2018

November’s Progress: Lighthouse & Crime

/ Andrew / Leave a comment

Andrew: Howdy! We’ve been working away, despite the holiday (Thanksgiving). To say the least, we ate hearty. Besides stuffing our faces, here’s what we’ve accomplished during the month of November:

Harbor Progress

Continuing work on the West Trading Harbor (working title), it has since improved. Previously, what was shown in the screenshots of October’s Progress was about the extent of what was the harbor. Now looking the other way, the area is contained! The buildings are obviously placeholder and the scene is still WIP.

Lighthouse (in Harbor)

Night and day.

This is the Harbor Lighthouse (WIP), spoils of continuing work on the harbor. In the gifs above, you can also see more of the harbor, at a distance.

Criminal Hunt Encounter

“It’s all over law breaker!”

Jon has continued working on encounters, particularly with guards reacting to crime. Now, when someone is detected committing a crime (in a scene with a garrison), a bell will toll and guards will start to appear!

Misc. Goodies & Bug Fix
  • New cursor graphic:   
  • Fixed: water now has refractions again! Thus, fixing some of the shader issues from one of the Unity updates.
  • Adjusted/increased radgoll forces from weapon hits.
  • We’ve been working on supporting lower shader LODs, so the game can run on a wider variety of platforms. Here’s a preview:

We are still encountering the issue of our player’s falling/passing through certain colliders and have linked it to using Unity’s CharacterControllers… Jon has tested a preliminary Rigidbody motor and found no issues with passing through colliders, as of yet. We may have to switch over to this “Rigidbody motor” in the near future.

For some good news, we can now build the game again! For a while there, we had lost the ability to build the game, due to build errors, after one of the Unity updates and the many changes we’d made. So now we can actually start really testing this version of the game properly.

And we leave you with a preview:

I did a little landscaping outside of the Lava Cave. 🙂

Until next time.

4-Year Development Anniversary

/ Jon / 4 Comments

Jon: Another year, already!?

Well, as usual, here’s a overview of what we got done this past year:

Started New Areas
  • Castle

  • Castle Way: Connects the Upper Town to the Castle

  • Harbor

  • Farmlands: Connects the Graveyard and Castle Way

  • Lava Cave

  • 2 Unrevealed Areas!! 😏
Shaders

We dived into a bevy of custom shader madness! Here are some of the successful outcomes, so far:

  • Eyeball – Iris/pupil drawn right on the eyeball, instead of using another mesh.
  • Crest – Very similar to the eyeball shader.

  • Splatmaps – Blending between multiple textures, e.g. dirt path and grass

  • Water – Alas, refractions are broken at the moment…

  • Lava

  • Slime – Vertex animation and multiple scrolling uvs.

  • Invisibility – Refraction only shader that fades in/out.

  • Billboard – Causes object to always face camera. Used to be on the CPU, now on the GPU!
  • Grass – Normal interpolation upward.

Added some misc. shader effects too

  • Smoothness and specular, of various materials, increases during rain
Codin’

Here’s a some notables on the engineering side:

  • Swapped AI from GOAP
  • Progress on Encounters/Scenarios
  • Created XML Database
  • Random loot using XML tables
  • Changed weapon collisions and item physics
  • More added effects & potions

I have also continued cleaning up and rewriting various older systems. Since there’s over a quarter of a million lines of code in the project now, it takes some time… I have also learned a lot in programming over the past 4 years.

In programming, I’ve come to favor the Service Locator Pattern over the use of Singletons as it allows more flexibility/ease of changing. I find focusing on flexibility in this scale of a project is the best way to go. I have also wasted(?) a lot of time trying to pre-optimize things, focusing too much on performance early on. Favor code clarity and function over performance until later on, I say.

Relics!?

We’ve also made a lot of design progress and figuring out the direction we want to take the game. We’re finally figuring out what these Arcane Relics are going to be…

We’re not spilling the beans just yet, though. 😀

Chipmonk!

We released a side-project this year, Chipmonk! 

Believe it or not, this has already helped with certain things in TAR. I got to learn a lot more about Finite State Machines and how useful they can be!

We also wanted to test launching a less complicated and smaller file-sized game on various platforms.

Unfortunately, it looks like we won’t be rolling out an update this year as there are still many things broken. We are also still transitioning many prefabs to Unity’s new nested/variants setup, which is going well so far. On the bright side, there’ll be more changes/progress when the next version comes out!

We’re getting there! 🐌

Take care!

October’s Progress: Harboring New Areas

/ Andrew / Leave a comment

Andrew: Hello there. Here’s what our game development entailed for this last month, October:

New Props

  • Spruces: new trees, brambles/etc are beginning to appear throughout Terradim. They are a nice change from the usual oak/maple trees littering the land now.

  • Edited normals of rocks/foliage/etc: in messing around with Blender more, I’ve been utilizing modifiers, more specifically the Normal Edit Modifier. Basically for the foliage of trees, I’ve been “faking” the lighting by setting the mesh normals to face outward radially (so light hits from all directions, blending better at different times of day). For grasses, and some rock props, I’ve set the normals of their meshes upwards in local space, so their lighting more accurately matches the surface normal below.
New Area Previews

  • Castle Way: preview of the area just outside the Castle. WIP.

  • Farmlands: this is the area between that connects the Graveyard with the Castle Way. It is very much, WIP.

  • Trading Harbor: planned to be off West somewhere, this is the starts of a harbor town. Focus on the piers and harbor. Boat is placeholder (courtesy of the Unity asset store). Obviously, WIP.

Jon has continued working on setting up various prefabs with nesting and variants. He has also continued working on the encounter system (which is coming along), UI, and bug fixing. He’ll fill you in on more details in his next post.

On a side note, I’ve also been revisiting Dalwood (starting splatmaps, UV-ing, adding new props and adjusting old, etc), and the Lava Cave (adding more rooms/areas/tunnels, etc, getting farther along). More to show later.

Remember, our side-project, Chipmonk!, is available on itch.io:

 BUY NOW!

Ciao!