Update 24: Gearing up for Fall

Written By Shawn Lord

Hail Adventurers!

Summer is starting to feel like Fall around here, but don’t be sad - we’ve got another great update for you!

Grab a beverage, cross your fingers and wish for a few more warm weeks, and then read through what we’ve been up to in August.

Character Art & Concepts

  • Modeled male & female Ashira

  • Modeled Elemental Pets

  • Implemented Ashira and Elemental Pets into unity

    • Still more work to do with texture and animation though!

  • Improved Coloration/Sharpness on the Face and Skin Layers

    • This coincides with tech/rendering improvements (below)

  • Generic Concept for Adventurer, that fills out most gear slots

  • New Mob Concepts

  • Started Zombie concepts

Last, but not least — we’ve added a new animator!

Welcome William/Urkenstaff!

He’s been working on:

  • A new rig for the Human player character with (awesome) new controls

  • A first pass of most Human animations (a few shown below)

We’re also working with another talented animator, who has been focused on the Jackal animations (more on that next month).

Environment Art & Concepts

  • Began adjustments to Night Harbor’s Western District street flow

    • This is starting to break up the grid-like flow from the initial greybox/blocking pass

  • Began work on the Park District Walls and Hanging Gardens

  • Gathered architectural references for Necropolis District

  • Fixed the blocking geo in Fallen Pass and the Twilight Isles

  • Fixed the nav mess issues in Vale of Zintar

  • Two new “book cover”/Place, Party, and Peril (PPP) Illustrations. Inspiring!

UI & UI Concepts

  • UI Asset Creation

  • Updated inventory layout

  • Added new textures to inventory and container UIs

  • Refactored some base UI for window management

Note: there’s a bit of placeholder at play in this image, but we’re now integrating last month’s concepts into the game.

Elements like the experience bar will be replaced with art similar to the concepts, the class symbols will eventually be 3D and animated, and the paperdoll view will likely be a real-time view of your character.

Design & QA

  • MUD Object update in Wyrmsbane

  • Fallen Watch dungeon made higher level for purpose of playtesting

  • Reworked combat formulas to improve balance

  • Resists/resist formulas revamped to improve utility/gameplay in the early levels

  • Wrapped up Rogue Guild faction lore

  • Bards Guild faction lore started

  • Fighter and Ranger starting quests added

    • Used these to discuss worldbuilding & design workflow/approach

  • Merchants updated to use the new buy and sell lists

  • All existing items tagged to work with the new “buy” system

  • Added missing merchant types; common items added to merchants

  • Update Night Harbor POIs to use new volume system (see below)

  • NPCs are now wearing clothes over their undies

  • Started organizing Issues for a Bug Polish Pass

  • Started Regression Testing for all Open Issues

  • Lots of additional design work/ad hoc testing

Tech

  • First person camera control tweaks

  • Fixed sending location data for larger zones

  • Integrated Wwise sound engine (Yay!)

  • Sound design, new audio, and music now utilizing Wwise sound engine

    • Including a new audio track for the Glass Flats from Robert!

  • Huge improvements to texture loading and blending, leading to much nicer looking player characters

  • Added merchant buy and sell lists (support to define what a merchant will buy)

  • Melee Combat Formula Tuning

  • Gameplay Volumes (Data driven spaces that can have arbitrary rules attached to them)

  • Resist Revamp (includes Damage Reduction/ Resist Block Chance)

  • Data Driven Statics (Doors, Volumes, Points of Interest)

  • Animation system improvements in blending between states

  • Improved navigation calculation

  • Improved movement speed logic and server/client sync

Also… and In Closing

As mentioned last month, we’d like to announce another addition to the team:

Welcome, Keith!

You’ve probably seen KeithG around in Discord or on the streams. He’s been making the really fun Mandrake Farms video edits, and just happens to also be an experienced programmer IRL.

Keith is now helping us on both fronts (videos and tech). Yay!

So, that’s it for August. We hope you have a great month, and we’ll see you on Discord, our YouTube comments, and during the streams.

And at the time of this writing, we’re at 1990 people on our Mailing List.

Be sure to join up, if you haven’t already.

Take care!

Shawn Lord
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Year 2 Retrospective
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Update 23: Another Hot Month