October DevLog: Week 3

Implementing the new environment to Depths of Erendorn has not come without challenges. In testing, we have noticed several bugs occurring in reaction to these changes. To fix them we have had to make a few more adjustments to our game and servers.

Game Client:

New environment walls implementation has now been completed and the displacement values for the old pieces have been removed since they became redundant with the new wall pieces. We have also added new wall meshes and updated wall and floor shaders.

The game client had a few bugs which had to be dealt with:

• Players Vs. Python: they can attack the Python from all sides again.
• Statuses were not displayed correctly: some enemy statuses were also shown as player statuses.
• Fixed rotation for the new wall pieces and for the double-sided walls.
• Sizing and position fix for double-sided wall prefabs.

The bugs above have now all been fixed.

We have also implemented new channel packed environment textures, which means less texture sampling. This has made the client more optimised and performant.

Character turns have been reduced to 45 seconds in the client and the time before tooltips are shown has been lowered to 0.5 seconds; this should avoid them popping up in the middle of actions such as skipping over an element to select another one. The scene value for that wasn’t the same as the one specified in code and it has now been corrected.

We have changed what happens at the end of each room. Originally, It was made so that as soon as all the enemies are dead in the current room, the next room is built and the old room was removed. This now happens after the players turn so that the player can finish his/her turn before transitioning into the new room. This will be worked on next week so we can improve the user experience more.

We have also made some changes in the UI and the number of turns that a state is active is shown above the entity’s health bar (e.g., if a character is “Stunned” for 2 turns it will now be shown as “Stunned (2)”) and selected entity names are now displayed above the stats panel.

Animation:

This week, we have been working on the following animations for the Zentragal character:

• Damage Reaction (a reaction to the character receiving damage).
• Drink (used for potions and other similar in-game items).
• Punch Attack (used as an unarmed melee attack, usually when the character is disarmed).

See the videos below for each of the animations described above.

Another exciting piece of news is that we have now started rigging and skinning a new character, the Melmee, which we plan to unveil (complete with its texture) in its total over our Halloween Social Media Event next week. However, since you have been following our Devlogs, you get to have a quick sneak preview first hand here.

Server:

We have also made improvements to our game servers.

• Our new ability editor developer tool now pulls from and can update the database using our API.
• Improved the usability of the ability editor.
• Room transition command fixed server-side.

Our Halloween Event will happen on Wednesday, October 31st so stay tuned to our social channels. As usual, we would love to hear what you have to say so feel free to drop us a message via email, Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.