Dev Update (April 2026)

TLDR: Waited for motion capture suit for animations (solved some problems, not all), burned out and worked on side project to clear my head, now back to finish the game, added lots of new things, demo update soon

It’s been a long time since our last update. We are still actively working on the game. We spent large part of last year waiting for mocap suit to arrive. After we got the mocap suit, it took us some time to figure out good and bad things about it. The suit is great for general motion capture, but for fast and precise action like combat it is a bit lacking. This means we’ll still have to do lots of manual animating which is time consuming. As a developer who is not very artistic, I’m not looking forward to it. Currently, we have combat animations but not in quality we would like.

To avoid burning out I’ve taken some time to work on a side project. This side project is open-world game that reuses most of code and logic from this game. I’ve built cool things like custom terrain renderer, real-time save, online multiplayer and so on. I’ve also updated combat system, AI logic, inventory, save and other components and put most of those changes and things learned back into this game. I think it was time well spent even though I did sidetrack a bit.

New version of demo with all new things should be available any day now.

Here are the things that were made/improved from the last update:

Combat

We are still experimenting with combat and how to make it look and feel better. Obviously, animations are biggest problem. But while it is something we can’t really fix right now, we are focusing on other things that we can fix. We added posture/stability attribute that defines how well one can defend. When posture/stability is low there are bigger chances to stagger or knockback. This way combat is not fueled by stamina alone.

Enemy AI

The main issue with AI was the effort required to change enemy behavior. Having a complex behavior tree for every enemy required too much time which we didn’t have. That is why we looked for ideas in some good old games and decided to do something like Oblivion/Skyrim. The new approach produces good results and is quite easy to maintain/expand. Ironically, it is very similar to the AI we made for AI airships ages ago (but we didn’t know that when we implemented it).

Factions

One of the irritating things in the game was the lack of distinction between various enemies and NPCs. There was nice combat music starting when approaching rabbit in the field. We solved this by introducing factions. Now, NPCs can belong to one or more factions that define how they will interact with other factions. Guards can attack wild animals but will not attack players or other villagers, zombies attack everyone, rabbits are hunted by foxes and wolves and so on.

Factions also allow us to make interesting things like trespass mechanics or quests where NPC will be perceived differently by other NPCs simply by chancing its faction.

AI Behavior

NPC AI behavior was also upgraded. We wanted to make the NPCs feel more alive. We were influenced by Oblivion/Skyrim Radiant AI. The NPSs have basic schedules that can be overridden by various environmental events like cannonball explosion or enemy attack. The villagers should appear in the morning and go to work, eat at noon, and go to rest in the evening. Shops will be closed during the night. Animals may decide to roam the village at night or to sleep during the day. Also, all the villagers will cower or run to houses in case of an airship attack. Currently, this is implemented but not yet added to all NPCs.

Currencies

We introduced new currency – credits – to solve the problem with pricing of items, cargo and airships. Now, gold is used for purchasing and repairing items (weapons, armor, items, …) and can be earned by selling items, solving quests and so on. Credits are used to buy cargo, ammo, airships and so on. We plan to introduce buying credits for gold later.

Fortifications

Fortifications are military complexes engineered for the defense of territory that will attack the player if player comes near. The fortification can vary in look, armaments and strength. The dock is disabled until fortifications is destroyed. To destroy the fortification player must bombard the fortification with cannons. After that player can raid the fort and loot it.

Bounty Airships

Some airships now have bounty on them. If player destroys them, the bounty is automatically added to the player. Bounty is usually gold and credits but can be upgrades too. Destroying the airship will also destroy cargo and all other valuables on the airship. The player can damage airship enough to board it and defeat its crew to loot the airship traditional way getting the bounty and the cargo.

Day/Night

We finally found time to finish the day and night cycle. The implementation was finished years ago, but we never found time to tweak the colors to make it look good. We had a problem with color banding at night. Lots of colors are needed to apply to get the illusion of day/night like sun color, fog color, sky (top/bottom) color, cloud (top/bottom) color, ambient color, and so on.

We also experimented with various lengths of day and night and ended with one where night lasts for a quarter of the day. We tried various colors for different parts of the day - like green for sunset and orange for sunrise - but decided to keep it simple with light color for the day and dark purple for the night. We still need to balance darkness.

Steam Integrations

We added implementation for achievements and cloud save. We still need to configure achievements, create icons, and test everything, but the implementation is there.

There are also lots of other changes that were made like upgraded save system, inventory, added new content like items, clothes, locations, islands, and bugfixes.

If you have any comments, ideas, or suggestions, let us know here or on our Discord!

Best regards, Mihael