An exciting week for our developers as the set piece design team work on smaller props for the cities of Erendorn. Meanwhile, the wizards of coding have been working on the first open-world zone. Additionally, the sound team have worked on audio for an in-game event. Finally, the animation team continues to update the Zentragal and the VFX team created some visual effects for interactables. 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
The set design team have continued creating props for the city asset pack throughout the last week. The team focused on small props that add depth to some of the opulent dwellings of Erendorn. Continuing to create models that have an ornate feeling. The team has used small details to add a level of intricacy, only crafted by master craftsmen within the city walls. The team has fabricated a fancy stool, vases both large and small, a chair, and a podium to display items. All these props will furnish houses within the richer areas of the cities of Erendorn in the future. For now, the models have been implemented into the engine, ready for gameplay. Examples of the new assets are below.
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Programming
Client
This week has been about continuing implementing changes to the Session and Combat Submanagers to facilitate Entity selection at the Session level, as well as working through the process of packaging World Partition maps in UE5. Additional work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Continued updating Entity selection to work outside of individual Combats.
- Refactored the player's move and attack queue functionality to work with Session Submanagers.
- Created Submanager utility functions for branching Session/Combat context.
- Explored and fixed build issues resulting from packaging World Partition levels.
- Fixed Merchant Location.
- Updated nav data for the settlement and Zone 1.
- Improved Mapping tools to improve XP painting times.
- Painted Zone 1 XP values.
- Added event locations to Zone 1.
- Added Activity Book session log parsing functions.
- Added NavEdit session log parsing functions.
- Added Spawned Asset session log parsing functions.
- Added NavEdit and Spawned Asset data to session data.
- Fixed Item Data Parsing.
- Reduced chance of holes in the dungeon walls.
- Polished up vendors some more both visually and programmatically.
- Returned to working on the dialogue system, mostly chasing bugs this week.
- Started preparing some visual elements for an overhaul of the character select.
Server
This week the server team has mostly been busy shoring up some of the more major bugs that've appeared as all the separate working parts of the game in the forms of dungeon combat, open world, and the settlement are all brought together. More work completed by the server-side team can be seen below.
- Ranged AI will no longer prefer to smack people with their bow when in melee if they can back up and fire a ranged attack.
- Fixed a crash causing someone who quits and tries to rejoin the servers to crash because the server was expecting them on a different connection.
- Altered the rules of invisibility. Invisibility no longer has restrictions on what you can/cannot do with it, and just works like any other status effect now: It lasts for a set duration then wears off.
- Gold/XP that is being rewarded in dungeon combat will now correctly be handed to the settlement server as you rejoin, and then be rewarded to your character and saved to the database.
- Fixed an issue causing the above data to be lost by saving the 'old' version of your character before it left the settlement rather than the most up to date version of your character.
- Improved Activity Book session logs.
- Refactored progression data.
- Added Spawned Assets to session data.
- Added NavEdits to session data.
Sound Design
The sound team have been working on more audio effects, used when a player interacts with events in the world of Erendorn. This week the team has been focused on creating audio that will be heard when opening a cage with a captive inside. This audio is a bit different, due to the rewarding nature of helping the prisoner. Mixing the audio for a cage door opening, with the sound used as a reward from chests, the team created an easily identifiable sound. Examples of the newly created audio are below.
Animation
Following on from the skeleton update last month, the team have been updating the animations with the new rig. Along with the new armour comes a few issues that could arise, such as the model clipping into itself. Now the updated rig has been applied to the mesh, the animation team can apply all the gameplay cycles before importing them into the engine. The team have started this process with the idle cycle for the Zentragal. Work will continue polishing the animations over the coming weeks. An example of the new mesh combined with the idle movement cycle is below.
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Visual Effects
The visual effects team have been working on VFX that will be used to show an item is interactable while playing. When creating effects such as these, the team has focused on ensuring they are identifiable by the player. To achieve this, the team used similar colours throughout the effects to give consistency when in the engine. This will aid players in identifying items and NPCs that can be interacted with while playing Depths of Erendorn. These effects, once completed, were implemented into the engine, ready for gameplay. Examples of the new interactable effects are below.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of August yet?!
