Welcome to our second update! We've been hard at work behind the scenes creating new designs and expanding our team.
Civilians
First of all, we'd like to give a warm welcome to our new Concept Artist, Becky Farr! She's been hard at work creating some fantastic concepts for our civilian populations.
These will be instrumental in our world building for believable people. From the rich to the poor, civilians provide questing opportunities, and work towards growing their homes.
Weapons and Armour
Howard has made some gorgeous blades for our ring swords. Here are a couple. Pattern welded weapons were incredibly popular in this period, creating stunning damascus-like patterning.
To create such a blade, the smith would need to fold layers of steel into rods. They would then twist this steel and shape it into a blade to create unique designs - no two pattern welded weapons were the same!
For the average soldier, a solid and reliable blade would do the job. Patterning of this type was mostly visual, so was more of a demonstration of status as opposed to effectiveness!
Howard and Toby have also been working incredibly hard on our upcoming helmets! Here's a sneak peek at one of our Vendel helmets. These detailed patterns would have taken a skilled armour weeks, if not months, of hard work.
You'll be able to attach different types of chainmail to protect your neck and face, select a variety of crests and change the patterns!
We want to spend the time to make believable characters. It's a big part of why we aren't rushing this game to an alpha state.
To ensure we create a believable experience, we're investing in full body motion capture, and facial motion capture. This will make your characters blink on incoming blows, see enemies contort in pain on successful attacks, and speak with accurate lip sync and expressions.
This will be mixed with hand animation to create balanced animations. We'll have more to show very soon, but until then check out this facial mocap test!
[previewyoutube="OHKtoJLdpDw;full"]
That's all for now! Thank you for taking a look at some of our work - we'll be covering our teams environment work in the next blog post. You can get sneak peeks by joining our Discord!
- Jared Merritt Project Lead
Update #1
Welcome to our first Quarterly Update, where we'll be covering formations, weaponry, animations and a bit of combat info! If you haven't already, please join our Discord.
Without further ado, lets dive in!
Weapons
A big part of recreating this period is tackling period accurate weaponry. We've discussed this shortly in our first Patreon vlog, but here are a few beauty shots of some ring swords we've been working on!
Environment Art
We're also working hard on some new environment assets. Check out this old Roman villa by our newest team member Arnel!
Animations
In order to bring Contingent to a higher level of quality, we've invested in a new motion capture solution which will allow us to record all sorts of animations, from walking and running to executions!
This combined with a groundbreaking facial motion capture solution (the same used in the Avengers series for Hulk) will allow us to create realistic believable characters which you can connect to. We'll be covering our approach for this in an upcoming Patreon vlog, as well as some sneak peeks at the new animations!
Combat
We've talked a lot about how our directional combat system will allow for greater flexibility when fighting, so to show this off, check out this gif where we show our near 360 degree swings using a one handed sword!
As you can see, this allows for a high amount of precision. It's important when defending these attacks to focus on deflecting the blade. A well-timed parry will allow you to block a strike while minimally affecting your stamina.
Your shield and sword will block strikes in any position, however it is most effective when blocking in upright positions as you'd expect!
PLEASE NOTE: The following GIF's feature outdated animations, UI and characters
Stamina management is also critical. If you fall too low, a hard blow could cause you to drop your shield!
Formations
We've also been working on our dynamic formation system. Here is an example GIF of a Line formation, which will automatically adjust based on your location of the area you'd like it to hold.
We also use the same system to dynamically resize formations on the fly, for example, if you need to fit a group through a small area they will smoothly transition to a tighter formation so they can all fit.
This system works all the way up from single squads to entire armies, so you can easily maintain cohesion in your planning.
Culture Archetypes
Each of the core cultures relates to a culture archetype. These are important, as the closer cultures are together, the easier they will get along when forming diplomatic agreements and relationships.
Britons
Predominantly referring to post-Roman Britons, the people of this cultural archetype were annexed by Romans. Latin became a common written and spoken language, among other hallmarks of Roman education remaining in place. This puts them much at odds with the Gaels and combined with territorial disputes this often led to war.
Gaels
After the Roman invasion, there was still a large portion of Celtic and Gaelic people never subjugated, whom stayed distantly culturally related to the Britons. The major difference is that Gael factions kept most of the pre-Roman ways of thinking. The Gaels were strong people who were fierce warriors, but often found themselves in-fighting due to conflicts among tribes.
Germanic
The Germanic factions mostly stick together. All the Germanic factions of this era sought new land in greener post-Roman pastures in a movement that became later known as the Migration Period. Part of this included the settlement of Britain.
Factions
There are 43 planned factions in Contingent, each with their own motives and history. Here is a full list!
Thank you for reading our first Quarterly Development Blog. We hope this was an interesting look into our work, and we're excited to show more in the future!
