Welcome back, everyone! We hope you all had a great time celebrating Christmas and toasting to the New Year! For the past couple of weeks, not a lot has happened on Depths of Erendorn since the team took a much needed break to revel in the holidays. But we’re back, ready and raring to go! We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for 2020, so make sure you stick around to see how it all unfolds - and check out our Twitter, Instagram and Reddit so that you never miss an update!
3D Character Modelling
Right! Where were we? Our Character Artist had just finished modelling, retopologising and unwrapping the sculpts for the Civilian and Merchant classes before the holidays, so the first thing they got on with this week was texturing! We kept it pretty simple for both of these characters when it came to texture:
- We picked neutral colours for both of their clothes to reflect the fact that these are ordinary folk.
- The bottom edge of the Merchant’s tunic was given a ripped effect to add interest to the design.
- A worn leather texture was then used on the shoes, belts and pouches of both characters.
We played around with opacity in order to create the ripped cloth effect on the Merchant’s tunic. This was actually done during texturing rather than the sculpting phase - not only because it was faster, but also because it gives us more freedom to change how it looks later, if needed.
The final bit of texturing work we did was on the backpack. Using a tiling texture to create the planks on the backpack’s panels, we decided to make the wood look dark, with random cracks and grooves to give it a bit of a raw, natural wood appearance.
Visual FX
Our VFX Artist started the year by getting to grips with the visual effects for Unique Blessing, a generic spell from Depths of Erendorn that you can harness when you play as either the Zentragal or Forest Druid. This ability is pretty different to the ones we’ve introduced you to so far because it actually allows you to help out another member of your team:
- When used, Unique Blessing increases a friendly party member’s Strength and Resilience.
- These stats will be increased for three turns in a row, and the spell itself has a five turn cooldown.
- This could be particularly useful during difficult battles as it helps the recipient both offensively and defensively.
When creating the effect for Unique Blessing, we decided to take inspiration from the ability’s icon. We used the same purple and orange colour pallet, for example, in order to tie the two together - though we did make the orange more saturated in order to get some sweet, sweet contrast. Our VFX Artist also wanted to keep the astral theme that the icon used, and they did this by adding some decorative lines and particle effects.
Programming
To get back into the swing of things, our Programmers first did some refactoring work on lobbies and character loading. Refactoring refers to cleaning up the code and making it more readable, so this was a good way to ease back into the working week.
On top of that:
- The X/Y Data now updates in the tiles of an object when it is rotated.
- Inheritance with tile objects was set up for better maintainability.
- We fixed several smaller bugs that affected the placement/rotation of Set Pieces.
- Overlap detection, which kept going wrong, especially after an object had been rotated, was also fixed.
In addition to all this, a new pathfinding algorithm was created to ensure that set piece objects and doors are always accessible in each room. With all of these fixes out of the way, we’ve got a solid foundation for all of our work going forward, so we’re excited to really sink our teeth back into everything next week.
That’s it for this devlog! We hope that you have all had a good start to 2020, and that the year continues on in your favour! As always, remember to stay tuned to our socials for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - and if you need a recap of what we were up to before the madness of the holidays ensued, check out our recent devlog summary for December!
