Development Newsletter: July Development Updates

While July has been a very quiet month for regular small patches, an enormous amount of work has been going on behind the scenes towards a major gameplay update to the Hermit Demo's art and visuals.

Important: As many things have changed under the hood in this update, the new build will not be compatible with older save games from previous versions of the Hermit Demo. Older (incompatible) save files will not appear in the load game menu.These changes are now live on the Beta Branch but will not be live on the main branch (default install) until later today, as some work is still needed on bug fixes/optimizations.

July Updates: Buildings & Architecture, Interaction Widgets, New Equipment, New Locations, and More!

New Buildings & Architecture

The main objective of this month's update was to significantly raise the bar for the quality of 3D art in the game, with a specific focus on improving the towns and villages.

This was a significant effort that has been underway behind the scenes for more than two months. Finally, late this month the 3D Production of the new building assets was completed and they were added to the game demo (replacing all of the old building structures in Gravenstaad, as the area has now been completely re-structured).

The result is a much more appealing look and feel for towns, with Gravenstaad in the Hermit Demo serving as the testing ground for the new look.

• All houses have been rebuilt using a completely new set of modular housing static meshes, created in-house with Blender

• Details were added to various other interior static meshes as well, including rugs and furniture

• Other, older art assets have now been removed from the game

• Gravenstaad has been re-built from the ground up with new buildings in every area

In order to achieve the new look for game buildings, a detailed multi-layer material base was created for all of the new buildings. This allows building walls to include separate, layered materials for the foundation, walls, and even erosion.

Inns & Taverns

In addition to this, the new modular building components allowed for supporting much larger structures in towns and villages. Inns and Taverns are the main objective for these larger structures, and a new Inn appears in the Demo.

• Finished work on 3D Production for building components of Inns, Taverns, and Distilleries

• Added the Gravenstaad Inn to the Hermit Demo (already in today's Beta build release)

Abandoned Buildings, Storefronts, & More

On top of this, several other new buildings have been added. This includes new sizes and shapes of storefronts (some of which do not appear in the Demo).

• Finished adding new abandoned building model templates

• Using the new modular building materials, two new abandoned building prototypes were added to the Hermit Demo: One on the main road, and one near the river

• Added new item spawns to support the two new abandoned house locations

New Bridges and Statues

This update also brings the addition of new buildings and statues in various other locations around the map for the Hermit Demo.

Improved Torch Throwing Mechanics

A longstanding issue with the gameplay in dungeons has been the awkwardness of throwing torches to light up dark areas. This has now been improved significantly in this latest update.

• Torch throwing has been replaced with torch placing

• Pressing 'T' will now place a torch in front of the player standing vertically, where its cast light will usually not be obstructed

• Pressing 'T' while a weapon is already equipped in the main hand will now place a torch without swapping out of the melee weapon slot

• Pressing 'T' while a Torch is equipped in the hand will now place a torch on the ground and then immediately swap to the Melee Weapon slot, giving players a much faster/easier response for placing torches and then immediately going into combat

• Pressing 'T' to place a torch will now usually prefer to place a torch from the backpack (if one is available) rather than the equipped torch from the character's loadout

New Equipment, Storage Scrolls

• Added Bear Traps (coming in the next patch, but currently live on the Public Beta Install)) that can be purchased or found as an additional combat equipment item

• Added a new scroll: Recitation of Storage (coming in the next patch, but currently live on the Public Beta Install)

• The Recitation of Storage is a single-use item that provides a temporary magic totem, allowing the player to directly access the Donkey's saddlebags from anywhere (including inside dungeons) for 120 seconds

• After 120 seconds, the totem disappears

• This allows players to unload their backpack while inside of dungeons as long as they have space in the Donkey's saddlebags to move loot to

• Until a crafting recipe is available, the scrolls can currently be found from item spawners in the world and in Urns or Chests

• Added a new, significantly better satchel (Hermit's Satchel) that has more space and slots for spells, potions, and bandages

• The Hermit's Satchel can be found somewhere in the Hermit's Memory of the Mausoleum, which can be reached using an Elixir of Remembering

• Added a new frost damage sword (the Eismesser) that has a rare chance of spawning from Unsealed Caches in the Hermit Mausoleum Memory area

New Windward Step Locations

• New Windward Step Locations have been added to the game

• The Windward Step Locations locations are revealed by a subtle wind VFX with green blowing leaves when the player stands near them

• These are locations where using the windward step spell will jump you to a specific distant location, sometimes much further than expected

• Using the Windward Step spell in these areas can bring you unexpected locations / hidden areas

Improved Character Interaction UI

• Fixed an bug that could cause Interactable NPC UIs to sometimes become stuck on screen permanently

• Interactable NPC widgets have been completely re-worked with new look and functionality

• All conversational and vocalizing NPCs now have widgets, not just traders / quest-givers

• Interactable NPC widgets now support showing character names or titles

• Interactable NPC widgets are now colour coded, and support showing Icons for jobs/roles (e.g., for traders, quest-givers, etc.) as well

• Fixed an issue with the display of damage resistance icons in the creature codex

• The codex will now always properly display damage resistances for known species if information about their resistances is available (and '???' if the species is known, but their damage resist profile is unknown)

Other changes and bug fixes in this update

• Isolated the cause of the long-standing bug'clicking items drops them immediately'

• To address this bug, alt+click to quick-drop items has been temporarily removed from the game until a permanent solution is implemented (it turns out this bug is caused by alt-tabbing, and is related to the interaction between this Windows functionality and the Game Engine)

• In older builds of the Hermit Demo, the issue can be fixed immediately by just pressing L-Alt

• Fixed more potential causes for the Donkey getting stuck in certain locations

• Improved the functionality of skin tone selection in the character creator, with more options for hair colour, eye colour, etc. planned in the near future

• Added a codex creature entry for Spectres

• Spectres are now extremely resistant to physical damage

• Renamed the game project files

• SaveGames will now be saved in a new location (on windows, this will be in %appdata%\\Local \\HermitDemo)

• One quest billboard poster has now been moved to the billboard at the Gravenstaad Inn

• Finished work moving new building modules into streamed sublevels for performance optimization

• Added a small Prison area beneath the Gravenstaad keep, to be expanded upon in a near-future update

• Improved the load time of the Load Game menu by restricting the number of displayed savegames

• A 'show all saves' button has been added in case players do want to view the full list of available save games

• Added new obstacles, loot, and wind SFX on the ruined bridge

How can I support the project?

If you've been enjoying the Hermit Demo and want to help support the game, here are some things you can do to help support the game's development!

• Share the game Demo with friends on Social Media, Discord servers, etc. with people you know that might enjoy it!

• Consider leaving a positive review for the Demo Page! It helps the game a lot, and allows me to focus more of my time on development rather than having to divert that time and energy toward marketing

• Submit bug reports using the reporting tool: if you find an issue, let me know. I can't reply to every report, but I do read them all and I make an effort to fix every issue that I can reproduce on my end

Thank you all for your continued support of the project!