An exciting week for the team working on Depths of Erendorn. The 3D modellers have finalised the sculpt for the Draconian model, during that time the Sound team has worked with the Stone Frog model to get the audio and animations working in tandem. Additionally, the Animation team has worked with the slime model to bring us new exciting cycles and the VFX team has started their work on the Zentragal Illusionist's abilties. Finally, the programming team has updated the game engine and worked on the combat system. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
The modelling team has completed the sculpt for the Draconian model. Finalising the design by adding the scaley texture of the creature to the arms and lower legs of the creature. The artists will now move on to completing the outfit for the Draconian and ensuring all problems with clipping during animations will be removed. Once these issues have been sorted the model will get baked onto a lower poly-model and will then be implemented into the engine ready for gameplay. Examples of the detailed sculpt can be seen below.
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Programming
This week has been aimed at updating Dungeon movement input to use the new system developed for World Sessions as well as preparing to update our Unreal Engine to a source-built version of the latest release. A breakdown of work completed by the programming team can be seen below!
- Replaced tile collision for Dungeon movement with the use of terrain coordinates. As we've made improvements to the way players interact with the environment ready for the World of Erendorn, the same principles have been applied to Dungeon terrain.
- Downloaded, built, and modified Unreal 5.0.2 ready for project conversion.
- Fixed an issue with movement that could crash the server.
- Fixed a bug that caused all temporary stat changes to be applied as permanent changes in combat.
- Removed Enemies from The Settlement (implemented for ease of testing).
- Implemented many aspects of the dungeon combat into the world sessions (not complete yet).
- Added helper functions when working with coordinates.
- Added an offset value to the Combat Area class used in combat.
- Improved the logging of combat updates to work with world combat.
- Session updates can now contain logs from multiple events. This will help improve server and client performance in sessions with high activity.
- Added log clearing to world sessions to avoid server memory issues from long-running sessions like settlements which we want to be able to run indefinitely.
- Enemy groups can now start combat with players if they get too close.
- Refactored the combat to fit better with both dungeon sessions and world sessions.
- Improved enemy world movement code.
Sound Design
Last week, the Sound Design team worked with the various frog audio clips, editing them to fit with the animations completed over the past few weeks. The audio clips that were completed a few weeks ago have been reformed to fit around the speed and length of the animation. With only one of the various Frog models being completed with its animations so far, the team has edited the clips to fit this video. This will give us a representation of how the animations and audio clips will work together when the individual Frog models are added to the game. These audio clips added to the animations can be seen in the video below. Each species of frog has been labelled to differentiate between them.
Animation
After completing the animations for the Stone Frog, the animation team has moved on to a more complex enemy. Starting to work on the Slime enemy model, the team has created an idle, walk, and death animation cycle. Due to the nature of the slime model, the team has created a bespoke rig to achieve the movement within the model that they desire. Each tentacle on the creature will have a joint system similar to an arm, so the team can give them the gelatinous consistency that a creature of this substance would have. These animations are currently a work in progress and the team will work to refine them over the coming week. The work-in-progress animations can be seen below.
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Visual Effects
Once the Visual Effects team finished off the Watertarg's final ability Tidal Surge, they turned their focus to the Zentragal. Using the older model of the illusionist for scale, the team has created the visual effects for Pain Replenishment, Mana Thirst, Touch of the Damned, Shadow Blast, Quick Escape, and Cocoon. Many of these abilities are using the same skills that were learned through the process of creating the complex Watertarg's abilities. These skills have given the team the capability to use a number of different meshes throughout abilities. These new meshes bring fresh shapes to the visual effects making the abilities even more distinct than the ones that have come before them. The final Watertarg ability and the new Zentragal ability visual effects can be seen in the video below.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of May yet?!
