An exciting week for the team! We start to see even more creatures that will inhabit the world of Erendorn come to life as the animators work on the Slime and Gorilla enemy. The 3D modelling team works on retopologising the Draconian model, and the sound team tackles the Zentragal's abilities. Finally, the coding team has worked on updating the client and fixing some tricky bugs. As always, join us on Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
Now that the high-poly sculpt is finalised, the team has turned their attention to retopologising and unwrapping the updated Draconian model. The first part of this process is done by creating a low-poly model, this will be more efficient within the engine. The low-poly model will then have the detail from the higher-poly asset 'baked' onto it. The artists will then work on unwrapping the model, this is the process of flattening the skin of the reptilian down onto a 2D image. In doing this, the task of adding colour to the Draconian will be much less complex. The lower-poly model with a loin cloth and possible customisation for horns can be seen below.
Programming
Client
Last week has been focused on testing the conversion of the DoE Client Project from UE5 Early Access to the source-built UE5 Release Version 5.0.2 in preparation for distributing to the rest of the team. A breakdown of other work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Applied updated versions for all project plugins.
- Updated references to deprecated plugin functions.
- Worked through project conversion compiler errors.
Server
Last week the server team has been busy with some particularly tricky bugs. The more problems that get rectified and become stable, the tougher bugs become to fix. The team then has to start dealing with glitches that don't necessarily happen every time you repeat the conditions that caused them to occur. Sometimes, these don't even manifest despite your logs saying there's a mistake happening. Ambushing enemies were able to circumvent the turn-manager and take double their turns at the same time, while enemies very far away from the player would sometimes not bother taking a turn at all. The former was to be discovered by observing entities taking their turn during the previous teammate's turn, then taking one in their natural order. While the latter was narrowed down to how our entities reserve a tile before movement, reserving a tile then not being allowed to move to it because it was already reserved, by themselves! Other work completed by the server-side team can be seen below.
- Enemy groups and players joining mid combat nearly finished.
- Separated movement handling into two separate functions for movement in combat and movement in the world.
- Improved the progression data tracking and structure.
- Attacks, abilities and movement added to world session combat.
- World session combat handling.
- Entity / Combat Mapping.
- Enemy group and player entities initiating and joining an existing combat implemented server side.
- Combat ending and clean up processes implemented.
Sound Design
Taking the visual effects from last week, the Sound Design team has worked to add audio to give them the grounding they needed. The skills in question are Pain Replenishment, Mana Thirst, Touch of the Damned, Shadow Blast, Quick Escape and Cocoon. The audio created by the team gives the impression that the Zentragal is using many of the mystical arts their race is known for. The more bespoke the abilities, such as Quick Escape and Cocoon have been given specific audio making them more defined than the other basic abilities. The VFX combined with the audio now give us a decent idea of how the abilities will be represented within the engine, next in the pipeline will be adding animations and refining them all together. Once this is completed, the ability itself will be ready for gameplay. The new audio for this VFX can be seen in the video below.
Animation
Work has continued on the animation sets for the many creatures that will inhabit the world of Erendorn. The team has focused on finishing off the animations for the Slime enemy and getting them into the engine. The newest animation completed by the animators is an updated idle animation that finished off the set from last week. All the animations for the Slime enemy will now be put into the engine ready for implementation in the world. This new animation can be seen below.
Work has also started on the Gorilla, the team has focused on preparing the model for animation. Adding a new skeleton and skin weights to the asset so the animators can manipulate them as they require. The team has also taken care to add joints and bones behind the facial features and also into the areas where hair would be put onto the model. These will be very useful when it comes to animating the Gorilla, as without these the flow of the creatures movement would feel off and artificial. An example of the model with the new skeleton can be seen below.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of May yet?!
