Hello fellow gamers! It's been a while. As we said in last DevLog post, we've been working on rework of some critical game engine features, which we (almost) completed in the latest development build.
Deferred Rendering
One of the things our game engine was lacking up until now is modern rendering technique - Deferred Rendering. Most modern game engines use some form of it to bring players the image they see on their screens. You can learn a bit about differences between traditional Forward Rendering technology and Deferred Rendering in this article.
Using newer rendering technology lets us now have things which we couldn't have before, like dynamic lighting from multiple light sources and particle effects, which will bring a lot more life in the game without concerns for performance.
And performance is our big concern! There are a few things let to tune, optimize and test on different hardware, but Deferred Rendering gave us a boost in rendering performance from 10% to 90% depending on user's hardware and graphics quality settings.
UDP Networking
Again, if you want to dig dipper in the tech stuff of it, you can start with this article describing the difference between the old networking we used and the new one.
In the start of the project our goal was to quickly achieve working results and it was much easier to use reliable and robust TCP for our networking than bother with handling lost packets ourselves. Unfortunately, it's not a good long-term solution for a lot of games, including ours, since it needs to be as real-time as possible without any spikes in delay between client and server.
Which is why we completely rewritten our networking library from the ground up now using UDP instead of TCP. Preliminary test show increase in stability and network delay, but some bugs still need to be worked out.
Few other things
We are also work on Alpha world level design. In the build we added a lot of new tools for terrain design which allowed us to create cool caves.
A big progress have been made in developing the new Tentacle Biome, current results you can see here.
Work In Progress
Since we didn't have much changes this time, we decided to share with you some things we are working on now.
Character GUI
One of the most important pieces of game interface is a Character Screen which displays your equipment, calling, abilities and many other info. It's on its way to the game, but you can get an early look at the design now.
Plum Octopus
New mob in the making is Plum Octopus. For now we can show you only concepts of it, but expect it to be in production very soon :)
Rabbits Race
Rabbits is a race of enemies that will oppose players in achieving their goals. They have warriors and mages and they're relatively smart. A statue of a Rabbit Warrior was in game for some time now, you might have seen it on one of the videos or screenshots.
New traps and Tentacle
Dynamic and egaging game world is one of our main goals in developing of Elteria Adventures. We are currently working on adding more interractive traps in the game, concepts of which you can see below.
On top of it is a Tentacle, which is technically a mob, albeit pretty stationarry one.
Next is a spring that will launch player that step on it directly upwards with some bit of air control - it can be a way to reach higher places or to recieve signifficant damage from a falling.
The last one is a sort of a tunnel that drags nearby players inside and unless they're carefult, transports them on the other side, which can be any place including a death trap ;) Watch your step...
New Gems
Gems are an important part of the exploration gameplay in Elteria Adventures and we want to make them less generic and more fun. New gems are in the process of modeling now, but you can check their concepts now. From left to right: Dark Gem, Lava Gem, Wonder Gem and Nature Gem.
See you next time!
Please leave your questions and thoughts in the comments bellow or in one of our social networks:
Hey everyone! We want to share current progress on the game by talking about changes we made in the latest major dev build.
New GUI
In previous major build we reworked skills panel. In this one we added the resources panel to display all your current resources, highlight resources you just collected and show you which ones will be consumed by actions such as building. Also, the new chat, which is an important part of any MMO game :) Few others small things have been added to the GUI, they will be highlighted in other changes below.
Gather / Mine mode
We reworked how Tool Glove works. Now it switches mode to Mining / Gathering with small GUI change and it lets you mine stuff with left click and gather resources with right click. It's possible to break world, trees, ores, gems and other stuff with many skills, but if you use anything except Gather ability, you will get less resources.
Building with blueprints
Though still work in progress, we added the main way players will build in open world and during the battle — blueprints. You will be able to find them during exploration from chests or as loot from monsters or create them yourself. They not serve only decorative or structural purpose, some will be useful in battle by providing auras to allies or even attacking enemies.
As you can see, you need resources to build each blueprint depending on materials used and the blueprint itself.
Bees!
In previous dev build we added Beelmo — a new Lemon Bee monster. Now we added it's ability: when it stings you it starts running away and if you can't kill it in a few seconds, you yourself will become a Lemon Bee! While you are in the bee form, you can't your abilities and more vulnerable, but you can jump higher and perform double jumps to reach places you couldn't before!
With this we introduced the polymorph mechanics in our ability engine that will help us make a few more interesting abilities and cool game mechanics '^__^'
As you can see on the screenshots above, we moved the camera above character's shoulder from above it's head and adjusted field of view and camera distance. It should provide better gaming experience. All abilities have been adjusted for the new camera position.
Graphics and animations update
You can see it in the video here, we updated a few important textures in game, like grass and gems and added Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. New textures give the game a more consistent look. Check this tweet about restyling to see how it was before and how we are working on game style.
We updated a few animations to add some character to them so they don't look plain as they used to :) It's still work in progress until it will be consistent throughout the game.
New sky
It's... not boring any more :)
Many more!
It was only things that are easily shareable in form of a few screenshots, but a lot of work we do can't be easily seen. Still, we want to share it with you to give a glimpse on the development process:
Animation Engine rework. We use our own animation graph system, because the engine we use didn't have one when we started. Because of that we had problems with stuck or not working animations from time to time. No more of that since we reworked a few core things in it :)
Fixed air control, it now works like in most action and action-adventure games.
Updated sound engine to support more easy integration of sounds in game and fixed some sounds.
New artefacts and resources that have no use for now. We will talk about them later ;)
A lot of bugfixes!
Hope you stick with us to see more! '^__^' Next update will be a bit boring compared to this one because we are working on some things in the game engine that are required to ship the game to an alpha stage and continue it's development. We will see you with new DevLog when it's done!
Please leave your comments and ask questions, we will be in comments ;)
Elteria Adventures Steam page
Today we are launching our Steam Community page! Join us in discussion here and on other social networks:
