September DevLog: Week Two

We have been waiting with great expectation as we prepare our game client to receive its new environment art and animations.

This has required extensive testing and adjusting to ensure everything runs smoothly for the transition.

Changes:

• Only one room at a time is spawned, instead of the whole dungeon. It marks the start of our revised room transition system.
• Abilities can now only be configured by means of a toggle. This prevents unexpected behaviour when trying to use abilities, and essentially adds to user-friendliness.
• UI elements are updated/rebuilt selectively now. In other words, an update for an element only happens when something about that specific element has changed. Besides this solution being more performant, it makes sure that tooltips won’t disappear all the time when elements are updated.

Our new User Interface is starting to take shape as we gear up to introduce the new environmental art and animations within the next couple of weeks.

Fixes:

• In some cases, Jade Pythons were ignoring melee attacks which caused their health bar to remain unaffected. We have now fixed the way highlighted tiles are calculated, which should put an end to this Python’s misery.
• The path towards enemies would always show, even if the enemy was completely out of reach. This has now been fixed.

Tests:

• We have been applying performance tests with the upcoming dungeon walls and the results were good; they are more performant than the old walls using less VRAM, draw calls and less tris/verts, which is a positive outcome, since ceilings and other environmental elements still need to be added to the game which is going to add up to the environment rendering. The new walls will be implemented soon.

We are constantly improving and adding features to Depths of Erendorn to make sure that, when we can finally share this experience with you, it will be one that you will enjoy playing as much as we enjoy developing.

Stay tuned for more updates.