September Devlog: Week 3

It’s been another busy week behind the scenes at PGC Games, and if we could choose one word to describe what we have been working on, this word would be “Feelings”.

We’ve been building on the way we want our player to feel while venturing into the Depths of Erendorn, making it a more immersive experience.

Gameplay Music

We’ve had an amazing time recording our Main Theme for DoE’s Official Sound Track under the direction of our composer Thom Robins.

We are excited to announce that we have an official original soundtrack for Depths of Erendorn which is currently at its production stage and as you can see in the video above, songs like the Storm Elves theme are starting to shape up pretty great!

Stay tuned for more updates as further work is being undertaken in composing the themes for different areas in the game.

Changes

• Added cursor icons (both the brown and the grey variant) in the sizes 128×128, 64×64 and 32×32. These different sizes are purely there for future (possible) customization options. Currently implemented icons are:
  – Default – moving around and clicking on elements;
  – Mouseover for textboxes;
  – Rotation;
  – Melee attack.
• More selective updates to save performance:
  – Status effects are not updated every time the game gets an update; instead, there is a listener that specifically searches for status effect changes.
  – Reworked the way in which teammate panels are refreshed/rebuilt. Just like with the status effects, the panels were rebuilt every time the game received an update. Now the panels are only built once on startup, and the values within (e.g. health and mana) are refreshed with every game update.
  – This change also means that the status effects bar in this panel is not being reset all the time, which, in its turn, fixes the problem of tooltips resetting with every game update.
• There was a configuration option for every entity’s ability bar. This has been removed; the player can only see the option to configure the ability bar if they own it.

Fixes

• Cursor icons were displayed much darker than the original texture. On texture type ‘Cursor’, the imported textures would not take well to linear colours. The solution to the problem was creating a function that converts the colour values of the textures to gamma instead of linear.

With the new environment art and animations well on their way and being added to the game, we are closer than ever to being able to share more of the world of Erendorn with you, and we can’t wait! Make sure you stay tuned for updates for the Depths of Erendorn. If you’d like to find out more about Project Gamechanger or the work we do, then make sure you get in touch online and a member of staff will get back to you as soon as possible.