Last week saw our sound team bring different types of frogs to life, focusing on the variation of sound you'll experience when encountering our hopping horrors. Work continued on our Zentragal rework, while more city assets trickled through from the environment team. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
More progress was made on our Zentragal rework last week, as the team turned their attention to the facial features of our fan favourite spider. They looked at things like teeth, jaw composition and additional customisation options.
Additional design features like scales and a protruding spine were implemented, adding to the primal vibe the design team are looking for within the new model. This also gives us more customisation options to explore, for example: changing the bone structure on the spine, adding more spikes and adding patterns to the armour-like carapace.
Set Piece Design
Our Junior Environment Artist continued working through the mountain of city assets that need creating for Erendorn. As we've mentioned in previous Devlogs, these will litter our towns and cities, helping to breathe life into the world.
These assets are created off the back of initial concept artwork, allowing our team to have a clear vision on the style and design that furniture and other content should adopt. Doing this allows us to envision building layouts and atmospheres before modelling begins.
Programming
Although there's no such thing as a "quiet" week at Project Gamechanger, much of last week was spent bug fixing our server and client. This is an essential part of development, as identifying and fixing potential issues early prevents much larger problems later down the line. Once complete, the teams next step is planning out the next development phase which will give us the foundation to create the full gameplay loop. Last week was also about laying the foundations of how Client session updates are handled outside of dungeons, giving us the basis to begin adding the different types of message that players will receive from the Server.
- Trimmed previous Settlement levels for instance loading as a stand-in for Unreal 5's level partition system which is not currently functioning in our engine version.
- Planned methods for implementing non-combat logs relating to Erendorn's open world. As many functions of the open world have different requirements to their Dungeon counterparts, differences in implementation have been considered and will form the basis of the coming week's Client development.
- Updated and reintegrated the Game State Updater class, this is responsible for parsing and generating gameplay actions. After this rework they are now being created per-session and per-combat. This is important for creating the open world as players move in and out of combat, the client can now handle these different logs separately.
- Created and refactored Zone loading code.
- Tested and bug fixed Navigation data.
- Performed an initial test of the pathfinder using the settlement navigation data.
Sound Design
Last week the Sound Design Team were working on the different types of Frogs in game: Venom Spitter, Stone and Devil.
The Stone Frogs are the most natural sounding (as natural as a massive deadly frog gets).
The Devil Frogs have a deeper purring behind their main vocal layer, which turns into a soft growl for the Bulbous.
The Venom Spitters are more of a mutant gurgling (we imagine if you're spitting venom all day you might sound a bit mucousy).
Devil Frog Bulbous vocal
Devil Frog vocal
Stone Frog Baby vocal
Stone Frog vocal
Venom Spitter Attack
Venom Spitter vocal
Animation
Last week our Animation Team continued their work on the human model update, this time turning their attention to the Mage. Although some models will share things like walking and idle animations, some will have unique characteristics, for example: A mage holding its hands out to prepare a spell.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of February yet?!
