I thought the last update was a beast but this is something else! We even pushed back the update release just so we can squeeze a few more goodies in there.
Playtest Feedback
We’ve added a link on the main menu to access a feedback form so we can start collecting data from all your lovely people. With the inclusion of story scenes, we’re needing more feedback from outside sources to make sure we’re on track and are delivering our best on each update; which is why it’s invaluable to have people actively playtesting with an open and honest communication with the team. Your opinions are what will ultimately shape Elegos in the days to come and are essential to make this project thrive.
Combat and Alex
This is a big one and could do with a post in and off itself. This whole sequence in the villa required the updating of nearly every game system to make it happen. Even though it isn’t perfect, it is a start and it finally lets us iterate effectively on all of these systems at the same time. The overlap between the systems makes my brain hurt and the NPCs don’t always make the right decision, but you do get to have a fight with Alexander the Great!
I can't wait to expand further on the combat system and add more animations, more reactions, more sounds etc.
Audio
I wish that I could post images of sound as we are so happy with the ambience that is now being built up. It’s so nice walking around with layer upon layer of ambient sound, talking, coughing, music etc. Maybe I’ll post a picture just so you know a nice spot to go listen.
Environment
The beautiful island of Phacos week on week is looking even more stunning and alive. Here are a couple of examples where we’ve concentrated on more set dressing, more tweaks and updated assets. Rocks, boulders and better textures for the terrain are a big jump for us, we do need a bit more colour matching to really blend it all together next time around in this area.
We have a new main road to the village along with various wear and tear. This is a great shift from our static and rather boring perfectly straight one that was there before.
Sometimes (all the time) things go wrong and so I thought I’d share this image of what happens when you go a bit overboard with painting prefabs of trees, bushes and rocks. It definitely has post-apocalyptic vibes but it also made our systems melt. It was a good GPU stress test of what we can’t do. 😆
Thanks for reading, here is the changelog of everything we’ve added and changed.
Changelog
UI
- Main menu now includes a link to a playtest form and moved trello to the social panel
Audio
- Ambient sound added to Pier and Village. - Reverb tweaked when inside interiors - New sounds for different punches, sword swings, grunts and footsteps - Ongoing tweaks to the audio mix
Environment
- Rocks and boulder assets added - Villa courtyard, steps and exterior reworked. - Cloth assets added to crate stacks - Water lilies and pads to villa courtyard ponds - Final terrain sculpting, texture painting, decals, set dressing around the Pier and the Village - Statue plinths updated with better textures - New main road through the village - Village building steps reworked - Set dressing around beach overlook
Modding
- Nature and decal materials now moddable
Combat
- First pass at blood effects during combat - Tweaked combat data and movement pathing
Systems
- Optimization work on GPU instancing and nature assets - Subtitles now hide if too far away from the audiosource
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
It’s been a very productive few weeks and so this is quite a beastly, if not the beastliest, of updates. Some of the additions in 0.11 have been in progress for many months, and some even over a year! We’ve got everything from animation reworks to keybinding via lighting but the biggest addition has got to be NPC models to replace the walking mannequins.
The NPCs are still very much work-in-progress, especially with animations and decision making, but it’s amazing to see them walking around and having conversations. We will be filling the rest of the island with different types and with greater variation over the coming weeks, right now it’s just the Pier and Village areas that have been NPCified. This really allows us to add more dialogue, more story, and overall just more life to Phacos.
The first-person viewpoint has had various tweaks ranging from FOV and camera position, to reworked animations and timing for the actual player arms. The camera also has a degree of juice added - slight head bob, slight movement when jumping and landing etc. All can be easily tweaked moving forward and ultimately we can add into the Settings (hopefully in the next update) so the player can use whatever they like!
More work has been completed for our player combat - we can now do combos! If you click attack straight after the first click, you’ll do a second attack. Punching can get a bit boring after a bit of time, so until we have our inventory sorted and the full story in place, we’ve hidden a sword. Hit F7 for a sneak peek and go play.
More set dressing has been completed, primarily around the gardens and cliff paths. Lighting has been tweaked as always - paid a bit of attention to the indirect lighting multiplier so the shadows aren’t quite so dark. We’ve updated our nature shaders as well so our foliage can be more optimised moving forward. Need to save whatever milliseconds we can when having to account for modding. Had a good pass at the market area to optimise assets and make more modular as there are so many little things in that narrow corridor, it needed some love.
We’ve added custom keybinding! Yay! It’s completed via a manually created file at the moment until we get our menus updated. Ailin has been working hard on this for the last few weeks and it’s a great tick for accessibility. Check out modding.wiki for more information.
The rest of the time was spent further tying combat and dialogue systems together to keep the player freedom but to make sense if combat is used instead of talking. It’s not perfect, this will only ever get better, but it’s a lot further along than ever before and has highlighted what dialogue needs more lines and voice acting.
Phew, that was tough picking out just the really exciting things to talk about and there are still plenty of things that don’t get their own paragraph. Here is a copy of the changelog for some of the finer details of what is new and changed in Elegos.
Improvements
UI
New opening splash screen ‘made with unity’
Tidied up subtitles padding and layout and they no longer display if too far away from the audio source Input prompts now show multiple bindings
First-person
Reworked, but not final, animations. Updated skin texture.
Combat combos are now supported.
Tweaked timings for combat and hit detection.
FOV/Camera, jump/landing/bob
NPCs
NPC models, ai and animations. Patrolling, cowering,
Chatter is back
Minotaur encounter fixed with animation and colliders doesn’t glitch
Visuals
Reflection probes on boat
Garden set dressing
Market rework and optimization
Lots of upressed textures (but lots more work to do on this)
Updated nature shaders
Lighting tweaks (as always!) indirect lighting has had the once over.
All foliage has had tweaked HSL values hopefully making it all feel more grounded in the world
Input
Keybinding via controls.json (see modding.wiki)
Debug
Support for target information when Debug screen is on
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.10
Greetings Elegosians!
A small but important update this time around with a lot of backend work ready to go to support the next couple months of NPC combat, models and animations. We’ve been tidying and optimising as always so we minimise our technical debt, as well as workflow improvements just mean we can iterate quicker and quicker to get new things for you to check out ASAP.
The NPCs will now flee or fight, depending on their temperment. Some NPCs have a set number, others are randomized at startup. It’s a great place to be able to test things now and work out what to tweak. The silly NPCs keep running into dead ends so better sort that out soon.
We are trying to get the balance right between NPCs reacting as you’d expect for a game, and not necessarily ultra-realistic, simulation level of reactions. We are a small team with lofty goals and so that will require what I like to call a necessary level of jankiness. It’s still going to be fun though and worse case, everyone loves ragdoll physics and hitting things.
Environmental work is continuing beautifully as always. The team is doing a great job smashing through the various areas and getting the first pass of set dressing in with objects, props, terrain work, lighting, optimisations and general environmental storytelling. Amazing what can be achieved with limited assets and only another update to have the whole island first pass complete. Then we can pinpoint areas that need more and keep pushing them further.
The main focus for the last couple of weeks has been the Temple Island, both inside and out, and it’s great to see that fleshed out more.
Here is a copy of the changelog for some of the finer details of what is new and changed in Elegos.
Improvements
World
Set dressing focus on Temple Island
Foliage, grass and objects added to the top as well as tweaked terrain/geometry for better scale perception
Updated colliders on Pier and Pier Steps
Multiple textures upressed globally
Lighting
Added more reflection probes and updated the older ones
Optimised torch lighting during day and night
Lights added for better player pathing
Replaced and optimised whole villa interior lighting system
NPCs
State changes for fleeing or fighting, depending on their stats
Ink files tweaked to support more ways of ending conversations such as by being attacked, or attacking someone else.
Combat doesn’t start until the opening boat has docked
Updated NavMesh for better navigation by NPCs
Other
Lots and lots of backend tidying and renaming while people were on holiday to optimise workflows
Fixes
Diagonal speed of the player is now back to normal. Stupid Pythagoras.
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.9
Greetings Elegosians!
Alot of behind the scenes work have been going on with NPC states and the metadata that will decide on things. These are hard to show off right now, but it's laying the ground work for quests and dialogue in a future update.
We finally have gamepad support! (with some caveats of course). We've tested it with a PS5 pad, an Xbox pad and a Switch Pro Controller and they all work fine and as expected. We haven't got button remapping or changes to stick sensitivity at this point, that will come in the future. Our whole input system is using Unity's new(ish) InputSystem and so if the input device is supported by that and fits the normal gamepad layouts, then it should work fine already. We've decided to support the gamepad without having to specifically choose the device in the Settings, mainly because it makes it nice and seamless so the player can jump between controllers, connect/disconnect without restarting. We don't have any feedback/UI at the moment regarding what controllers are being detected/usable and the menus aren't navigable using a gamepad, you’ll still need to use mouse for that.
We've completed alot of work on our lighting and nothing shows that off better than sunset shots.
We've tweaked fog, ambient light and added torches to dark areas. This placement of lights is happening during our set dressing passes and so it won't be long until everything will be lit correctly.
The usual tweaks to music and audio as things get noticed have happened.
Here is a copy of the changelog for some of the finer details of what is new and changed in Elegos.
Improvements
Audio
NPC bark sound Tweaks to sword and fist combat sounds. Main music now all has captions
World
Set dressing and asset placement first pass completed rear of main island and into temple island Land bridge added and blockout removed from rear of island Large scale decals added to the terrain to add variation to rock/foliage
Lighting
Smugglers route torches added Torches added and tweaked during sunset Optimisations to global fog and ambient lighting
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.8
Greetings Elegosians!
It’s been a month since the last update and we’ve got some lovely changes for you.
Set dressing is continuing at an amazing pace - servants quarter, the garrison, the cliffside smugglers route and cave tunnel have all had blockouts removed, assets added and foliage/grass painted to really push that environmental storytelling. A couple more update cycles and the whole of the island will have had his first pass of prop dusting.
Accessibility is always on our minds and so the last couple of weeks we’ve made some decisions based on industry best practices regarding style and size, such as adding a background to subtitles. All of this can be changed via the modding until we decide on some presets that we will ship with. We’ve also added the ability to add captions to audio clips. We have already updated the music clips with text to be displayed, but any audio clip now has a caption field that can be shown. Barks have a separate location below the main subtitles so as not to break/distract too much from the dialogue lines when reading. Again, style and size of both barks and captions can be changed via modding.
NPCs may still look like mannequins (not for much longer, the rigging and anims are still being worked on) but inside they have been given whole new brains! Because of this, the start of something beautiful is happening such as the ability to react to being hit. NPCs are probably one of the hardest things to get right, seeing as they interact with every system in the game and there are expectations as to what should happen in any given situation. It turns into a spider’s web of decision making very quickly and so iteration is key for us to get the balance between realism and what works. What happens if you punch them while they are talking? What happens if you kill them? What happens if you are walking away from a conversation? Those questions are just a few of many that we hope to get ‘good enough’ over the next few updates. For now though, bare with us and enjoy the ragdolls!
Here is a copy of the changelog for some of the finer details of what is new and changed in Elegos.
Improvements
Modding
- Language modding has been expanded to support subtitles. - Styles modding has been expanded to support subtitles. - Wiki updated with information on the above.
Audio
- Footsteps detection has been expanded to support more objects. For example, the wood on the piers and bridges now play correct sounds. - Caption text can now be added to audio clips. - Tweaked sounds for combat related clip.
World
- Set dressing and asset placement first pass completed in the servants quarter, garrison, smugglers route and cave tunnel. - Terrain grass/foliage/textures tweaked around these areas. - Updated navmesh obstacles for more accurate navmesh generation.
NPCs
- New AI states added so they can have conversations\chatter again. - NPCs react to being hit and health is removed. - NPCs ragdoll when dead.
Accessibility
- Subtitles/Captions/Barks style and size by default matches industry best practices. - Captions now displayed when found on an audio clip.
UI
- Input prompts now working correctly again.
Bugfixes
- https://trello.com/c/r6wcQxMm/356-v060-floating-crates-on-the-pier - Animation speeds for first-person arms now corrected - Some broken decals on the pier have been fixed
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.7: Grass and Foliage
Greetings Elegosians
Ooooooh things are looking even prettier on the island. One of the main visual changes has been our first past on terrain grass and foliage across the whole island. Grass, wildflowers, bushes, cliffside vegetation, there is a little bit of something nearly everywhere now. Super optimised shaders have allowed us to be pretty free spirited with it and as time goes on we can adjust density to make sure these things stay unobtrusive.
We have continued our set dressing of the main areas, this time the rooftops in the village look alot more lived in as well as scaffolding around the crumbling houses.
So here is the full list of what’s new and changed in Elegos.
Improvements
Modding
Language modding has been expanded to a more well formed object that supports UI strings (as before), more metadata and dialogue in the future
Wiki updated with a more organised materials page, more images and new languages object
Added some more logging lines for when JSON can’t be correctly deserialized
Audio
Updated the audio mixer to have a less jarring duck of the non-environmental sounds when dialogue plays
Added new creak sounds to Wooden Bridges
World
Added Danger Sign prop near Garden cliff edge
Moved statue pieces around on boat to allow for better player freedom of movement
Realigned top of pier steps to fit new terrain better
Crouching section added back in situ to Smuggler's Route Overhang
Various assets missing colliders have now been updated.
New bush variations added and scattered
Main Village Rooftops set dressing
Dilapidated houses set dressing
Terrain details and cliff foliage first pass
Visual
Terrain painted around Smuggler's Route Overhang and Tunnel to help blend better.
Smuggler's Route Tunnel repainted with new Vertex Blend Shader
Optimizations
Generated LODs and replaced old floor pieces on Smuggler's Route Overhang section
Generated LODs and created new colliders for Wooden Rope Bridge assets
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.6 - Optimisation
Greetings Elegosians
It's been a busy few weeks as usual but I wanted to let everyone know about why we decided to push our 0.6 update by an extra week.
The last couple of updates have been pretty focused on optimisation now that we have some internal guidelines and budgets on what we can (and can't) achieve. Days of R&D and A/B testing have been completed in order to get these metrics and this update has needed nearly every asset in the project to be updated/tweaked in order to hit the guidelines. Suffice to say the backlog was pretty beastly and so would have been silly to push an update when we had plenty of triangles left to cull.
It's far from perfect - optimisation is always about completing passes as certain milestones are hit. As much as we like to automate everything we can, the human touch is needed on plenty of assets. As we are continually set dressing and signing off areas of the island we will constantly be tweaking texture resolutions, polygon counts, LOD distances, colliders, gaps, culling techniques etc.
Our goal for each update is to have a mix of new things to see and do as well as fix bugs and optimise existing assets and code. We can also unveil our new opening sequence in which we can finally move around the boat while it is heading towards the harbour. This has been our intention for over 2 years now and it was a joyous occasion finally cracking the well-known problem of being able to move around on moving platforms.
Without further ado, here is our changelog for 0.6:
Patch Notes
CINEMATICS
The Player can finally move freely around the boat while the opening sequence is happening.
INPUT
Skip cutscene is now F key
OPTIMISATIONS
Textures base size reduced globally, this is a work-in-progress blanket sweep and textures will be increased with each set dressing pass where appropriate.
Meshes optimised across Phacos, especially in props, making sure the triangle counts are appropriate for screen size.
LODGroups added on objects throughout Phacos. Some of these are automatically generated and others are manually created. LOD distances will be tweaked as lines-of-sight and set dressing are signed off.
Many bought assets have been reimported using lower and more sensible LODs and matching texture sets applied to materials.
Ocean shader optimisations to reduce triangles, and to push LOD distances
Lots of hierarchy and editor tool cleanup to help with in-editor development.
NavMesh is now baked at runtime rather than at build time.
CullingGroupAPI has been used to help distance and frustrum culling of combined meshes. Essentially a runtime optimisation pass for when objects have been modded/moved.
WORLD
Lower Temple Island bridge blockout replaced with Rope Bridge assets
Replaced Cinematic rocks with new secondary terrain
Replaced horizon geometry with new a new low detail, huge terrain terrain
Fixed an issue with the Smuggler's Route Tunnel where the local HDRP volume was not assigned the correct light layers for reflections and indirect lighting. Soon to be replaced with the same shader as the Temple Island interior.
Various assets missing colliders have now been updated.
UI
Removed forced capitals in text objects. Capitals can still and will be used, but it isn’t a force design decision now.
Fixed bug where audio volumes couldn’t be changed.
A lot of internal components have been reworked to expand modding capability and iteration time. Things shouldn’t be any different visually when using default styles and languages.
Implementation changes with some of the more device independent settings like resolution switching, hopefully should be more stable.
MODDING
Language modding has been expanded with more strings that can be modified.
Styles modding has been expanded with more UI elements that can be modified.
Modding.wiki updated for both of these areas with example files and list of all keys that can be changed, as well as screenshots for what keys are represented where.
Known Issues
Settings
Currently, there is no official controller support built into Elegos. If you do wish to use a controller, consider following this guide as a temporary workaround until we implement official support - [How to set up a controller for any PC game].
Art
Water rises through the ground in some incomplete areas
The entrance to the palace has some graphical issues
Gameplay
Ladders can sometimes knock/bounce the player off them
Player speed can sometimes be inconsistent
Players can sometimes trigger sprint animation on ladders
Some NPCs can walk through structures
NPCs can sometimes be tilted
NPC movement is still in development
Stealth systems are still in development
Narrative interactions are still in development with placeholder storyboards being implemented
Pause (when menu is opened with ESC) no longer works as expected during the opening cinematic.
General
Combat is in early stages, as such players cannot kill or be killed
Most NPCs are placeholder dummies
Audio is not fully implemented
Art is not final
Performance
Occlusion culling is currently implemented in a very basic form. We have plans to improve this and move the processing to the GPU to improve general performance
A number of our assets utilise LOD meshes, but there are many more we plan to implement
Many colliders are placeholders and may cause some issues
Further tweaks to a number of our graphical features will take place based on feedback we receive about visual glitches and performance on different hardware. This includes systems like reflections, post-processing effects, shadow fidelity, etc.
We are constantly looking to improve our lighting setup whilst also improving performance related to it
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Update 0.5.0
Greetings Elegosians,
Welcome to the next update being released to our Closed Alpha branch.
As always, we are so appreciative of our growing community who continue to provide useful feedback and suggestions as we continue to evolve the alpha build.
We have been hard at work updating our Terrain system for this update and many changes will reflect that. Gone are the cliffs of old as we usher in a new era of Mediterranean flavour to our scene. We have resculpted large parts of the terrain and appreciate there may be some new collider based issues as a result, please let us know if you find any of those pesky holes...
Some of the usual ongoing bug fixes/collider issues have been fixed up and the global cloudy lighting and fog has been tweaked for atmosphere.
Thanks, as always, for your continued support. A big shoutout to a few of the key Discord folk that have been spending their time helping us decide on what to focus on and finding things for us to fix. Jiub, Mellin, Ellie etc. I'm looking at you!
Now we are heading back around to optimisation for 0.6 and sorting out all these crazy triangles that are getting thrown around everywhere.
Here is the rest of what is new:
Improvements
World
Pier set dressing
Main Street set dressing
Garden Party area floor added
Some base groundwork in Garden
Smuggler's Route has been resculpted and trims added
Terrain has been replaced with new system and resculpted and repainted
Terrain sculpted around Temple Island and trims added to holes
Kill planes have been tweaked to fit new Environment pass
Blockout added back to Smuggler's Tunnel
Visual
Terrain textures and blend shader materials aligned and re-applied in most areas used
Cliff meshes removed
Reflection probes added to Village Stairs area
Depth cache added to Ocean for surface foam
Added distant Terrain for skybox/backdrop
Bugfixes
Fixed various collider issues on entrance Boat
Collision pass relating to new terrain / environment changes
Known Issues
Settings
Currently, there is no official controller support built into Elegos.
If you do wish to use a controller consider applying the following config as a temporary workaround until we implement official support – learn more here.
Art
Water rises through the ground in some incomplete areas
The entrance to the palace has some graphical issues
Gameplay
Ladders can sometimes knock/bounce the player off them
Player speed can sometimes be inconsistent
Players can sometimes trigger sprint animation on ladders
Some NPCs can walk through structures
NPCs can sometimes be tilted
NPC movement is still in development
Stealth systems are still in development
Narrative interactions are still in development with placeholder storyboards being implemented
General
Combat is in early stages, as such players cannot kill or be killed
Most NPCs are placeholder dummies
Audio is not fully implemented
Art is not final
Performance
Occlusion culling is currently implemented in a very basic form. We have plans to improve this and move the processing to the GPU to improve general performance
A number of our assets utilise LOD meshes, but there are many more we plan to implement
Many colliders are placeholders and may cause some issues
Further tweaks to a number of our graphical features will take place based on feedback we receive about visual glitches and performance on different hardware. This includes systems like reflections, post-processing effects, shadow fidelity, etc.
We are constantly looking to improve our lighting setup whilst also improving performance related to it
We hope you enjoy all of the fixes and improvements listed above.
As always, please report any persisting or new issues through the in-game feedback tool (press F1) or join us in our Discord server and talk to us directly!
Welcome to Elegos ⚔️
Hello Elegosians,
We’re Perpetual Games, a new UK based studio made up of a team of developers, designers, artists and more working to develop our first title: Elegos, an open-world RPG with modding at its front and centre!
Work has been going on behind the scenes for a very long-time now so it's safe to say we're incredibly excited to start showing off the game. Especially as many of us have a personal connection to games like this, having backgrounds working within the modding community.
We're so excited to finally reveal Elegos on Steam and to start building a community of RPG fans and modders alike, since every aspect of the game has been designed with you, the player, in mind.
Elegos is an immersive first-person RPG, being built in partnership with Nexus Mods. Set in an alternate history at the time of Alexander the Great, the world of Elegos is largely populated by intelligent mythological creatures, known as Mytha.
Tasked with uncovering the mystery of your past while surviving to see the future, how your story entangles with Mytha and Man is up to you.
A few select players have been invited to the shores of Phacos to take part in our Closed Alpha, which is happening right now! It's nerve-wracking to be showing the game off to players for the first time, but we can't wait for people to start exploring this world (and feedback is always welcome)!
Whether or not you were one of the lucky few, we’re excited to see what you think of Elegos and what ideas you’ll bring to the game when we’re ready to launch!
Keep your eye out for future playtests too, as we're already excited to implement your feedback, improve the game, and get new players in to give it a go, and be sure to give us a wishlist!
With that out the way, you can head into Elegos and begin your journey. Perpetual Games ⚔️
_ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElegosGame Discord: https://discord.gg/CepTaXdDCC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elegosgame/ DevLog: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/elegosgame If you enjoyed this early look at the game, be sure to wishlist Elegos on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1882300/Elegos/
