Update 23: Another Hot Month
Hello everyone!
Despite the heat, vacations, and all the other trappings of Summer, the team has continued to get an update worthy amount of work done!
We hope you’re staying cool. Grab an icy beverage and enjoy!
Character Art & Concepts
Human, Gnome, and Ogre geometry reworked to facilitate better topology around the armpits
UV and Weight Painting cleaned up accordingly
Animations were reworked, both from the Art & Tech side of things (more below)
Modelling on Female Humans and Wood Elves started
Attachable items (backpacks, belt packs) working on Player Characters
New NPC & Monster Concepts
Some NPC/Monsters Concepted via Sculpting
Experimentation with reuse of existing textures to create new equipment variations
Additional Character Customization (and tooling)
Environment Art & Concepts
Continued work on Night Harbor Western District
Market
Temple Entrance
Tannery
Additional Streets and Structures
Newbie yard revamp
Fallen Watch façade updated and added to Shaded Dunes and Vale of Zintar
Cat Rooms (dog rooms coming soon)
Wyrmsbane Entrance Model updated and added to NH Western Newbie Yard
Wyrmsbane Zone Expanded
Additional Tomb areas grey boxed
Cavern areas grey boxed
In distilling what we love about a lot of classic fantasy art, as related to our tenets, we arrived at: “Place, Party, and Peril.”
These “Cover” images (think books, modules, etc…) do a great job of tapping into that inspiration.
Expect more of them.
UI & UI Concepts
UI Mockup & UX flows concepted
UI Texture Style concepted
Character Race Selection illustration
Character creation UI and workflow improvements
Added additional character name validation
Added confirmation before deleting characters
Ability, buff, and Hotbar UI visual and functional changes
Various Bug fixes
In the mock-up above, you can see that we’re concepting integrated customization of core UI elements. The goal is to enable players to easily set up their UI to their preference, even if they’re not technical (via drag and drop, un/dockable tabs, etc).
We’re still early in the process, so feel free to give us your thoughts on Discord.
Design & QA
Itemization Work
Recipes Work
New Mob Spawns and Mob Spawn Adjustments for Night Harbor
Started adding new MUD Objects for Night Harbor and Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane zones
Misc. Ability Work
All Newbie Note quests in data or implemented (some PH)
Public Test Milestone Checklist
Misc. Ability work, updates, and bug fixes
Pruned/modified starting abilities for certain classes
Gameplay Testing/Bug Reporting/Regression
Tech
CICD pipeline support for automatic building of server and client
CICD pipeline support for publishing patch releases available to launcher patching
More work on login server integration with login via launcher
Database restructuring
Implemented additional texture processes such as masking
Implemented attachable items (backpacks, beltpacks)
Animation system revamp. It is now all programmatic.
More robust “RPG style” functionality added for Reagents, Food, Merchants. For Example:
Merchants will now only buy items that they are tagged to buy
Light sources can consume “charges,” similar to food
Light sources can be recharged (ex. Oil Lamp)
Multiple reagents can be used at once or only have a chance to be consumed
Navigation fixes
Wwise integration proof of concept and research for overhauling audio is underway
Skin tone and facial features for NPCs
Fixed some zone line problems
In Closing
As you can see, despite vacations (or in Ali’s case - because of…), the team has kept things moving along nicely!
Next month we’ll have some info on our latest addition to the team, and possibly an update on the search for an Animator.
Exciting stuff!
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out our:
Have a great day and hopefully, we’ll see you on one of our streams or in Discord!