Wellspring: Altar of Roots
Inspection Mode
So this probably isn't the most glamorous feature ever, but we've recently fine-tuned our combat "Inspection Mode!" This is essentially a way to 'pause' combat and cycle through all of the combatants to view detailed information such as movement range, the currently-queued up skill and its targets, as well as any active buffs or debuffs.. and probably some other junk too when I get around to adding it.
This mode has existed since the early days of Wellspring, but we noticed that players would sometimes enter this mode and not realize it--this update serves to make it a little more obvious that the player is 'inspecting' the characters and that the normal flow of combat is 'paused.'
Implementation-wise, we threw in another post-processing volume (gotta love these things) as well as the flashing "Inspection Mode" text controlled by a simple Tween. We also 'froze' all of the combatant animations, which was a little trickier than I thought. Enabling/disabling the animator component doesn't quite work, since certain values get reset, so I ended up just setting the animation speed to zero and reverting it afterwards. Not too shabby for an afternoon's worth of work!
Like always, we'd love to hear your thoughts about it and/or ways that we can improve it. Haikus are also welcome.
Teleport Strike
Finished up most of the Teleport Strike skill for our turn-based, tactical RPG Wellspring : Altar of Roots! This is our first 'free-targeted' skill, meaning that you can position it anywhere within its attack range. If there isn't a nearby target, the skill simply moves the user to its targeted destination, but if there is an enemy (or enemies) in range, it will deal damage to the nearest one.
The most challenging parts were setting up the animation/particle effect timing and working out the logic for whether damage is dealt or not--our skill system is pretty robust, so it wasn't too terribly hard to get it up and running.
Pretty satisfied with how it turned out, but there are a few small issues (like the sound effects and particle effects disappearing abruptly) that'll be cleaned up soon enough! We feel that this adds a lot more variety to Bodom's overall strategy and play style--feel free to let us know what you think! :)
Free Targeting
Hi all! Here's a more 'behind the scenes' look at something that I've recently been working on! In Wellspring, up until this point, all skills have required an actual target before they can be selected and queued up. We always wanted to have certain skills allow the player to manually position them and therefore, not require a specific target. Unfortunately, we didn't build out our skill system with this in mind initially, so there was a little bit of uh.. 'messiness' involved with implementing this basic first step.
For Bodom's skill Teleport Strike, we want the player to be able to position it anywhere within a certain radius, and potentially do damage if it's close to an enemy--but it can also be used as an escape route or gap closer. There were a few tricky parts to implementing this: the first issue isn't super difficult, but requires the skill to be confined to the movement radius. The other, more difficult part, is the restriction that you can't teleport on top of something else (this ain't no Philadelphia experiment)
Since the targeting area moves relative to your character and you can still move at the same time as the target area, these two issues combine to cause what I thought would be a nastier problem, where the target area gets 'pushed' by the movement radius and accidentally overlaps with a character or it gets pushed from a character and accidentally ends up outside the movement radius.
The quick and dirty solution, funny enough, is to just treat the skill as if it's an actual character. Since combatants automatically have these restrictions 'built in' (they can't move outside of their movement radius and can't move through other units), we just slap a Character component on the actual skill and give it an alternate method of control, IE, use the arrow keys/D-Pad to move the target area as opposed to WASD/analog stick movement for the actual characters.
There were a few other little issues to sort out, such as UI changes, backend targeting code (prior to this, skills couldn't execute at all without a target) and camera/character control (the target area needs to move relative to the camera, but skills are 'awakened' outside of combat, which uses a different camera), but I'm pretty happy with where it's at. I still haven't implemented the actual skill, but that'll be next on the list!
Chain Effects
Wellspring's gridless combat system introduces the concept of 'chains', which allows allies (and enemies!) to queue up skills to deal extra damage and other effects. We wanted to make the presence of a chain more obvious, while also adding more gratifying visual feedback for the player.
To help draw attention to chains, we've used Unity's Post Processing Stack (v2), and added three effects: vignette, chromatic aberration and color grading/tinting. Thanks to the flexibility of Unity's volume system, we can make the effect stronger overall just by changing a single value, and the more skills that are involved in the chain, the more pronounced the effect is. We also change the damage font as well, just to let the player know how 'large' the chain is.
We're pretty satisfied with the effect, but we're wondering if it's too strong, or maybe not pronounced enough, so naturally, we're looking for feedback! We'll also have the ability to disable the effect altogether if the player flat-out doesn't want it.
Wellspring Pre-Alpha Demo 1.3.2 is LIVE!
Since we've changed our name from Bevontule to Wellspring, if you want to keep your old save files and configuration settings, you'll need to do a few things, as the application data folder has a different name:
- Find the AppData folder for Bevontule--this is usually found at C:\Users\\AppData\LocalLow\Multithreaded Games\
- Run "Wellspring_Demo.exe" and close it before choosing configuration options from the built-in Unity dialog.
- There should be a "Wellspring" directory in the same directory as the previously-mentioned Bevontule folder.
- Open the Bevontule folder and copy all of its contents into the Wellspring folder--make sure to overwrite anything if prompted.
- Run the game as normal!
Here's a full list of all the changes:
Improvements
- Removed references to "Bevontule"--new title is "Wellspring: Altar of Roots"!
- Improved cloth performance by up to 80%
- Increased Bodom's field movement speed by around 10%
- Reduced enemy AI calculation time up to 10x in some cases (most noticeable with the Drone enemy)
- General graphical optimizations
- Optimizations related to character/enemy movement on the field
- Updated some resource/item spawns
- Tweaked a few enemy battle formations so that they were closer to allies
- Rebalanced certain enemy attributes, skills and drop rates
- Reduced 'ghosting' (motion trails) on characters when moving
- Significantly reduced the chances that an enemy might move slightly out of its movement radius in combat
- Removed Kickstarter references and replaced with newsletter signup
Bugfixes
- Fixed issue where Voltaic Whelp could fail to land on the ground
- Fixed rare issue where Voltaic Whelp battle could lock up the game
- Fixed issue where highlighted collectibles could become 'frozen' when entering combat
- Fixed issue where scene fade-ins could trigger twice in a row or not trigger at all
- Fixed audio volume issues
- Fixed excessive sliding for skills that cause targets to be knocked back
- Fixed issue where minimap wouldn't appear after first cutscene if the pause menu was opened
- Fixed issue where minimap could sometimes be opened during cutscenes and battle
- Fixed issue where Klyph would require 20 more iron to see the 'black market' if the player exited the current scene and returned
- Fixed UI issue where right-clicking to cancel, when hovering over a character panel, would fail to work
- Fixed UI issue where EP/AP costs would sometimes disappear in the Skills menu
- Fixed issue where Blightculler could not be used to attack in certain circumstances
- Fixed issue where Bodom's passive skill Risk and Reward was applied to items as well
- Fixed issue where Moroch's passive skill Tourniquet applied to items as well
- Fixed issue where characters could sometimes be revived in battle to full HP instead of just 50
- Fixed issue where revived characters would not be placed on the ground until moving
- Fixed issue where area projection for line-based skills was displayed incorrectly
- Fixed issue where certain characters would orient themselves improperly when using skills
What's in a name?
Bevontule’s a cool word and all, but it has very little recognition, people tend to not remember it and people tend to not be able to pronounce it. So we wanted to pick something that’s more… ‘normal.’ Lately we’ve been focused on the name "Wellspring"— and this has a special significance, as ‘wellsprings’ are the latent energy ‘pools’ found throughout the continent of Onich.
Without further ado—let us know what you think!
- Wellspring : Altar of Roots
- Wellspring Story : Altar of Roots
- Wellspring Saga : Altar of Roots
- Kelvari Chronicles : Altar of Roots
- Keep "Bevontule : Altar of Roots", ya pansy!
- Something different? (please elaborate)
Thanks!
Bevontule Kickstarter Update #13 : Farewell... for now!
Until next time,
Derek
Bevontule Kickstarter Update #9: Bevontule Through the Years!
- Obvious one, but even a pledge increase of a few dollars from every backer would put us way ahead! And you can get some pretty awesome add-ons too!
- The final 48 hour surge is incredibly important! Anyone who's signed up to be reminded of the campaign will get an e-mail and depending on how funded we are at that point, this could literally be the make-or-break moment! We've put together a Thunderclap campaign--consider signing up! It's practically effortless and will help promote the Kickstarter as loudly as possible as we get closer to the finish line!
- We've been fortunate enough to gain some visibility and amazingly positive responses on Youtube, Imgur and Reddit and the more people we can reach, the better! Consider spreading the word to any channels, forums or subreddits that you might be a part of! If you're a streamer, feel free to download our demo and show it off to your followers!
- Like and comment on our Kickstarter page and updates--be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter as well!
We also wanted to give a HUGE shoutout and thanks to everyone that stopped by our Kickstarter Live stream yesterday! We were so incredibly humbled by the amount of feedback, support and positive feedback we received--the stream went on for nearly four hours and had about 40-45 concurrent viewers the entire time. Pretty awesome stuff, everyone! <3
For this update, we wanted to give a glimpse into the journey that we've undertaken as a small, two-man development team. This could be thought of as a "history" of Bevontule, focusing on some of the more important milestones and goals that we've reached throughout our almost 3-year development cycle. You can check it out HERE!
Bevontule Kickstarter Update #8: Progress Update, Livestreams and More!
We also have a few live streams planned in the next few days! The first will be shown on Kickstarter Live on Wednesday, February 21st at 8:00 PM EST! You can check out a preview link here! We'll also be conducting a playthrough of our Kickstarter demo on Twitch on Monday, February 26th, also at 8:00 PM EST! Feel free to follow us on there as well! Hope to see some of you there! :)
For more details, you can read the rest of our update here!
And once again, like always, thanks for your support and feedback!
-Derek
Bevontule Kickstarter Update #6: Curious about our AI system? Look no further!
For this Kickstarter update, we wanted to take a deeper look at our enemy AI system to determine what makes it so ruthlessly intelligent! You can find all the details on our update page here!
I want to also remind our supporters that our Thunderclap campaign is active—consider supporting it so that we can have the strongest possible final stretch of our campaign! We’ve also added a few more entries to the Bevontule challenge drawings! There are only a few days left, so make sure to get in there and whip some whelp!
From all of us here at Multithreaded Games, thanks again for reading and be sure to let us know if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions!