Monthly Update April-!

Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone-! This is our second monthly we have done on steam so we now know how to write them up a bit better and how to show more interesting stuff. This month we have done quite a lot of behind the scenes work with even more planned next month so lets jump into it-!

Lots of work has been completed and is still in the works. The character selection for dragons and dragon skin customisation has been fully implemented. Almost all of the crowdfunding backer skins have been completed for Icy Crown, the 'Fallen Celestial' is the only one that has not been transferred yet. Kirin 2.0 model has been started, Vitreus is pending an update and new music from Omnisound have been finished! And lots of more!

CROWDFUNDING SKIN CONCEPT SHOWCASE

This month we have nearly completed all of the crowdfunding skin concept art for Icy Crown. Except the angelic and demonic abomination that is 'Fallen Celestial'. This development update we showcase the completed Icy Crown 'Gilded Obsidian'- and a work in progress of the Kickstarter exclusive crowdfunding 'Doug' -skin concept art.

— Gilded Obsidian Icy Crown —

Possibly one of our community's most liked crowdfunding skins is the 'Gilded Obsidian' -skin. The combination of pearlescent white, iridescent obsidian and gilded metallic gold. This skin will be handed out to Snowy to be created later.

— WIP Doug Icy Crown —

A sneak peak of the upcoming Kickstarter crowdfunding exclusive skin: Doug! We had the 'William' -skin as the exclusive Indiegogo campaign, which is inspired by our mascot William! For Kickstarter campaign we are going to have a skin made of William's friend, Doug. Disclaimer: this is still a work in progress concept art!

PROGRAMMING: FLIGHT, SURVIVAL SYSTEMS & CUSTOMISATION

Our two junior programmers have been working on implementing the new UI, optimising survival systems for more multiplayer-friendly state - and what many of you are waiting for: the extensions to the flight system.

The survival systems: the dragon's statistics are being adjusted, or more specifically the health, stamina, element, hunger and thirst systems are being more optimized for multiplayer gameplay.

— Flight Boost, Dodges & Barrel Rolls —

We have implemented new actions hat can be performed during flight. Dragons will now be able to slightly boost their flight speed for a short period of time. They are able to dodge and barrel roll to avoid incoming attacks while in the air. All of these will cost stamina, so beware of that quickly depleting stamina bar! Disclaimer: in the video the stamina depletion was disabled for the sake of showcasing these new abilties! Players will not be able to boost or dodge infinitely. VFX will be added later.

CHECK DISCORD FOR VIDEO

— Character Selection & Customisation —

Another thing that we have now fully implemented is the dragon character selection and skin customisation. We have included the new Icy Crown 2.0 within the video showcase below. Disclaimer: the colour palettes featured are placeholders! These have been set as examples how the system works.

CHECK DISCORD FOR VIDEO

— Message from our Lead Programmer —

Our senior and lead programmer, Eclipse has created detailed notes on the work that he has done. Lots of things in regards to the Backer Beta, proper UI pass, implementing NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR support and more. We warmly recommend you to read the message in detail!

Hey everyone,

It's been a busy couple of months on the engineering side of Wings of Dawn, and the next one is shaping up to be even busier. With the Backer Beta on the near horizon and the Kickstarter Demo right behind it, most of what's currently in flight is converging on the same goal of getting something solid, stable, and genuinely fun into your hands. Here's a look at what's on my plate and what I’m wrapping up over the next few weeks.

Standing up the Backer Beta

The biggest chunk of my time right now is going into prepping the game build and our server infrastructure for the Backer Beta. That means a lot of unglamorous-but-critical work like hardening the deployment pipeline, getting our client and dedicated game server builds stable and provisioned in the US and EU, and shaking out the build process so we can ship updates to backers quickly on Steam when (not if) we need to patch something.

We're treating the Backer Beta as a real load test of the game before our Kickstarter Demo and Backers are going to be the first players hitting our live infrastructure at any meaningful scale in awhile, and that's exactly the kind of pressure we need to find the rough edges before we open things up further for the Kickstarter Demo. If you're a backer, expect more concrete details on access, schedule, and what we're hoping you'll help us stress-test once its released and you receive access.

A proper UI pass

Our current menus have done a great job carrying us through internal development, but they were always temporary scaffolding. Over the next few weeks we're rolling out new versions of the Main Menu, Settings Menu, In-Game Pause Menu, and Server Browser. The new Server Browser in particular is getting a lot of attention like better filtering, cleaner design, and a layout that doesn't make your eyes glaze over when there are dozens of sessions to choose from. The Settings Menu is also getting a real overhaul. For the beta we want video, audio, and keybind settings to all be in a fully functional, beta-ready state. That means actual graphics presets that map to sensible quality tiers, an audio mixer that respects your output device choice, and a keybind system that lets you rebind anything.

DLSS and FSR support

We're adding NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR support to the build. This has been near the top of the wishlist for a long time, and the timing makes sense, Backer Beta is exactly when we want a wide range of hardware exercising the renderer. Bringing both upscalers in lets us hit the performance targets we want on lower-end hardware without compromising on visual fidelity for players running a wider spread of GPUs.

Network optimization

Our networking layer is getting a focused round of optimization. We've been profiling bandwidth and CPU usage during internal playtests and there's healthy low-hanging fruit like redundant character state replication, payload sizes that grew organically over time, and a few snapshot frequencies that were tuned conservatively early in development and never revisited.

The goal is straightforward, comfortably supporting more concurrent players per session than we do today, with headroom to spare. Network optimization is one of those areas where you can almost always find another 5% if you look hard enough, so we're being disciplined about prioritizing the changes that move the needle for the Backer Beta build specifically. Any deeper structural work that doesn't make the cut for Backer Beta gets queued for a later pass.

In-game bug reporting

Last but very much not least: I'm building an in-game bug report system for the Backer Beta and Kickstarter Demo. The idea is to make reporting a bug as low-friction as possible for players, pop the report tool, type what happened and submit. On the backend it'll automatically capture the context that's painful for players to gather manually like the build version, hardware info, current scene, player location, recent log tail, and so on. The honest reason this matters is the number one thing that makes a beta useful to a development team is good signal. A bug report with a build version, a log, and a "this is what I was doing" sentence is worth ten reports that say "the game crashed sometimes." We want to make giving us the good kind of report effortless, so we can turn around fixes fast.

Wrapping up

That's the slate for the next month. Lots of moving parts, but all of it lines up behind the same milestone which is a Backer Beta we're proud of, and a Kickstarter Demo that puts our best foot forward.

Clarification that Caladria is not part of Purple Hive Studios! The more support Eclipse gets the more time he can put into The Wings of dawn.

On a personal note, like a lot of folks in games, I got caught up in the wave of layoffs that's been rolling through the industry over the last few months. It's been a mixed blessing, honestly. Tough on one hand but on the other it's given me a lot more time to pour into Wings of Dawn, and the headspace to finally cross the finish line on a passion project I've been chipping away at on and off for the last six years. That project is Caladria - my take on the ideal animal survival game, built on RedM for Red Dead Redemption 2. It launches this week at playcaladria.com. If Wings of Dawn is your kind of thing, I have a hunch Caladria will be too and I would love it if you gave it a look.

https://playcaladria.com/

Thanks, as always, for the support and the patience. Knowing there's a community out there genuinely rooting for this game makes a real difference when we're heads-down deep in the work. See you in the next update.

— Eclipse

LEVEL DESIGN & MAP FIXES

Our level designer Noa has been working and changed the look of assets and overall visual of the game. Ech, Klack and Noa sat down and checked every single assets together till they were happy with the appearance. This is to better help deliver the mood and aesthetic that we will want to have for the game. There have also been many fixes to the map, and more are being actively fixed and optimised. Below are some new screenshots!

Steam post imageSteam post imageSteam post image

NEW MUSIC FROM OMNISOUND

Our partners from Omnisound are coming to you with four fantastic tracks of music. Couple of these are songs that you may remember from the tech demo version of the game, or the main theme from our Indiegogo trailer. There have been some fixes in terms of music and an introduction of brand new song for Icy Crown and Valhad!

YOU WILL HAVE TO CHECK THE DISCORD FOR THE MUSIC-!

NEW COMPLETED GAME-READY SKINS

Snowy, our magnificent skin magician has completed a total of three new skins this month! What a true powerhouse she is! Two new crowdfunding skins and one new customisable skin has been completed for Dustrius.

— William Dustrius Showcase —

Speaking of the Indiegogo exclusive crowdfunding skin, 'William' -skin has been completed for Dustrius. Below are renders for how the skin looks in a fancy lighting~!

— Cosmic Dustrius Showcase —

Additionally we have another crowdfunding skin, 'Cosmic' -skin completed for Dustrius. This skin has definitely been a little bit of a head scratcher during its concept stage. After all, Dustrius does not have large massive wings like Icy Crown or Vulgan, meaning that our artists gotta improvise in creative manner to make it fit. What do you think about the result?

— Forest Dustrius Showcase —

One of the two upcoming customisable skins for Dustrius, is the 'Forest' -skin. This is one of the two forest-themed skins. In total there will be five customisable skins planned. This one is inspired of more temporal forests with a more down to earth browns with a little touch of green as highlights. The tropical forest variant is currently in the works.

VITREUS' NEW DETAILS

SadEch has been working on adding more detail onto our Vitreus! This dragon is not getting a model update like Kirin. However, it is going to be given brand new details, so that the dragon fits with the new quality and detail that we are wanting for our models. Below is a little bit of a teaser~

DUSTRIUS' NEW ANIMATIONS

Of course, on top of some detail and model work. SadEch has been working on completing Dustrius' animations. There are still a few to go before the dragon can be fully be called complete. The two animations that are being showcased today are: sniffing and Dustrius'special attack animations.

PLEASE CHECK THE DISCORD.

Shown here is in-, charge loop-, exit and hit. VFX will make it feel beefier as it flashbangs everything after.

PLEASE CHECK THE DISCORD.

KIRIN 2.0 MODEL + CUSTOMISATION OPTIONS

The new and updated Kirin 2.0 model has officially started its progress. The new model will give a more draconic feel that is present within the original Eastern mythology and depictions of Qilin / Kirin -creatures. What you see below is a heavy work in progress (WIP) of the redesign of the Kirin. Currently showcasing no fur or scales.

This is a very base "naked" shape. However, you can clearly see some of the customisation options and features that we have thought for this creature. You will be able to customise the main forehead horn, the male's antlers, the "mane" which currently is simple spiked ridge. We also thought of adding more customisable visual options such as the spikes at the base of the tail to give the creature some variety.

BACKER SKIN CUSTOM HORNS???

We have a couple crowdfunding skins that will have unique features to their skin. These may include: horns, accessories and other possible features and adjustments onto the model. We have three skins which will have unique features, these being: Gilded Obsidian -, Woodland Warden - and Fallen Celestial -skins. Here you can see some for the first two skins!

— GIlded Obsidian's Chains —

For the 'Gilded Obsidian' -skin: it has a unique set of horns, which are accompanied by a pair of golden rings, which are attached to each other via small chains. A small, yet unique little detail that fits into the skin theme. The 'gold' is literally part of the name after all. Are you feeling extra fancy?

— The Warden's Overgrowth —

The 'Woodland Warden' -skin is definitely one of the more interesting skins. In order to make this creature and skin look like it is part of the nature: it has been given a set of custom horns and a body that is covered in moss and mushrooms. What do you think? Is this enough moss for the overgrowth?

So that about wraps things up for this month. Now, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that we don’t share, such as working on a trailer, writing lore, and other elements. So although it might not look like much on the surface, there’s a lot going on that you haven’t seen just yet.

However, if things go smoothly, you can expect to see some gameplay in the next update!