Alex and Connor (Zukan) have continued their work with Ali on reworking and unifying our UVs.
As a small team, this work is very necessary for us to be able to build a large amount of content.
The work has resulted in a modular system that allows us to build armor textures for all races quickly. It unlocks the ability for us to make cultural armor that can possibly be worn by other races, without us having to make that same armor for different body types.
We’re excited about it because it allows us to produce more with a reduced pipeline cost for each individual armor texture, and something that’s been proven to work in other games.
The Ogre in a robe is a work in progress, but it’s good to test the approach with extreme examples.
Facial Customization
To support our work on character customization, we’ve also created a number of facial options for the human, gnome, and ogre.
Animation
We’ve spent some time this month working on character animations. This includes testing out Cascadeur, which has proven easy enough for even Shawn to use, despite being a complete novice.
As part of this, we’ve also begun testing retargeting of these animations between the races to speed up development.
Don’t worry though - there’ll be plenty of unique flavor for each character & critter.
Environments
Harrison (Padas) continued his work on Night Harbor by creating more structures & interiors, and blocking out the city. He also took a quick break to do a texture pass on our newbie dungeon, Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane.
Shawn (aLovingRobot) continued to greybox/block out some of the remaining proof of concept zones, including: Sungreet Strand, Glass Flats, Dragon’s Run, and the Vale of Zintar.
Design & Music
Nick (NickHotS) continued work on class design, player & NPC abilities, and implemented the new Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane dungeon for us to playtest in.
He’s also been finding and regressing a ton of bugs while wearing his QA hat.
Despite being on tour with his band, the Von Hertzen Brothers, Robert has provided us with an incredible new audio track.
Check out both of their work in this sneak peek video that Nick made:
Lore development continues behind the scenes, but we’re still mostly keeping things hush-hush. Hamad even drew out some fantastic maps for us to work off of.
If you’re crafty, you might be able to spot a glimpse of them in one or two of the streams.
Once we get some bandwidth to focus on the website, we’ll get some basic background lore posted - but, we still think that a big part of the fun will be in playing the game and learning the lore for yourselves (or just finding it on a wiki somewhere if you’re slow out of the gate).
Feel free to pop into Discord and let us know what you think about this approach.
In Closing
Thanks for all of the support! As you can see, we’re staying busy and making steady progress.
Our YouTube, Discord, and Mailing List continue to grow, so it seems like word is getting out. Be sure to join/sub if you haven’t already.
That’s it for April, but don’t worry, we’re already working on stuff for May!
Take care and thanks again!