October DevLog: Week 2

We are all excited to announce that we are now getting to a point where we can divulge more information about Depths of Erendorn. Character profiles, development images and videos and even some screenshots showing our progress will soon be made available and we hope that, as you can see what we are working on, you will be as excited as we are about what is coming up in the world of Erendorn.

Animations

Over the past 2 months, we have been preparing character animations to be integrated into the game. It has been a large undertaking and hours of development but between idle poses, attacks, use of healing spells and potions, walking cycles and every other action in the game we have put hours and hours of work into the animations and character development for Depths of Erendorn.

Environment

After an assessment of the current implementation of environment assets, we concluded that our method of making various wall models/textures and randomising them had to be changed.

We are now using flat wall meshes and using a shader with information stored in textures to offset the mesh vertices. Making the wall tiles this way means they now flow seamlessly into each other, giving us better performance and an improved overall look.

Some slight adjustments to the wall substance have also been implemented.

Server:

We have made it so that XP/Gold is tracked when an enemy dies ensuring it is correctly distributed between all of the players that are still alive.

Game Client Updates

We have updated the grid shader so that the lines of the grid have a smooth transition. The benefit of this is that aliasing is reduced along the lines and the overall look of the grid is better.

We have also spent some time working on the environment and made multiple attempts to make a shader for the walls. We believe we’re onto something that looks good and is performant.

Between some of the new additions to the game, the client now connects to the settlement server seamlessly and the new Message Box/Question Box system has been implemented.

We have made a few changes and fixed a few bugs on the game client itself:

• Walls are now double-sided. These are needed in situations where there is only one row/column of inner walls (otherwise one side of the wall would be void).
• A looping playlist for music within the game scene is now in place. Two newly recorded cave pieces have been added to this playlist in order to expand it.
• Positioning for walls and columns has been adjusted. They now align better with the rest of the new environment.
• Corrected a situation where all floor tiles were set to impassable. There was a problem with the calculation of this after adding ceiling padding. This has now been fixed and the tiles are working accordingly.
• Fixed scenarios where an excessive amount of extra rows/columns with ceiling tiles were being generated. Some room offsets were really big, which means that the starting point was very far away from the 0-point of the map list that is being used.
• Heightmap settings for the newly added wall prefabs have been fixed.
• Corrected broken movement in one of our game scenes (players could not move at all). Among other things (but this being the most important “thing”), room data was being overwritten in some scenarios, which meant that all reference data was lost.
• Fixed broken movement after going back to the main menu and choosing a new seed. Listeners were not removed correctly in between scene changes, so they referenced the destroyed objects instead of the newly made ones.
• Broken movement in the standalone build has been corrected.
• Fixed the room transition command.

This is just the beginning of a series of additions we are making to Depths of Erendorn for our Internal Alpha sessions over the next few months.

As always, we would love to know what you have in mind, so feel free to contact us via email, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram should you have any queries.