The Draconian gets a colourful texture upgrade in a work-filled week for the team as more props are created for the new city assets set. Additionally, the sound team has continued to work with visual effects while the animators work on movement cycles for multiple enemy models. Finally, the visual effects team have been working on some concepts for upcoming ability effects. During this time the coding teams have finalised the transfer to the new engine version as well as balancing and fixing 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
With the coloured texture being finalised, the team has spent the past week working on the alternate colours for the many different Draconian sub-species within its race that will inhabit the world of Erendorn. The different types of Draconian all have unique abilities with some having powerful breathing abilities. The different races can now be differentiated whilst playing within the game, giving knowledgeable plays the edge when it comes to encountering them. A minor tweak has also been done to the mouth of the model to fix a previously discovered issue with animations. The new colours for the Draconian model with the adjusted mouth can be seen below.
Set Piece Design
The set-piece design team has continued their work on the new item set for the cities of Erendorn. The team has continued the theme of less complex items with a harsh and brutal aesthetic, these items will also go to furnish the city's guard houses and seedy taverns. These props will feel right at home in establishments that may be inhabited by the less than welcoming characters from within the city's underbelly. An example of the new models can be seen in the pictures below.
.png)
Programming
Client
This week has continued the process of transferring the project and all team members to UE5.0.2, finishing up with test runs and writing a guide and assisting in the process for the entire team. The rest of the work completed by the client-side team can be seen below.
- Finished testing with Dave and Jack to ensure the engine and project run smoothly after team members switch over.
- Updated the documentation guide for the steps it takes to download and run the new project.
- Helped with any team members that had issues not covered in the guide.
- Updated the engine code to prevent Visual Studio compiling the project using 2019 tools.
- Finished up the transition from using collision tiles to using runtime mesh terrain for mouse interactions in Dungeons.
- Removed unused plugin classes and sequence assets.
Server
The server team has finished off two major tasks this week. Firstly, enemies now can spawn in with passives once again, allowing Rats to infect you with the disease debuff, Skeletons to get tougher, and Boars to charge at you when they're far enough away! A little bit of bug fixing was needed once the abilities were in, since some of them were written so long ago they were a little broken. Secondly, the Watertarg was updated with its new abilities and balance pass, as well as a few bug fixes, which were done to the revamped abilities. Additionally, some time was spent this week fixing how Active Effects are attached to abilities, this will allow us to tell the client whether some active effects should be visible, only visible on selecting the Entity they're attached to, or completely hidden. This will help us from too many passives stacking and flooding the game with too much information. In the text below you can see a breakdown of other work completed by the server-side team.
- Added loot drops to world combat.
- Adjusted loot distribution to have a concept of vendor items.
- If an NPC group joins an existing combat then another loot roll is added giving the chance for multiple pieces of loot from world combat.
- If you escape combat then you become combat immune for 7 seconds, to avoid combat starting again instantly if you're still in aggro range.
- NPC groups should go back to wandering around after combat ends with some NPCs remaining alive.
- New client source control repo fixed.
- Fixed an issue where dead entities could have been added to combats resulting in weird behaviour.
- Added a function to make getting random loot drops easier to maintain and use.
- Refactored Active Effects to reduce the size of message sent over the network.
- Watertarg Character Class Ability Redesign/Rebalance.
Sound Design
The sound team has been continuing their work on the Zentragal ability audio, over the past week they have focused on creating sounds for Skitterer, Mirror Illusion, Time Displacement, Venomous Bite, Grappling Web and Encapsulate. The team used new sounds that were recorded through the past week to create the audio for the Zentragal's visual effects. Some of the audio recorded last week included metallic swipes and swooshes, these have paired excellently with the imploding and exploding nature of these visual effects. The visual effects with newly added audio can be seen below.
Animation
Work continued on the Gorilla model over the past week, the team has been focusing on animations for a roar, attack and death. The animators have taken care to give the animations bold and distinguished silhouettes. These poses show the attitude the enemy has towards the player, similar to the way a Gorilla would in our world. For example, during the roar animation, the team has pulled the model's shoulders right back to show off the size of the creature when it is in a threatening position. Examples of the new animations can be seen below.
The team has also started work getting the Mantisar rigged and skinned. Using another bespoke model, due to the number of legs, the team created the bug skeleton and started the idle animation. The team has taken references from a few different insects to get to the perfect level of movement needed for a creature of this size. Primarily taking reference from the Praying Mantis, the team has worked the movements of the small insect to fit a much larger creature. The team will continue to work on the Mantisar over the coming weeks. An example of the new idle animation can be seen below.
Visual Effects
The visual effects team has had a slower week last week, taking the time to concept some more abilities for the Zentragal. The concepts have been created to give the VFX team a guide for the shape and form of the next set of visual effects. Both of the concept sets of visual effects are for characters that lean towards dark magic. Using darker colours such as purples, reds and black solidifies the character with the dark and mystic arts. The team has also done some work experimenting with new procedural trail types, we will see these in use within visual effects over the next coming weeks. The concept art completed over the last week can be seen below.
That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of May yet?!
