December Devlog | Week #2

This week, our systems administrator adjusted multiple abilities in the server, our game developer fixed several issues that were affecting the game’s functionality and our animator and environment artist kept themselves busy with designing various assets and posing character models. We made some good progress on Depths of Erendorn this week but there is still a lot to be done!

Environment

Our 3D Environment Artist started this week by creating a female base mesh that will be used to make a few character variations. A male base was used to create the female mesh in order to speed up the process. A human and elf variation will be made from this female base mesh, and once these works are completed we will be able to begin working on the Forest Druid character.

The sculpt for the female base mesh is nearing completion which means we will be able to begin creating the character variations very soon. Our Environment Artist spent the rest of this week finishing the high and low poly meshes for the following assets:

• Wall Torch
• Metal Wall Torch

Existing assets were also used to create a campfire, some scattered wood, wood planks and three sets of scattered bones. These assets will be placed randomly throughout the dungeon rooms by our game developer so that the environment has more dimension.

The sculpt for the female base mesh is nearly complete.

We will use this female base mesh to create several other character variations.

We used the male base mesh when creating our female in order to speed up the process.

Here is the difference between the male and female base meshes.

Animation

Our Animator spent most of this week posing and rendering several of our characters in several different environment scenes, as well as doing the render and composition for a battle scene between an Ogre and some Human Knights. She posed and rendered:

• Frost Dwarves and Human Bandits in the frost mine dungeon
• Twilight Elves and Skeletons in the lava dungeon
• Blue Melmees and Zentragals in the jungle dungeon
• A blue Melmee, Twilight Elf, Earthen Dwarf and Parakaw round a campfire in the ice dungeon

Our Animator also worked on creating the third scene for our short cinematic animation that will show a character from Erendorn battling an enemy. We’re looking forward to sharing this project with you all, but until then it’s going to have to remain a secret!

Server

After a new player character was introduced to the server last week, there were a few fixes and additions made to many of the abilities, enemies and player classes. Our game developer first had to balance the changes and fixes made to the following abilities:

• Mind Net: This now costs 18 Ancient Power
• Acid Bolt: This melts 1 armour for 10 turns
• Giant Lightning Bolt: This has had its damage increased to 9–12 Lightning Damage
• Revitalise: This now has a 6 turn CD
• Water Drops: This now costs 22 Ancient Power and is castable on others
• Ancient Bolt: This now costs 13 Ancient Power
• Double Strike: This now deals 6 Damage to each target
• Cleave: This now deals 6 Damage to enemies adjacent to the target
• Kinetic Crush: This now deals 4–6 Damage
• Shrouded Step: This now has an 8 turn CD and costs 20 Energy
• Pulsating Wound: This had a mistake in the text description which has been corrected. It can now be used at melee range only and gives 1 Ancient Power to the caster each time it deals damage
• Flooded Lungs: This now deals 8 (-Resilience) Damage on the first turn, 6-7 (-Resilience) Damage on the second turn and 5-6 on the third
• Black Hole: This now targets a 6 x 6 area
• Headbutt: This now deals 6-8 Physical Damage
• Voidshadow: This no longer causes the enemies targeting the player to switch targets.  They will now wait for the player to become visible again

A new base ability for the Watertarg Excursionist was also added to the server this week. This new ability is called Empowered Ancient Bolt. It deal 7-8 Arcane Damage and slows a 1 tile enemy by -2 Movement for 2 turns. A 4 tile enemy is slowed by -1 Movement for 2 turns. Empowered Ancient Bolt costs 5 Ancient Power and has a 7 turn CD.

Fixes were also made to several other abilities:

• Flooded Lungs: This now deals the correct damage on the correct turn
• Ancient Invocation: This no longer heals the Watertarg Excursionist as well as the target
• Future Blessings: This was not getting applied in the next room. This has been fixed
• Spiritual Whirlpool: This was not reducing movement. This has now been fixed
• Ancient Bolt: Originally, this had a 3 turn cooldown. Now it no longer has a cooldown
• Spellcatcher: This was renamed to Magic Gland
• Shiftstrike: This and the other abilities where the cooldown was linked to enemy deaths now correctly have their cooldowns reduced when enemies die
• Fast Healing: This was not correctly healing the player.  This has been changed so it correctly increases Health Regeneration.  This means it can synergise with Revitalise.  The health gain was also being applied on the wrong turn.  This is no longer the case

Changes were also made to some enemies and player classes. The Parakaw Astromancer now has 28 starting Maximum Mana and the Watertarg Excursionist now has Strength 2. There were three enemies that had changes made to them:

• The Redriver Crocodile now has 27 health
• The Plains Lion now has 30 health
• The Swiftstrike Jaguar now has Strength 2

A new A.l. Type was also added to the server this week. Known as Aggressive, it makes the entity being controlled attack the nearest target instead of the distributed targeting method of the Standard A.I.

Our Animator posed and rendered some Human Bandits about to ambush a group of Frost Dwarves in the Ice Dungeon.

Game Client

Our game developer began this week by adding to the Game Client a few models that the Environment Artist created. These assets include:

• Updated bridge pieces
• Missing variant of the bridge end piece, which is used for 1-tile length bridges
• A rock scatter model
• Small crystal cluster models

There were a few environmental changes that our game developer made to the Game Client in order to ensure that everything was as refined as possible. More variations of the shroom group were made, with added components like scattered rocks, bones and small crystal clusters. Other environmental changes include:

• Small crystal clusters now emit a point light from the centre
• The light range of the shroom groups was reduced so that it was more subtle
• The ceiling was fixed so that it no longer used the wrong RAHM map

For the user interface, the game developer added the Ancient Power ability to both the team mate view and the stat view. Highlighting for the Black Hole ability was also set to 6×6 instead of the original 4×4. Exceptions for ability targeting were also added, meaning that for some abilities the same target can be chosen multiple times.

Functionality

This week, there were a few issues with the functionality of the game that our game developer had to fix. The main problem was that auto-attack, when pathing for melee, did not work anymore. It took the game developer several trials and errors to fix this as well as two other issues that occurred in the Game Client:

• The owned tiles of a targeted enemy were not being coloured anymore
• A partial path could be walked on. A partial path is a path that should not be accepted because it goes through a wall, for example.

All of these issues were caused by the same underlying problem and it took our game developer a lot of tests to solve. The important thing is that all of these issues are now fixed. As well as this, there were several other changes our game developer made to the functionality of the Game Client:

• The code for the notification effects was revamped. It now makes use of Canvas Groups, which means that changes can be made and applied to this group instead of having to find each individual component.
• Notification effects now make use of the new Coroutine system, MEC.
• The camera position is now clamped between the edges of the currently active dungeon room. This disables endless camera travel.

Standing torches were also added

Metal torches will also be used in the game environment;

Our game developer added all of these decoration groups to the game environment.

Remember to check back in next week, when we release our final devlog before Christmas. We can already feel it’s going to be a busy one so if you want to find out more information on how we’re developing our game, watch this space!

Are you up-to-date with last week’s devlog?