City prop work continued last week, as we look to populate our towns and cities with assets. Our Zentragal model gets the attention of the 3D Modelling team, while our harpy model bares its teeth with a new attack animation. Join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
After the whirlwind of support we received from our latest pre-alpha trailer, it became clear that our community really resonated with the Zentragals of Erendorn. Spider-like creatures who are masters of illusionary magic. This prompted us to look at the model again, which is currently that of an enemy, and not the playable version gamers will get their hands on. With that in mind, our 3D Modelling team have began reworking the model to bring it up to the standard we expect, and create something that players will be excited to try!
The team is looking at things like proportions, scale, features and functionality. This is an incredibly unique playable character and has to deliver on some very important design features for it to work.
Small things like the addition of spikes on the shoulders, or scale-like patterns on the abdomen help create the sense of individuality, but also allows us to explore the potential of customisation within the model. For example, varying spike styles and patterns, natural armour variation and more.
Set Piece Design
Asset creation continued last week on our city props, this time looking at things like tables, shelves, chandeliers and more. Variation is key in RPGs and something we're really striving for in Depths of Erendorn. You can expect to see much more coverage of this work, as we have hundreds of models still to make. Luckily this process is thoroughly planned out and something we're confident at working through, starting with initial sketches of what everything will look like and how rooms will be populated.
Programming
This week has been about continuing to fix core gameplay features of dungeons as well as helping the remainder of the team transition to Unreal Engine 5 built from source. Our work consisted of:
- Fixed Turn Display messages and UI, allowing players to be notified which party members have ended their turn.
- Updated positioning functions to correctly use the active room, preventing characters being positioned outside of room bounds.
- Updated Character Creation UI cleanup function to properly remove widgets affected by the upgrade to UE5.
- Fixed engine association ensuring UE5 built from source is prioritised when opening the client project.
- Added a new Trace channel for mapping movement and adjusted the settlement level to use it.
- Calculated Navigation Data for the first settlement.
Server
The Server Team spent most of last week focussing on a couple of improvements to existing systems. AddStat is even better now with some new logs, and with the whole function being streamlined down to be about 1/3 shorter.
Additionally, some new targeting selections and triggers have been created to help with the Wolvajin's passive Scent of Blood. Making it so that the second you slide below or above half health the Wolvajin gains its buffs from you being low health, without having the combat code trigger every time any entity takes damage. Instead, we now we have:
Triggered On AITarget
Triggered On AITargetted (as in, targeted by an AI)
Triggered On AIUntargetted
With these triggers, things like provoking an enemy will cause them to target you, while technically in the code you're not their 'target', you just replace the target in their code temporarily.
Additionally, Free Attacks are now a thing - attacks that don't cost any energy to do. Originally, we just set the energy cost to a flat 0 temporarily, but this caused some issues with Triggers such as 'Triggered On Attack Costs Deducted', etc, and having to store the original energy cost for the attack elsewhere was far too inefficient.
Additional server and bugfix work:
- Added World Instance/population management framework.
- Adjusted new connection management to work better with new world instancing tech.
- Wolvajins can no longer infinitely stack their Scent of Blood on you if you keep on forcing them to switch targets every turn. No more 100+ movement and strength for our wolfy friends.
Environment Art
Last week our Environment Team were hard at work creating useful tools for the game. Looking at things like:
- Creating roads.
- Investigating why roads do not remove grass from the landscape.
- Fixing Quixel Megascans plugin.
- Identifying issue with Skylight causing strange highlight on certain props.
Sound Design
Last week the Sound Team downloaded and set up the new UE5 source engine - Allowing them to look at some of the new features this week.
A few weeks ago they visited a national park and collected a few new recordings which were cleaned and organised last week.
They also started recording/collecting sounds for the Character Ability Skins. None of these are final as the VFX isn't ready yet, but the initial base concepts have been put together so that when the VFX is made, they can very quickly rearrange the sounds to suit.
Hammerfall Skin initial concept
Mighty Skewer initial concept
Poisonous Fang initial concept
Protected Vines initial concept
Spine Chill initial concept
Wil-o-Wisp initial concept
Glyph of Revitalise initial concept
Animation
The Animation Team whipped up the attack animation for our flying Harpy last week. This one takes some extra work, as they have to consider how the wings will move, along with body position and attack speed/weight while being airborne. Their work included:
- Created new attack animation for Harpy.
- Exported animations that are now ready for the engine.
- Continued with engine/project installation.
- Started to work on updating the human male model, with a new mesh and adjusted animations.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of January yet?!
