This week, the teams at Depths of Erendorn made significant strides in several key areas of development, with notable progress across modelling, client, server, animation, and visual effects. From the finalisation of the Minotaur sculpt, ready to roam the game world, to the refinement of enemy animations, the focus has been on enhancing the immersive experience for players. Client-side, movement functionality has been successfully implemented in dry testing, while server updates continue to lay the groundwork for more efficient game delivery. Meanwhile, the VFX team has been hard at work perfecting spell effects and materials, ensuring that the visual quality meets the high standards set for the game. With every aspect of development moving forward, the world of Erendorn is steadily becoming a richer and more dynamic environment for players to explore. 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
Finalising the sculpt of the Minotaur, which is now ready to be implemented into the game engine, has been the focus of the 3D modelling team throughout the week. With its towering and intimidating presence, the Minotaur is set to join the diverse roster of beasts that will inhabit the initial areas of Erendorn. Careful attention was given to refining the model’s facial features and overall proportions to ensure it embodies the strength and power that this creature represents. The final sculpt will help bring an even greater sense of danger and atmosphere to the game’s world, adding depth and realism to the player experience. Examples of the completed work can be seen below.
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Programming
Client
The Client team at Depths of Erendorn successfully completed the implementation of movement within the dry testing environment, following extensive experimentation and adjustments. After navigating through challenging testing results, movement is now functioning as intended and at a reasonable speed. With this milestone achieved, the team has begun automating the swapping of entities and their references in the dry test environment to streamline testing further. In parallel, progress continued on the planned UI systems, with the pre-login changes being finalised and the framework for the Social Panel now in place. This new panel will allow players to manage friends and party members, further enhancing the social dynamics within the game. Additional work completed by the team can be seen below.
- Implemented the Agreement Subwidget for EULA and other agreements during account creation.
- Created a Social Panel widget for displaying party members, account friends and blocked users.
- Fixed a number of UX bugs regarding login, character creation and character selection.
- Worked through potential solutions to a crash originating from LODs.
Server
This week, the Server team at Depths of Erendorn focused on progressing the server-client communication update, a significant and complex task that fundamentally alters how the game is delivered to users and how commands are processed. This update will bring considerable benefits by allowing the servers to concentrate more on managing sessions rather than individual connections, improving overall efficiency and scalability. However, due to the scale of the project, it is expected to take another week to complete. In parallel, the team also re-enabled dungeons in the open world, a major step that has introduced a number of bugs and crashes. The team has already begun addressing these issues to ensure a smoother experience as players explore these challenging environments.
Animation
Last week, the Animation team at Depths of Erendorn focused on enhancing enemy animations to improve in-game fluidity and combat realism. The spawning animations for Skeletons were refined to bring more life and detail to their entry into the world, while Zombie attack animations received key updates to make their movements more dynamic and impactful. Both sets of animations are now complete and ready to be implemented into the engine, ensuring more immersive encounters with these foes as players journey through Erendorn. An example of the work completed by the team can be seen below.
Visual Effects
The VFX team at Depths of Erendorn focused on refining and expanding several visual effects within the game. The Cursed Ground ability was resized to a 4x4 area, aligning with its intended spell description for better consistency and gameplay clarity. Work also commenced on the first draft of the Summon Arcane Giant spell, which will become even more impressive once the giant is fully animated, adding dynamic movement and presence. Additionally, the team began developing a new smoke material to replace the existing one, which had issues rendering bright colours effectively. This new material will allow for richer and more vibrant smoke effects, enhancing the visual experience for players. Examples of the abilities that have been worked on by the team can be seen below.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of August yet?!
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