It’s a bit of a quick update in this week’s devlog, but we’ve still got some awesome highlights to show you, including a bubbling cauldron and a new tentacle brush! As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram or Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
Our 3D Character Artist continued their work on dragon bones last week. This involved sculpting a few more pieces before texturing everything to look aged and decayed. Take a look:
Next up, our Artist created a fancy new brush that they’ll use in the future to make tentacles for some of Erendorn’s aquatic monsters. The tentacle brush is a tri part insert mesh brush that will massively speed up our workflow when it comes to creating these suckers (pardon the pun):
Animation
Our Animator made a ton of new updates last week, both to animations in the game trailer as well as animations in general. Here are some of the highlights:
- The Knight’s run cycle was adjusted so that it can now run while holding a torch
- The basic idle and walk cycle for Civilians was updated to use new meshes
- The new skeletal base meshes for Humans was added to the engine for testing
- The split armour skeletal meshes for Humans was also implemented for testing
Visual FX
If you follow us on socials, you’ll have already seen the new effects our VFX Artist created last week - but we’re gonna show them to you again anyway! The new visuals include a bubbling concoction spilling from a witchy cauldron, and some burning logs for use in our campfires:
https://depthsoferendorn.blob.core.windows.net/assets/BubblingPot.mp4
https://depthsoferendorn.blob.core.windows.net/assets/2021-08-05-14-25-20_Trim_Trim.mp4
Programming
Game Trailer
For the video production team, last week was spent finalising the big opening shot of our trailer, polishing up all other shots and preparing them for rendering, as well as fixing visual issues that were highlighted during rendering.
As renders can take a significant amount of time to complete, the remaining part of the week was spent gathering some game footage that showcases the variety of cave environments our procedural room generator is able to create.
By using Sequencer during gameplay, our team have been able to create smooth cinematic movements, which will be combined with captured gameplay footage in order to give our viewers a real sense of what it feels like to play Depths of Erendorn.
Reworking the Ability Editor
We mentioned in our last weekly devlog that our Programmers had begun reworking the Ability Editor to be more readable (this is the program we use to assign things like values, effects and stats to entities and abilities in the game).
Our Programmers continued this beautification of the Ability Editor last week. Before this work, you'd have to know from memory all the exact numbers for things like targeting constants, damage types, counter types, status IDs, effect IDs, and so on. Obviously, this isn’t practical, so our Programmers have spent a lot of time turning the hundreds of numbers that the code uses into names that appear in dropdown boxes. This makes it possible for non-Programmers to assign things for themselves without any hassle or headaches.
Golang Server
The latter part of the week was dedicated to finally beginning the shift of the SQL server so that it's able to handle the new Golang server! With this work, all the game's entities (players, NPCs, etc) are now stored with the new iteration of stats, items, and all the other changes we've made while creating the Golang server.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our July roundup yet?!
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