Monthly Devlog | February 2025 | No. 73

Throughout February, the entire team at Depths of Erendorn has continued to make strides in developing key elements of the game, refining creature assets, environments, gameplay mechanics, and immersive audio. The 3D Modelling team delivered significant updates to creatures like the Armoured Skeleton and snakes, while the Set Piece Design and Environment teams enhanced visual storytelling and realism through landscape refinements, dynamic water systems, and detailed asset integration. Gameplay stability and dungeon generation were substantially improved by the Client and Server teams, resolving numerous technical challenges to create smoother player experiences. The Animation and VFX teams provided polished character movements and advanced visual effects, respectively, further enriching gameplay immersion. Lastly, the Sound team captured distinctive audio recordings, contributing atmospheric depth to Erendorn’s magical and natural environments. Collectively, these efforts continue to shape an increasingly dynamic and immersive world for players to explore. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! – now let’s get into it!

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3D Modelling

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Throughout February, the 3D Modelling team at Depths of Erendorn made substantial strides in the development and refinement of key creature assets. Efforts began with the creation of a base model for the Armoured Skeleton, enhanced through an iterative process driven by team feedback, resulting in a cohesive design featuring aged, battle-worn armour. The primary focus for the month, however, was the comprehensive overhaul of the snake and cobra models. The team fully sculpted, retopologised, and unwrapped these assets, optimising them for seamless in-game performance while preserving intricate visual details. Significant experimentation with new methods for crafting realistic scales led to highly detailed, sculpted textures being applied to the models, greatly enhancing their authenticity. By the end of the month, all snake variants were fully textured, showcasing intricate naturalistic patterns and bringing a new level of depth and realism to Erendorn’s diverse wildlife. Examples of the team’s work throughout February can be seen below.

Initial Armoured Skeleton iteration
Final iteration for Armoured Skeleton
Updated Snake model
Scales creation method iteration
Cobra and Snake continued updates
Cobra models retextured
Snake models in variety of textures

Set Piece Design

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Over the course of February, the Set Piece Design team at Depths of Erendorn made substantial progress in enhancing the game’s environments through detailed refinements, technical innovations, and increased visual diversity. Work began with applying naturalistic details such as painted moss to assets, giving structures a weathered look that blends seamlessly into their surroundings. The team improved landscape material blending to produce smoother, more realistic transitions between terrain types, contributing to a better player experience. Several new Points of Interest were sculpted, enriching environmental storytelling and encouraging exploration. Drawing inspiration from other games, the team refined settlement layouts for improved navigation and immersion. Technical advancements were also achieved with marketplace assets, enabling colour customisation directly within the static mesh properties, greatly streamlining the workflow. Architectural ruins underwent further visual refinements, enhancing their integration into Erendorn’s landscapes. Additionally, the introduction of optimised Megascans assets and randomised landscape variations greatly expanded artistic flexibility, while enhancements to the fast travel site stones ensured their visual quality matched the high standards set by photogrammetry assets. Examples of the team’s ongoing dedication to enriching the game world can be seen below.

Underground temple with aged effect
Improved bridge asset in initial settlement
Additional ruins in initial settlement
Updated paths within settlement
Additional updated paths

Programming

Client

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February saw the Client team at Depths of Erendorn dedicate considerable effort to enhancing gameplay stability, refining critical systems, and addressing a wide array of technical challenges. The month began with a focus on developing and finalising a dynamic difficulty overlay for the map panel, which included integrating XP updates and resolving positioning errors resulting from the transition to the new world level. Dungeon systems underwent significant improvements, notably in camera behaviour, character movement, entity placement, and mouse interaction, enhancing user control and overall gameplay fluidity. Persistent camera issues, including unintended teleportation and delayed responsiveness, were successfully resolved through careful event management, ensuring seamless player transitions between characters and dungeon floors. Bug-hunting efforts were prominent throughout, tackling issues such as duplicate audio cues, team panel disappearance, and empty ability slots appearing during level-ups. Legacy code was reviewed and updated, notably enhancing the levelling up and looting user interfaces, ensuring smoother, more reliable interactions. Additional work completed by the team can be seen below.

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Added the ability to update map XP at the start of and during Adventures.
Added new message types for region updates.
Fixed issues with player and Fast Travel icon positioning.
Investigated issues preventing Entities from spawning in the correct order and position.
Worked through issues preventing the camera from being positioned correctly when spawning into a new or rerolled Dungeon Room.
Implemented the ability to disable Camera Tethering in Dungeons.
Added the ability to track Dungeon Entrances on the map.
Fixed issues facing floor and tile interactions, mouse actions are accurate again.
Investigated roombuilder issues and causes of Set Piece desync.
Fixed frame issues affecting animation playspeeds.
Fixed issues preventing camera settings from saving locally.

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Server

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Over the past month, the Server team at Depths of Erendorn concentrated efforts on enhancing the reliability and robustness of dungeon generation systems, significantly refining the underlying infrastructure. Persistent technical issues affecting login functionality, such as session cookie handling errors, were successfully identified and resolved. Key progress was made in addressing critical dungeon-generation bugs, including rogue tiles disappearing from combat areas, random shifts of tile coordinates during creation, and gaps appearing in door placements. The team implemented intricate adjustments within the procedural generation system, particularly fine-tuning the Cellular Automata algorithm to create more immersive and strategically engaging dungeon layouts. Furthermore, substantial updates were completed on wall spline generators, internal wall blueprints, lighting placement, and gridnode systems to enhance visual clarity and structural accuracy. The combat area viewer tool received valuable improvements, including clearer differentiation of internal and external walls and tile labelling to streamline debugging processes. Early stages of an independent player-monitoring infrastructure were also developed, laying foundations for future enhancements in network stability and player tracking.

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Sound Design

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Throughout February, the Sound team at Depths of Erendorn greatly expanded the game’s audio landscape, capturing and refining a wealth of distinctive sound effects. Venturing into harsh winter environments, the team recorded dynamic ambient audio, including strong winds, snow gusts, and resonant ice textures. These raw recordings were carefully organised, edited, and prepared for integration as atmospheric layers and detailed textures for magical abilities, combat effects, and environmental audio. Further sessions concentrated on versatile foley elements derived from ice and snow, suitable for footsteps, impacts, and spellcasting—particularly for earth- and ice-based abilities. Innovative techniques involving hydrophones and contact microphones were also utilised, capturing unique water-based magical sounds and rich, atmospheric rumbles from antique wooden equipment, respectively. Examples of the work completed by the team can be seen below.

Environment Art

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The Environment team at Depths of Erendorn focused heavily on bringing dynamic realism to the game’s natural landscapes through the integration of Fluid Ninja. Initial experimentation identified optimal approaches for incorporating fluid simulations effectively, balancing performance with visual quality. Significant effort was dedicated to developing realistic water features, culminating in the successful implementation of waterfalls and a detailed settlement river system. Following extensive refinements, the river’s velocity data was precisely adjusted to ensure accurate directional flow, with ongoing plans to further align the water to the landscape’s river spline. Additionally, the river material was carefully updated to seamlessly match the game’s distinct artistic style, enhancing visual cohesion and authenticity. These developments substantially enrich Erendorn’s environments, offering players vibrant, dynamic, and engaging natural settings to explore. Examples showcasing these advancements can be seen below.

Animation

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Over the course of February, the Animation team at Depths of Erendorn undertook comprehensive refinements and enhancements across several key character models, significantly improving visual quality, performance, and realism. The team dedicated considerable effort to refining the Earthen Dwarf, optimising skin weights and cloth physics, and revising idle and run cycles for smoother and more natural animations. The integration of new armour sets was meticulously reviewed, ensuring seamless cohesion between rig and animations. Additionally, substantial updates were made to undead characters, with the Skeleton receiving an armoured variant and aged weaponry, enhancing its battle-worn aesthetic. The Zombie and Skeleton models were further polished through adjustments to skeletal meshes, materials, and weapon alignment, along with added visual details like quivers and arrows. Work also began on upgrading Elf and Snake characters, addressing mesh issues, implementing dynamic clothing physics for the Elves, and introducing a new, more efficient rigging system for the Snakes. Examples of the team’s progress can be viewed below.

Updated Earthen Dwarf animation cycles
Updated Armoured Skeleton animations
Snake rig in action

Visual Effects

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Throughout February, the Visual Effects team at Depths of Erendorn dedicated considerable time to exploring and integrating FluidNinja, significantly enhancing the game’s visual fidelity and optimisation. Extensive experimentation led to the creation of various fluid simulations, laying a robust foundation for atmospheric and environmental effects. The team discovered through testing that FluidNinja excels in environmental applications rather than standalone skills, informing their decision to shift attention toward environmental VFX and dynamic events. Additional improvements included creating versatile material instances for diverse effects and reworking previous VFX assets using fluid simulations to optimise performance. Examples of the team’s progress can be seen below.