Last week was a busy one for the team! Work was completed on our most recent armour set, while our Zentragal model looks at receiving an update. Vocals were set up for our human characters and more set pieces were created for our towns and cities! Join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
Our 3D Modelling team finished the texturing work on the electrifying cosmetic armour set we've been sharing over the last few months. Now complete, it can be handed over to other departments for the finishing touches, before it's ready to be put in game. This is one of several cosmetic pieces we've completed over the last year, and we're incredibly happy with how they've turned out. Variety is one of the key pillars in Depths of Erendorn, and giving players the choice to play the way they want to is vital in an RPG.
The team then moved onto a redesign of our Zentragal model. As we outlined in our recent Q&A, we wanted to get everything in Depths of Erendorn up to a first art pass, meaning most things are functional, but far from final. We got a lot of feedback from the community following on from our Pre-Alpha Trailer, and character models was a major talking point. To clarify, our current character models are actually those of enemies, and not the models that players will be in control of when they enter the game. And the time has now come to look more closely at the assets players will be using when they first step into Erendorn.
Set Piece Design
Work continued on our town and city assets last week. This is a long process as hundreds of different models need to be created for varying aspects of the buildings designs. To better illustrate this, our concept artists most recent work highlights the sheer amount of content and work that could go into populating a single building or shop within Erendorn.
Each of the items/furniture/foliage etc that you see, needs to be individually modelled. We can of course call upon reusing assets and editing existing ones, but their initial creation is still needed. For example, this mirror could be found in a nobels home, or a high end store within a large city. However, if we remove the accents and birds on either side, it would look much more simple, lending itself to a commoner's home or a small tavern.
Programming
Last week has been about getting back to fixing the core gameplay loop of dungeons, with transitioning to new rooms and rerolling being the main focus. Once the gameplay loop is stable, internal testing can begin and completed assets can be implemented into the game. Some additional work that took place included:
- Updated the parsing of room, reroll and other transition logs to the new server configuration.
- Updated the Room Builder to make use of the new logs.
- Updated instanced level loading for Set Pieces.
- Updated the room detail panel to allow players to see the results of rerolls before transitioning.
- Solved an issue stopping movement in some dungeon rooms.
Server
Last week, we managed to solve the issue of random client disconnects, and it turned out to be related to our Websocket package for the server. With the Websocket handling switched over to a new package and re-implemented, we then spent another couple of days fixing Room Generation.
At some point during switching the servers, rooms had ceased to become randomised. It turned out the server wasn't updating its generation settings when we gave it a new seed, so every room was based on the same seed. It also became apparent that the random generator wasn't using the correct seed in the first place.
With all that fixed, work has resumed on kneading out all the little bugs in some abilities, including our server bug of the week: Skeletons no longer gain gold when you hit them.
Additionally, zone navigation data loading was reworked and now works much better with concurrency.
Environment Art
Our Environment Artist finished importing the settlement into the new level last week, this allowed work to continue on things like material issues and terrain decals. Their work included:
- Settlement moved over to new level and is now no longer floating in mid air.
- Material issues which were causing props to appear white and shiny investigated and addressed.
- Method for implementing roads through RVTs researched.
- Terrain decals for adding detail to the ground without the use of further material layers researched.
Sound Design
Our Sound Designer has been working on character vocals for the past week, these are a selection of vocals for human characters - but they're "recyclable", so they can easily be used again for other characters/enemies/beasts. Emotes like these are great as signifiers during combat/looting/etc.
Male 1
Male 2
Male 3
Female 1
Female 2
Female 3
Animation
Last week our Animation team continued work on our Revenant model. Looking at its hit react and death animations. They then exported the completed work into the engine.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of January yet?!
