This week was all about new set pieces, a brand new armour set, golang/lobby tweaks and our crab being brought to life by the animation team! As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
Set Piece Design
This week our Junior Environment Artist created a notice board for the game. This static prop will be located within settlements, and will be filled with requests from the citizens of Erendorn. Later in development we intend to create different variations of this board, to match the location they are found - towns, cities, camps etc. We have also been considering different potential functions of this piece: It could be used to distribute quests or bounties, or as a way of grouping up with friends. Due to the nature of development, not every idea can make it into the game. But having these discussions early and often helps us to better plan and prioritise what comes next.
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Programming
This week has seen progression from last week's joining of Dungeon Lobbies, to generating Dungeon Sessions and the data used when preparing Dungeon gameplay.
- Session UI - We updated UI initialisation to fit with the new Session structure. World and Dungeon Sessions now both have the ability to prepare their individual UI layouts and share any required functionality.
- Dungeon Session and Combat Creation - We implemented the creation and setup of a Dungeon Session once a Lobby is joined, and added the ability for the Combat Manager to create a Combat instance. While dungeon Sessions will contain a single all encompassing Combat instance, adding this foundation gives us the ability to create multiple ongoing combats in a single World Session in the future. For example, this could mean that within one single World Session, a group of players could be fighting a group of enemies in an isolated combat, and two different groups of enemies could be fighting each other on the other side of the map, in a second isolated combat. By the time the players reach this part of the map, there could be a small group of enemies that survived and the ground littered with corpses, as this combat happened when the players were far away. This will add additional immersion to the world of Erendorn.
- Session and Combat Data - When connecting to a Dungeon Session, the Server sends a message containing all relevant information about the Session: Room Data, Enemies, Players, and Events, to name a few. This data is now parsed and stored in the Client and ready to be distributed to the relevant managers used in Dungeon setup.
The Programming team also made some changes to our player lobbies this week. This included:
- Adding 'Party Colours' to the lobbies.
- Adding the ability to change your colour in the lobby.
- Adding 6 Default Colours.
- Improving logging for dropped connections.
- Cleaning up some server messages.
- Adding in error handling around sending Session Updates.
- Cleaning up nil entries in the lobby list.
Golang
This week the Golang team has finished up the first half of what the new modular testclient can do, which includes the connecting and automation of joining games. We now have working modules that can be turned on and off, to control things like:
- Logging in to the main game server
- Making/deleting/choosing a character (at random or in a specific way)
- Creating/joining lobbies
This also includes customising lobbies for test purposes. These options include:
- Difficulty
- Loot drops
- Enemy groups
- Set pieces
- Number of rooms
- Room seed (used in random generation. The same room seed can be used to spawn exactly the same room as the last time you used the seed)
Additionally, test client modules no longer solely listen to the immediate response to the command they send. They can now listen to all incoming messages, cherry picking ones that have the type they're interested in. For example, the message type 'Update' for the Dungeon Module, so combat can be updated on the client's computer.
3D Modelling
Sculpting began on our latest armour set! This process begins by taking our human character model, and shaping the basic design of the armour around it. Once done, our 3D Modeller can begin to fine tune the sculpt, adding more intricate details and additional features, such as chains, bones, horns etc. Keep your eyes peeled for more updates on this one, in the weeks to come!
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Animation
The latest model to have the attention of our Animation Team, is the crab. This little guy will be a low level enemy that you'll encounter towards the coasts of Erendorn, along with other areas that may accommodate it. This week our Animator:
- Rigged and skinned the crab. Then exported the SK mesh and added it to the engine.
- Created the animation set: idle, walk, attack01, hit reaction and death.
- Cleaned everything up and exported.
- Finally, importing the model into the engine.
They also began work on the next animation set - The Zullra.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of September yet?!
