This update is for the demo only, an update to the playtest will out be relatively soon while will expand and complete 'the Frozen Fort' and add onto the HUB.
Some of the additional pieces have been taking longer than I thought they would, but I can definitely show off one of the things:
Anyways, onto demo updates!
Additions: - Added the character editor and save system - Added 'spawners' in the prologue, but only in a few sections
Fixes: - Fixed an issue where your weapon may not equip correct after loading your save - Fixed an animation issue where your character wouldn't look down correctly when holding a 2-handed weapon (So now you can see your shoes) - Fixed some texture issues where some settings were applied to the wrong material - Fixed the damage numbers in the inventory - Leveling attributes is now easier and works more consistently - Stone magic projectiles have been optimized to fix some weird edge case issues - Ice magic projectiles have been optimized to better follow your aim trajectory - Using plant magic's thornwire will now only connect to a single other plant, as previously you could exponentially make new plants and crash the game - Thornwire no longer hurts the player - Wood magic (Thorns) no longer hurts the player and you can stand on it - Fixed several of the Otter's animations - Certain clothing will no longer disappear when sneaking - Fixed the 'left run' animation as it made the camera bounce a lot - Added blocks in certain sections as the player could accidentally get themselves stuck - It is now more difficult to regenerated stamina while swinging with the grapplehook, making extending grappling a bit more difficult - Fixed some issues with various cliff collision - Unarmed punching should now have arm's length of range and do basic damage - The player in the Character editor can now be properly rotated with the gamepad - The escape menu now works much better with the gamepad - Fixed an issue where you might end up with the wrong face after exiting the editor
Changes: - Removed cel-shading from NPCs as it caused unexpected performance issues - As requested, the lamp flicker is now much smoother - Disabled some VFX temporarily until we figure out some performance quirks we've ran into with them - You can now attack/magic with only 1% stamina (previously it required a minimum amount) - Updated wall candles - Gave the editor example character all the same clothes regardless of race as it was previously confusing to see it changed when you finished customizing the character (Except for otters, for obvious reasons)
Beta Hotfix #1
Didn't realize the feedback button was broken, sorry everyone.
- Feedback button is now fixed - Human swim animation is now centered so it shouldn't clip through walls anymore - Attack wind-up timing has been adjusted, making most attacks faster overall (especially hand to hand) - Fixed attack recoil when you hit a solid object, as it wasn't playing for many weapon types
Patch notes
- Fixed an issue where clients could lose the keys to open doors - Fixed an issue where you could not examine Johnson under certain circumstances - Reduced light 'flicker' as requested - Fixed some dialogue issues - Fixed some interactables - Fixed an issue where magic would duplicate - Fixed an issue where clients would 'jitter' a lot - Fixed some issues with the possessed armors
Temporary removals: - Temporarily removed the ability to kick until its physics issues are sorted (And because everyone keeps kicking the NPCs into the ocean) - Temporarily removed some of the magic elements to be fixed for both balancing and replication issues
Beta is going live!
The playtest beta will be live here in a little while.
I ran into a lot of various networking issues and unusual bugs, I have been chipping away at these but was not able to finish some of the other content in time. That being said, we're going to open up the beta with the character editor, prologue, the hub, and part of 'the frozen fort'.
There are also two versus maps with a 'king of the hill' style game mode.
I will be adding the other content through the duration of this playtest beta.
Zofia Beta Announcement
I am aiming to have Zofia's open beta within the next few weeks at the end of May - It will be open sign-ups and be done via Steam's playtest tool. It shouldn't look much more different than downloading the demo.
The beta will include the character editor, a handful of story levels and some of the challenge maps. (Maybe more if I can get it done in time)
Based and the demo's feedback (and some internal testers), there are a couple of changes and additions that will be happening:
- Some of the magic elements you can use were either wildly useful or very situational, so many of these are being reworked to either be more useful, or allow some alternative interactions.
For example, you can now smack the rock columns to hurl a large boulder towards enemies:
- The 'possess' spell and 'swap' spell will likely be coming back but only in certain situations. (To hopefully make them less game breaking)
- Some physics objects can now be picked up and dragged with the grapplehook.
- There will be a few more level changes made to the prologue, as well as some performance tweaks.
I will put out more details as we get closer to the release date.
Zofia Beta
I am aiming to have Zofia's open beta within the next few weeks at the end of May - It will be open sign-ups and be done via Steam's playtest tool. It shouldn't look much more different than downloading the demo.
The beta will include the character editor, a handful of story levels and some of the challenge maps. (Maybe more if I can get it done in time)
Based and the demo's feedback (and some internal testers), there are a couple of changes and additions that will be happening:
- Some of the magic elements you can use were either wildly useful or very situational, so many of these are being reworked to either be more useful, or allow some alternative interactions.
For example, you can now smack the rock columns to hurl a large boulder towards enemies:
- The 'possess' spell and 'swap' spell will likely be coming back but only in certain situations. (To hopefully make them less game breaking)
- Some physics objects can now be picked up and dragged with the grapplehook.
- There will be a few more level changes made to the prologue, as well as some performance tweaks.
I will put out more details as we get closer to the release date.
Upcoming Updates - April
Normally I try to be formal with these posts but today I am vibing with just talking about everything:
There have been literally thousands of things I have been updating (Specifically 4669 changes), all of which can't really be shown off and were extremely tedious to update... Well I am going to show them anyways:
Zofia started years ago, but whenever I built the initial character rig (which all characters are based on), I made some pretty ugly mistakes that no artist would make. Over the years, this has caused a number of unusual issues to crop up, where some animations would look 'off' and some funky character issues.
Well I have finally taken a lot of steps to correct that, but its led to some significant challenges. Every animation and character model in the game has to be altered/updated, which has been a lot of work. Any character art that hasn't been updated looks pretty broken:
"Do you want to talk about it?"
Unfortunately some of the original files for the older art have been lost, so some of this is essentially getting remade, which has been a slow process.
If you played the Demo, you'll be happy to know this area will be getting some updates:
There were some minor differences in an older version of the map, we previously wanted players to get more comfortable with magic before entering the fort. Well, after some big gameplay and map changes, the player was basically left with not much to do in this section except murder that deer.
The new plan is to introduce the grapplehook sooner so the player can get more comfortable with that.
Speaking of the demo...
I have watched a lot of people play the demo at this point, and (nearly) everyone struggles with these guys (at least, until they get the hang of combat). They are going to undergo some changes so the first melee combat enemies you run into aren't as punishing.
The magic-throwing hoodie ghosts will have significantly less tracking on their projectiles, as it seems a lot of player deaths were from getting hit in the back... Which isn't fun for anyone.
Some other rapid fire updates on the demo:
- Lantern is getting corrected so it works better - Reducing the demo's build size - Optimized the bulk of textures and materials - Adjustments being made to stealth parameters - Dialogue UI being adjusted as it tends to look wonk in certain resolutions or splitscreen - Some dialogue getting changed - Ghost models getting updated - Some NPC models will be getting updated, thanks to their rig being corrected now - Engine has been updated to 4.27.2
Zofia - Demo
I am aiming to have a demo of Zofia out sometime this week. Currently, Zofia as a project is on hold, but it isn't fair to the others or myself to just never release anything from it.
That being said, while I have made some adjustments based on feedback from the internal beta, some features or options are going to be limited as they've proven to be problematic.
The demo is 64-bit Windows only, and will only feature single player/local co-op - It will feature just the prologue and will not have the character editor at this time.
I will still be collecting feedback and will try to fix issues as they come up.
Thank you everyone, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
An unfortunate setback
Due to unfortunate timing and personal reasons, Zofia has temporarily been placed on hold.
The art upgrade to the 'new style' has been much more time consuming and costly. The artists have left the project, which has made finishing the project while maintaining the art standard difficult. The scope of the project is big enough that the art will likely not be able to continue in this style - Though I am unsure of what the changes, if any, will be.
The other primary reason is personal - I don't feel the game plays as its supposed to. We made some significant changes to accommodate the art style and try out suggested ideas from feedback, some of these changes have led to more design problems and gameplay impact than we could have realized.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, hopefully the next update will be more positive.
Dev Talk #1
This dev talk is going to go over some nitty gritty details about game development and some of the issues we've ran into during 2020. This will be greatly summarized.
The Cost of Art
It's an absolute surprise to no one that better art takes more time. What we didn't realize when we first started making the art transition is that it bleeds into absolutely everything.
The 'old' art style
I'm not an artist so choosing the project's art style wasn't really a choice, it was what I had a skillset in. The distinctive advantage to the old art style though was speed. I'll give you some metrics though: At its height I could whip up a new armor set in about 1-3 days. New assets like boxes or tables could be anywhere from 3 minutes to 3 hours each.
At the time, I didn't really consider how much of an advantage this was. As I am also doing the implementation for enemies, I could go from a concept -> model -> animating -> implemented in 4-7 days. A fresh new enemy a week is not bad all things considering.
The 'new' art style
The new art style was a choice, though one with some unforeseen consequences.
Zofia's design called for six unique areas - The goal being that most had some environmental obstacle that the player(s) would have to overcome. The easiest example being a cold, snowy mountain fort that you would ideally want to wear a cozy jacket in.
From a design perspective, this is a lot harder because now you have six areas you have to consider and design. What works in the snowy mountain fort probably won't fit in that tropical sea-side town.
This gets doubled-down when you realize each NPC and enemy also (likely) needs to be thematically correct, so everything requires a lot more legwork. Overall this made the process of creating a new enemy from about a week to about 3-5 weeks.
In the original scope of the game, estimating for every asset, and given our team size, this likely set the game back about ~2-2.5 years of development time.
In retrospect - Art styles are actually quite a lot of work, and creating and refining one is some serious effort. I don't believe anyone on the team quite anticipated how much the impact of the art change would be.
Looking to the future - I don't actually have a confident answer on this one. We're trying to find a better way to speed up the art process without compromising the game's design, but there may not be a good answer, at least none that we've found yet.
The Cost of Features
In hindsight, this seems a little obvious, but there is a distinctive lack of first-person melee games out there, and splitscreen as a feature is typically uncommon.
I have a remarkable amount of design decisions being made entirely because of first-person and splitscreen. A big one is text. I mean any work on the UI takes a bit of wizardry to make, but getting the scale to something legible in splitscreen is a challenge on its own.
Definitely not showing in-game books
The issues we've seen with first person melee combat is largely a lack of situational awareness. It's a player skill to manage handling multiple close-range enemies at a time, but this is amplified with the very basic premise that blocking or parrying requires you to look (generally) at your target, and therefore unable to assess the situation.
This becomes worse on splitscreen where your screen space and field of view is limited.
The other issue of course is that it can be difficult to determine how far away something is, which can result in sword strikes narrowly missing and causing a lot of frustration.
In retrospect - As they say, these are challenges that come with the territory, though admittedly I didn't grasp that very well until later on.
Looking to the future - These are solvable issues but they can be challenging issues, but I don't believe our melee combat has quite hit its stride.
Some other thoughts
These are smaller topics that don't quite have enough to talk about to warrant a bigger space.
There just isn't a good place to put the drivable airship in at right now as it causes a lot of gameplay issues, but I'd eventually like to find a good place for it, if possible.
It's really difficult to get swimming right and bug free. I think if I had to do this over again, I would probably not include swimming at all, or greatly reduce its complexity.
There was a bug where wearing a set of cursed armor would make your health bar invisible, and honestly that's such a better curse than what the armor was actually supposed to do.
I should probably do monthly articles like this rather than being silent for months at a time.
That's it, I'm hoping by my next update we'll have some good answers to things.
