Welcome to the world of
Everlast
Hello Traveler!
Hello Everyone! Welcome to the world of Everlast, a new single player or online co-op adventure with intelligent, skill based combat, and an array of skills to evolve and use to leave a meaningful and lasting impact on the gameworld. This is our first Devlog to begin recording our development process and progress for you to follow. We hope you’ll join us on this journey into a world where the line between life and death has become the tangled knot of a noose. A noose which holds hostage that most precious trait of the indomitable human spirit, Hope; in… Everlast!
Level Design:
We felt like our Graveyard area was looking a little bit sparse, so we wanted to spruce up and “flesh” out the zone. So we’ve been working to hammer out some details on the area, stocking it more thoroughly and giving it more detail for these neat looking vistas. We added more rocks to the graveyard, reworked the crypt flower fields, and more.
Level Design Cont:
We also made a great deal of progress on the larger Kirrin Moorne region. We wanted to really give the world a sense of logic to its design, so we spent a lot of time plotting out major terrain features like rivers, creeks, and the erosion effects they would have on the adjoining hills. Beyond that, we mainly worked on blocking out the eastern Kirrin Moorne forest area, and creating rough mockups of some major points of interest like the Mansion and Abyss to see how they fit into the distance, and made the paths connecting them.
Environmental Art Design:
We have been working on a few shrines related to one of our magic systems recently. We Made huge progress in creating one of these shrine types, “Devil Shrines”, all the way from building up the high and low poly models, to full texturing of the main structure and supporting structures, and creating LOD’s for distance viewing.
Environmental Art Design Cont:
We’ve also made big strides in expanding on and growing out our foliage to look more natural, and stylized. We dug more into Speedtree and the decal and mesh node to get better results for moss, vines, and crawling roots. We also merged the canopy textures from some of our newer and older art to bring them all more in line with our current art direction. Finally, we wanted to make distant foliage to look more subtle and painterly, and so we made some new developments with our mipmaps for terain flowers, trees, bushes, and interactable trees.
Character Art Design:
These last 2 weeks we’ve continued expanding our arsenal. We blocked out the iron and steel kiteshields, and made the highpolys for the steel mace, and iron and steel square shields
Rigging and Animation:
We’ve been working on this creepy guy for a while and we put a lot of time into developing more of his animations. We created transitions to and from his idle and walking animations, as well as fleshing out some of his other animations like some of his attacks or stances.
Writing and Game design:
Prepared various documents to guide future direction including quest documents, and various systems documents.
We also went to great lengths to finish hammering out the details of preliminary combat functions and abilities, and begin testing for how the mechanics feel in play, and how well they function.
Backend Work:
For all the people who like the more technical stuff, we’ve been doing a ton of backend work to work through changes we’ve been making to the system. We’ve improved navigation by delving into ECS and have created idle/wandering systems, as well as position data sending to other entities. Through this we have removed and replaced our old pathing code and made significant strides in our navigation system. We also propared the game server for the new physics server.
Speaking of, we completed working on the new physics server!
We also have some new backend updates on player gameplay! We’ve now implemented Stamina use in more areas, such as “channeled” magic attacks, and for sprinting. And speaking of magic, we’ve also now added one of the last long-lasting ability types, the “continuous” or flamethrower type ability. We also made an array of fixes to small visual variants. Finally, we made an array of other major backend changes. We began the reimplementation of Signals to match our new library structure. We made great strides in increasing efficiency and usability of MemoryPack over multiple .NET versions. We worked with source generators to try to maximize performance gains. Finetuned our network performance. We introduced a time manager for more precise high-resolution timing. And refined our architecture by cleaning up dependencies and improving session management.
Thank you!
Well, that seems to be enough for now. Quite a bit to report, and it’ll only keep growing. We hope all of you who made it this far enjoyed seeing some of our work, and will continue to follow us as we ever grow and improve.