DESIGN
Our mountains got a face lift this week! Previously, we were using an oversized rock texture, which looked like this:
While this looked decent on large mountains from a distance, it had the downside of looking very blurry once the player got close to it. This was especially noticeable in areas that have small cliffs or ledges, like towns. To fix this, we started by making the rock textures smaller, which increases the image resolution but also increases tiling. Not a good look.
So to combat this, we used the same tool that we use to create variety in the colors of the grass, which paints a secondary texture in a random pattern on top of what was originally there. Below is the result with that secondary rock texture blended in. You can see that the tiling is less noticeable than in the previous 2 images, and the detail resolution is also much better when viewed from close up.
While we feel like this is an improvement, we’re not totally satisfied with how it looks yet, so we’ll continue making adjustments. Let us know what you think!
A sizeable selection of hairstyles has been added! Not only does this give the player character more room for customization, but it also means we can create more variety in our NPCs.
We’ve finished implementing all of the cutscenes for our internal milestone! This was one of our major focuses this sprint, so there have been a lot of developments.
An important human’s custom model has been implemented in cutscenes, and we’re currently replacing their placeholder model in the overworld.
A few of our cutscenes needed to be linked together. The way we have it set up right now, it takes some coding changes to ensure that the connected scenes flow together seamlessly.
We’ve started adding music to certain encounters and cutscenes. It’s really amazing what a difference it makes for the tone of these scenes. We’re still experimenting with a few of them to get the timing and music selection right, but the one that’s finished is... wow.
We’ve made adjustments to the density of our volumetric lighting. It can be a tricky balance- with too high of density the colors in the distance look washed out, but with too low of density we miss out on those gorgeous light rays. With some tinkering, it’s in a good place now. We’ve also added code that allows us to change the volumetric light’s color and intensity at different times of day.
A couple different points of interest have been placed in the biome we’re working on. One of these is a fairly significant location that needed to be populated with set pieces and NPCs.
This week we placed some new Kinfolk spawners and other surprises for the player around the biome. We’ve set specific times of day for certain Kinfolk to spawn, which allows us to create even more variety in a given area.
Development
A major focus this sprint was polishing the feel of multiple characters’ combat by changing which abilities they have (in some cases making brand new abilities), and adjusting different aspects of the abilities themselves. In each of these cases, we’re seeing a noticeable improvement. These Kinfolk are becoming more fun to play as, and more fun to fight against.
All damaging abilities are guaranteed to deal at least 1 damage now. Previously, our damage calculations could round down to 0 in some cases, but this was causing some low level Kinfolk to commonly deal 0 damage with their abilities against similarly leveled opponents.
We added code that can specify a character as a target for NPCs to attack. That way, NPCs won’t attack other characters in the area if we don’t want them to.
Bug! Fixes! Galore! This sprint we found a particularly high number of soft locks that prevented progression while testing. Many of these were related to the new cutscenes. We also fixed issues with NPC headlook and Kinfolk followers. (And plenty of other issues that would be boring to read about.)
This isn’t quite a progress note, but we wanted to share that Rob ran into the team’s first “organically spawned” Phantom Kinfolk yesterday! It was a Lumala, and it made for a pretty cool moment. Unfortunately this was in the editor, so it wasn’t for keeps.
LEXICON
Asset: Essentially any in-game model. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Editor: (aka Unity Editor) The program developers use to make changes to the game. Developers can test their changes here before their changes are added to a build.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Headlook: Code that tells an NPC to look in a specific direction.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
NPC: A non-player character.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Point of interest: An area given special care and attention, intended to draw the player’s interest. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods filled with strange notes would be a point of interest.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
Rigging: Giving a character model a “skeleton” with joints that animators can move around to create animations.
SFX: Sound effects.
Set piece: A model used in the environment, such as buildings, statues, etc.
Shader: An effect that changes how things visually appear in the game. Shaders can do many things to alter overall appearances.
Soft lock: A situation where the game becomes impossible to progress due to a bug, glitch, or flawed logic.
Spawner: Code that spawns Kinfolk or NPC Summoners into the world. We can give them a multitude of settings to spawn based on time passed, or enemies defeated, etc.
Sprint: A two week period used for organization. Our newsletters are released on the last day of our sprint.
Summoner: The people in Hinterlock who can summon Kinfolk.
Texture: A 2D image that’s applied to a 3D model to give it color and shading.
Tiling: A noticeable repeating pattern on a model or terrain due to using a texture to cover a large area.
Tooling: Dev tools that help improve efficiency.
VFX: Visual effects. Kinfolk attacks, dust clouds, water splashes are all VFX.
xNode: The software we use for handling our dialogue implementation.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on November 17.
