This week, the team at Depths of Erendorn made considerable progress across all areas of development, focusing on refining existing assets, optimising gameplay systems, and enhancing the immersive experience of the game world. The 3D Modelling team completed an extensive visual overhaul of snake creatures, delivering realistic and intricately detailed models ready for integration. The Client and Server teams collaboratively improved dungeon generation and stability, resolving key bugs and streamlining systems such as camera movement, room connectivity, and UI interactions. The Animation team upgraded Elf and Snake character assets, enhancing both visual quality and realism through improved rigs and clothing physics. The VFX team continued refining effects using FluidNinja simulations to optimise performance and amplify environmental visuals. Lastly, the Sound team expanded the game's audio palette with fresh ambient recordings and specialised sound effects, enriching the atmosphere and magic interactions within the world of Erendorn. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
This week, the 3D Modelling team at Depths of Erendorn completed the full remake of the snake creatures, ensuring they meet the highest visual and technical standards for in-game integration. This process involved refining the sculpts, optimising topology, and applying detailed textures to enhance realism while maintaining performance efficiency. The updated models feature intricate scale work and naturalistic patterns, bringing greater authenticity and visual depth to these creatures. With these improvements, the snake variants are now fully prepared for their role in Erendorn’s diverse ecosystem, further expanding the world’s wildlife. Examples of the revised snake models can be seen below.
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Programming
Client
This week, the Client team at Depths of Erendorn continued refining and stabilising Dungeon systems, focusing on improving core features such as camera movement, character navigation, and mouse interactions. With room generation becoming more stable, additional testing and updates were implemented to ensure smooth functionality across all Dungeon mechanics. Bug hunting and system optimisations remained a priority, with significant progress made in resolving longstanding team panel display issues. A combination of legacy code and level-up notifications was identified as the root cause, and with these fixes now in place, the team panel functions as intended. Further debugging efforts also addressed an issue causing an empty ability slot to appear when selecting new abilities during level-up. These refinements contribute to a more polished experience as development continues towards the next stage. Additional work from the client-side team can be seen below.
- Fixed issues facing floor and tile interactions, mouse actions are accurate again.
- Investigated roombuilder issues and causes of Set Piece desync.
- Fixed frame issues affecting animation playspeeds.
- Fixed issues preventing camera settings from saving locally.
Server
This week, the Server team at Depths of Erendorn focused heavily on enhancing dungeon generation and stability. The team resolved a persistent bug causing tiles to lose their coordinates mid-generation, which had previously resulted in seemingly random shifts during dungeon creation. With this fix in place, work progressed to refining the connectivity between set pieces, ensuring seamless and accessible pathways throughout dungeons. Significant improvements were also made to the wall spline generators, placement, and sizing systems, alongside substantial updates to the gridnode system to align it with current generation methods. Adjustments were made to internal wall blueprints and lighting placement to resolve multiple visual and structural issues. Additionally, the combat area viewer tool received an update, now including tile labels to streamline debugging and offer clearer insights into tile and entity locations. Finally, initial steps were taken toward developing infrastructure to monitor online players independently of the game's network, further enhancing system robustness.
Sound Design
This week, the Sound team at Depths of Erendorn focused on refining and expanding the game's audio palette with freshly organised ice and snow recordings, now fully cleaned up and prepared to enhance existing abilities and future designs. Further experimentation led to capturing unique sounds using specialised equipment, such as a hydrophone and a contact microphone. With the hydrophone, the team recorded a variety of distinctive magic-effect sounds by interacting with objects submerged in water. Using a contact mic, they also gathered atmospheric rumbling and groaning sounds from an antique wooden yarn spinning wheel, providing excellent source material for enhancing cave ambiences with richer detail and depth. Additionally, the team began updating SFX notifiers in-engine for the recently completed Skeleton animations, ensuring cohesive integration between visuals and sound. Examples of the sound effects collected through the week can be seen below.
Animation
This week, the Animation team at Depths of Erendorn made substantial progress on refining both Elf and Snake characters. For the Elves, the team conducted detailed reviews of skeletal meshes, addressing and resolving issues to enhance visual consistency and quality. Further improvements were made by integrating clothing physics, adding dynamic realism to character movement, and planning animation updates to ensure fluid and natural interactions in-game. In parallel, work began on upgrading the Snake character models, starting with mesh adjustments and the introduction of a new rigging system. This updated rig provides improved usability, ensuring smoother animations and better control over movement. An example of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
Visual Effects
This week, the VFX team at Depths of Erendorn continued to enhance the game's visual effects by creating additional material instances tailored for various effects. They began reworking several existing VFX assets, integrating FluidNinja's fluid simulations to optimise performance and reduce their impact on game resources. The team also started configuring the FluidNinja handler to manage multiple effects within the same level, discovering through experimentation that FluidNinja is particularly effective for environmental effects rather than isolated skill or ability visuals. With these insights, the team's focus will shift toward environmental VFX and events, ensuring the game world remains visually dynamic while maintaining optimal performance.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of January yet?!
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