June marked another productive chapter in the development of Depths of Erendorn, with each team advancing key systems, assets, and features across the board. From backend refinements to gameplay systems, to visual and audio enhancements across the world, progress remained steady and impactful. While the Server team pushed ahead with quest and event system development, the Client and Environment teams worked in tandem to boost performance and improve visual stability. Character development also moved forward, with notable updates to animation sets, model customisation options, and texturing work. Complementing these efforts, new landmark assets, enhanced VFX, and an evolving soundscape continued to deepen immersion throughout the world. Highlights from the month’s work are outlined below. As always, join us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit for daily updates on Depths of Erendorn. Alternatively, join our Discord for all the latest! - now let’s get into it!
3D Modelling
Throughout June, the 3D Modelling team made significant strides in character development and customisation, pushing forward both artistic detail and player expression in Depths of Erendorn. One major focus was the texturing of the Necromancer, where detailed material work brought greater depth to the character’s sculpt—highlighting contrasting surfaces such as dark robes, polished bone, and glowing arcane elements to reinforce their ominous identity. Alongside this, the team completed the fitting of a new hair library to both male and female Human base models, establishing a flexible, shared pool of interchangeable hairstyles that will allow for broader personalisation during character creation. With this initiative complete, work shifted toward an early redesign of the Boar enemy, aimed at enhancing its visual appeal with a more memorable and distinct silhouette. These updates continue to shape the playable cast and creatures of Erendorn with greater clarity and character.
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Set Piece Design
June was a productive month for the Set Piece Design team as they focused on expanding and refining the structural elements that help define Erendorn’s visual identity. Work began with the completion of a new set of landmark assets—distinctive points of interest designed to break up the landscape, aid player navigation, and support future narrative beats within the world. Attention then turned to the central settlement, where a number of small refinements were made, including the addition of a new column asset to the marketplace and general improvements to environmental variety. A Viking-inspired wall tool was also finalised, further expanding the library of modular assets available for rapid worldbuilding. To support ongoing development, early modelling began on additional points of interest, backed by research into new thematic elements that will help inject greater variety and depth into Erendorn’s growing settlements and surrounding regions.
Programming
Client
Over the course of June, the Client team focused on refining core functionality to improve performance and support new gameplay systems within Depths of Erendorn. A significant portion of work was dedicated to optimising asset loading during game start-up, addressing issues around ability data and reducing unnecessary overhead to shorten loading times. In parallel, development progressed on the settlement quest system, with the new UI window brought closer to full integration through backend implementation and logic improvements. Efforts included refining the quest tracker to differentiate between accepted and unaccepted quests, as well as ensuring consistent behaviour across various interface elements. Additional focus was placed on the character creation pipeline, where the team began investigating methods to minimise the asset footprint required for functionality, further enhancing load efficiency and user responsiveness. These updates contribute to a more stable and streamlined client experience as new features continue to roll out.
Server
Throughout June, the Server team made significant strides in expanding and stabilising backend systems to support Depths of Erendorn’s growing gameplay features. A major area of focus was the new block-based Events system, which underwent extensive refinement to address critical bugs and ensure correct execution of quest and adventure logic. Enhancements included improvements to pathfinding, event triggers, and adventure initialisation, as well as the introduction of more detailed objective tracking within activity book entries. Alongside this, the Dialogue Editor continued to take shape—now featuring save functionality, a simulated preview system, and backend support for storing branching narratives. Item behaviour also saw improvements, with consumable usage logic updated to prevent inventory issues and new systems added to correctly route overflow purchases to player stashes. Optimisations to server startup times and ability preloading helped improve overall performance, laying a stronger technical foundation for upcoming content expansions. With many of these systems now in active use, the first wave of playable event and dialogue content has begun development in earnest.
Sound Design
Throughout June, the Sound team concentrated on refining environmental audio within Erendorn’s settlements, with a particular focus on adapting market ambience to fit recent layout changes. Existing soundscapes were reworked to align with the new structural design, incorporating balanced one-shots and looping cues to preserve immersion while reducing system load. The number of active audio cues was intentionally streamlined to optimise performance, and volume adjustments were made to background market chatter—tuned to reflect the current lack of NPC presence. These updates ensure the sound design remains contextually grounded while allowing room for dynamic expansion as interactive elements are introduced in future development phases.
Environment Art
Throughout June, the Environment team concentrated on a series of visual and performance enhancements aimed at improving stability and fidelity across Erendorn’s world. Key efforts were made to restore dynamic weather functionality, rebalance lighting across day and night cycles, and refine fog behaviour to reduce visual obstruction while preserving atmosphere. Following the upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.5, the team tackled several texture-related bugs—most notably addressing terrain artefacts caused by virtual texture streaming conflicts and recalculating 8K splatmaps via Gaea to restore visual consistency. A strong emphasis was also placed on performance, with in-depth optimisation work around Nanite usage, particularly for foliage and landscapes. By adjusting rendering settings and disabling opacity where needed, alongside experimenting with Hierarchical LODs and Temporal Super Resolution upsampling, framerates saw a significant boost—rising from 15 to 65 FPS at 4K. These updates collectively enhance both the visual quality and technical stability of Erendorn’s environments as development progresses.
Animation
Throughout June, the Animation team made steady progress across several characters, with a focus on improving expressiveness and readiness for in-game implementation. Major efforts were dedicated to the Forest Druid, where a new feminine idle pose was developed to serve as a unified animation base for both combat and exploration. Several legacy animations were reworked or replaced to match this updated stance, adding greater personality and realism to the character’s movements. Work also resumed on Dwarf NPCs, including the integration of new beard assets and early experimentation with bone-based physics to simulate dynamic motion in place of cloth systems—an approach tested on both facial hair and select clothing elements. Additionally, development continued on the Necromancer’s animation set, ensuring the character remains on track for full engine integration. These updates push several key assets closer to final quality, supporting a richer and more immersive character experience within Erendorn.
Visual Effects
In June, the VFX team dedicated their time to exploring new visual possibilities through a series of material and emitter experiments. By taking advantage of recently introduced emitter nodes, the team was able to test more advanced uses of texture channels—developing techniques that create the illusion of depth and complexity while maintaining strong performance. This work has not only broadened the team’s toolkit but also laid the groundwork for more visually compelling effects, from atmospheric enhancements to spellcasting and interaction cues. The discoveries made during this period will directly inform the next wave of VFX content planned for Erendorn’s evolving world.
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That’s it for this week’s devlog, but have you seen our monthly roundup of May yet?!
