This week, the development teams at Depths of Erendorn made continued progress across multiple disciplines, focusing on refining gameplay systems, enhancing environments, and creating immersive visual and audio elements. From addressing key technical challenges, such as optimising dungeon generation and resolving camera system issues, to creating new assets, animations, and audio layers, every team has contributed to pushing the game closer to its vision of a dynamic and engaging RPG experience. The ongoing efforts to refine settlements, integrate versatile visual and sound effects, and improve character functionality highlight the dedication to creating a polished and immersive world. 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!
Set Piece Design
This week, the Set Piece Design team at Depths of Erendorn made significant progress in enhancing the game’s environments through detailed and immersive set dressing. The ongoing work on settlement areas continued to bring these spaces to life with intricate design and careful attention to detail. The team completed the underground temple, adding a unique feature of frosted glass on the roof to create a visually striking and atmospheric effect. Additionally, a stone trim sheet material was finalised, providing a versatile and polished element for various architectural designs. Progress was also made on the creation of housing structures, with one turf house variant completed, further expanding the variety and richness of Erendorn’s settlements. Examples of the team’s work can be seen below.
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Programming
Client
This week, the Client team at Depths of Erendorn focused on addressing residual issues following the recent level switch, including resolving unusual physics interactions that had unexpectedly affected the camera system. While these bugs were fixed, further testing will be conducted to ensure no additional issues arise. In addition to bug fixes, new project settings were applied and tested to improve overall performance, enhancing the gameplay experience. Furthermore, functionality was implemented to allow Sessions to initialise with dead and/or lootable characters, ensuring this information is accessible to all players, even those who join after combat has concluded. These updates continue to refine the game’s systems, ensuring a smoother and more consistent experience for players. Additional work completed by the team can be seen below.
- Worked through packaging issues with foliage and landscapes.
- Changed a number of project and packaging settings in an attempt to improve performance, locked resolution to 1080p, capped frames at 60, allowed the game to run in background and more.
- Implemented the ability for character animations to start as dead.
- Implemented the ability for character animations to start as dormant and become active.
- Added dead character spawning to Session setup.
- Added interactable Entity application on Session setup
- Added Status to friend list entries so players can see when their friends are online/in the settlement/on an adventure.
- Began work on XP zone heatmaps for the Map Panel.
The bugs found (and solved) can be seen below.
- Camera spawning underneath terrain.
- Unusually slow speeds regardless of setting overrides.
- Inability to move the camera on spawn with WASD.
- Tethered state persisting in free cam mode.
- Sliding camera after releasing inputs.
Server
This week, the server team at Depths of Erendorn successfully resolved a series of cumulative bugs that had been preventing set pieces from spawning or linking correctly during dungeon generation. With these issues addressed, attention shifted to refining generation rules to improve dungeon layouts. Adjustments were made to allow for wider corridors and better padding around set pieces, enhancing both gameplay balance and navigation. These updates ensure that dungeon environments are not only functional but also offer a more polished and engaging experience for players exploring the depths of Erendorn.
Sound Design
This week, the Sound team at Depths of Erendorn focused on developing new layers of audio to enhance the magical atmosphere of the game. Building on last week’s VFX work, magic footsteps were created as a subtle layer beneath the primary footstep sounds, using a specialised plug-in originally designed for gunshot variations. By incorporating custom magic layers, the team can now create and adjust variations such as water, magic, or dark energy effects with ease. Additionally, work began on crafting corpse-looting sounds, with initial designs tailored to be versatile across most characters. A version featuring just gore and another including leather armour were created to account for enemies that wear armour, while still accommodating non-armoured foes like frogs. The sounds aim to strike a balance between visceral and appropriate, avoiding being overly graphic. Examples of the work completed throughout the week by the team can be seen below.
Animation
This week, the Animation team at Depths of Erendorn focused on refining character functionality and enhancing animations across the board. A "dead" pose was integrated into the animation blueprints as part of the spawning system, adding greater versatility to character states. Several broken skeletal meshes for human characters were fixed, improving the overall consistency of the character models. Hairstyles were temporarily integrated by skinning them directly to the character mesh to ensure some hairstyles are available while addressing issues encountered with implementing them through blueprints. Efforts were also directed toward improving the physics of overlapping clothing, with ongoing investigations into refining cloth behaviour for more realistic interactions. Additionally, progress was made on the creation of ready-to-use NPCs for the game world, with considerations being given to adding more idle animation variations to enhance the diversity and immersion of non-playable characters. An example of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
Visual Effects
This week, the VFX team at Depths of Erendorn focused on creating foundational assets to streamline future development. Curve meshes were created in Blender for use in visual effects, along with other general-purpose VFX meshes that are frequently needed. This proactive approach ensures that these essential assets are readily available, saving time and increasing efficiency for future effects work. By addressing these backbone meshes now, the team is laying the groundwork for faster and more seamless integration of dynamic visual effects throughout the game.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of December yet?!
