Monthly Update: August

Hello!

In August one of the biggest leaps so far were made. The demo is closer than ever and I can't wait to publish it here within a few months!

Here is a short video of gameplay from the starting zone:

Voice Acting- The whole demo questchain is now fully voice acted and implemented. The idea is to have the entirety of the mainstory voiced, while the sidequests and npcs will be non verbal with emotion expressed through sound/non verbal instead.

Weather- There is now active weather in Lorne. The idea long term is that they all can affect the player in different ways. Here are some weather types implemented:

• Thunderstorms

• Rain

• Snow

• Sunny

• Overcast

Polishing the Demo- A lot of effort this past month has been to make the demo feel smoother and get rid of any obvious bugs I have encountered when playtesting. Here is a list of general polish:

• Added background music to starting zone

• Created a smooth camera transition for title reveal cinematic

• Lysander is now a single entity, following you through the tutorial cave

• Made the level up vfx more performant

• Created a new explosive vfx for explosive items

• Harmonized all interactive vfx to a single vfx type

• Added soul dust drop ranges instead of fixed amount

• Increased crafting costs for all items

• Created artificial rimlight for the character and brightened textures to make Evelyn "pop" a bit more

• Changed some animations for spear attacks

New explosive VFX

Shopkeepers- Implementing a basic shopkeeper for the game turned out to be way more troublesome than I first thought. The hardest part was probably allowing for questgivers to carry dialogue and act as questgivers if needed.

• Added item descriptions and lore texts to 112 items, trinkets and potions

• Goldchecks, do the player have enough gold?

• Transfer items

• Possibility to run out of stock

• Greeting/Dismiss voicelines

• Integrate them with quest and dialogue systems

• Making them possible to edit in the world, allowing endless amount of deviations from the 3 vendor presets I made.

Example of item description:

Questgivers- Most attention were probably put into making and implementing the questgivers. In order to make them feel alive a lot of tiny details were added to their behavior. Here are the most obvious ones:

• Added a blacksmith Questgiver

• Headtracking - questgivers now track you with their heads when you get close

• Created different animations that are played when you are getting closer(such as sitting down or standing up when you are nearby)

• Added events for the questgiver such as follow player or run to position.

• Questgivers can now jump over obstacles

• Added an automatic unstuck feature as a fallback

Nortshire blacksmith

Headtracking

Questgiver events

Thanks for reading!