This week at Depths of Erendorn has been marked by significant strides across all development teams, contributing to the continuous enhancement of our new online RPG. The Set Piece Design team focused on enriching the game’s environmental details, while the Client team concentrated on refining the user interface and fixing critical bugs to ensure a smoother gameplay experience. The Server team worked diligently on improving server stability and optimising combat mechanics, ensuring a seamless and reliable experience for players. The Sound team made substantial progress in developing dynamic audio for new enemy abilities, adding depth and immersion to the game’s combat encounters. Meanwhile, the Environment team enhanced the game's visual storytelling by upgrading assets and laying out new areas, and the VFX team crafted compelling visual effects to heighten the eerie presence of formidable enemies. 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 substantial progress in enhancing the game's visual elements. They completed the additional rocks for the fast travel asset, further enriching the environmental detail and ensuring consistency with the game's aesthetic. Additionally, the team began working on a new weapon set, laying the groundwork for visually compelling and immersive weapon effects that will enhance the player's experience. Examples of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
Programming
Client
Following on from last week's efforts, the client team at Depths of Erendorn continued to focus on refining the user interface and fixing bugs. This included addressing issues with context menus and updating the inventory UI to accommodate multiple inventories per player. The team set up functionality to view each backpack separately and combined, and resolved display issues with certain icons in the inventory. Minor visual bugs were also patched, such as missing icons and instances where the loot widget failed to display after combat. The first half of the week was dedicated to implementing functions that allow players to cast abilities requiring both a tile and direction. In the latter half, the team worked on spawning VFX/SFX for combat tiles affected by Active Effects, including those created by level 2 abilities like Arcane Mines and Static Impact. A system was also developed to ensure VFX/SFX persist throughout an Active Effect's duration, whether affecting characters or tiles, enhancing the visual and auditory feedback during gameplay. Additional work from the team can be seen below.
- Fixed an issue causing the incorrect music track to play.
- Implemented an Ability Controller to allow players to cast abilities that require tiles and directions.
- Added targeting options to allow X amount of target cursors to display in the direction selected when casting Tile + Direction abilities.
- Implemented the ability for Active Effects to target tiles in addition to entities.
- Created generic SFX/VFX actors that can be applied to Active Effect targets and persist for their duration.
- Added a slot in Active Effect Data Assets to integrate persistent FX with OnApplied/OnProc/OnRemoved triggers.
Server
Last week, the server team at Depths of Erendorn focused on improving server stability and addressing numerous minor issues. A significant aspect of this effort was planning a rework of the population tracking system, as the existing system was causing various problems. The new system aims to provide more accurate slot reservations on servers, ensuring that a settlement server is available for players at the end of their adventures. Accurate population tracking is also essential for effective server infrastructure planning and monitoring, allowing capacity to be adjusted as needed. This week, the server team worked on several combat optimisations, including reducing the size of active effect logs sent to clients and modifying the way traps are triggered to retain the caster information while recognising the entity that triggered the trap as the 'host.' Additionally, several bug fixes were implemented to correct issues with assigning an entity's rotation during combat movement.
Sound Design
This week, the sound team at Depths of Erendorn advanced the development of new enemy abilities, including the Thunderclaw Crab's Chain Lightning and the Vampire Bat's Sanguine Restoration. For the Chain Lightning ability, randomised pitch and volume were applied during playback to create subtle variations, adding dynamic sparks as the lightning jumps between characters. Additionally, work began on the Icacian Necromancer's sound effects, which are expected to be completed soon. Examples of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
Environment Art
This week, the Environment team at Depths of Erendorn focused on enhancing and expanding the game’s immersive world. They upgraded old assets with a new scaling wood material and loaded cart-packed blueprint actors. Improvements were made to the cart cloth material and tent rendering/shading, adding greater realism and visual appeal. The team also began laying out the blacksmith area and started set dressing in the settlement to enhance the game's environmental storytelling. Additionally, they created a scaling texture wooden planks/beams kit and assembled several packed blueprint actors from collections of props and assets, including a potion shelf, book shelf, market tent decking, bar/shop counter, sign stand, and decking steps. Examples of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
-min.png)
-min.png)
-min%25201.png)
Visual Effects
This week, the VFX team at Depths of Erendorn crafted a Life Drain visual effect for the Icacian Necromancer. Utilising sparks and smoke, the effect vividly simulates a stream of essence being drawn from the necromancer's rivals, enhancing the eerie and formidable presence of this enemy within the dungeons they inhabit. Making them a foreboding enemy for all those who encounter them! Examples of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of June yet?!
