Welcome Back to the
world of Everlast
Welcome back traveler
Hello Everyone, thank you for checking out our devlogs. And if you’re a returning reader, welcome back! These past 2 weeks we’ve been trying to put wraps on some of our content for our graveyard area and continue developing the scenic vistas of the Kirrin Moorne. We also made some big new developments with our new pathing and navigation system that we introduced in the last dev log.
Level Design:
We are still working on the Kirrin Moorne region, though we've shifted more from the graveyard into the other nearby areas. Particularly we laid out and began detailing a quarry and a quaint little forest outpost we felt would fit in well here, looking over the surrounding landscape. We also did a ton of detailing on the river banks so now they flow really smoothly into the surrounding environment.
Environmental Art:
We wanted to make some more varieties of cliffs and rocks to keep things interesting and make the landscape more interesting to look at, so we scuplted, textured, touched up, made the LOD's, and made the collision for them. We also sculpted a few spiked rock variations and made the final versions for our favorite of the bunch.
Environmental Art Cont:
If you checked out the last devlog, you might remember all the work we did on foliage, working on texture and shape of it. Well we did even more of that this time. We updated some old foliage like dry yellow reeds, and made more strides on our trees, including building out a big visual centerpiece for the region, a giant tree, including working in SpeedTree like last time to grow out some more natural shapes for its sprawl.
Character Art Design:
We’re still working on expanding your future arsenal with new assets. This time we created the low poly’s for the steel sword and greatsword and the first 3 tiers of spears, and made the high poly’s for the spears and the iron axe. we’ve tested out materials for the finished look on the spears.
Rigging and animation:
We finally finished all the combat animations for this big spooky dude! We added some status animations like standing after being knocked prone, finished his attack animations, and added his death animations.
Writing and Game Design:
These 2 weeks have been big on implementation. Implementing and testing the more in-depth combat mechanics now that much of our groundwork has been laid, and doing some interactive reworks in our crafting system.
We’ve also begun working on and preparing some press and marketing materials, including some new screenshots, and we’ve included some sneak peaks at some of it below. On top of that, we have begun preparing to open and begin engaging on some socials! We’re finally going to be entering the social media space where we can show off more of our work, and where you all can interact with us more directly. More details to follow soon!
Backend work:
These 2 weeks much of our backend work was focused on combat. We worked with some of our new pathing ai to work on enemy combat movement ai. For now we have them running in circles mainly, but we’ve laid the groundwork for some much more complex and interesting movement that we think will make combat much more engaging. We also overhauled and updated how we handle statuses, particularly tick-based actions like DOT’s (Damage Over Time), and removed our old and outdated system for doing that. And that’s not all the combat updates we had, we also worked on implementation for our auto-target system and added some UI elements to make it more clear.
We did run into a few issues, including doing a ton of bug fixes, but we also ran into some issues when trying to enhance the performance of terrain blending materials. We tried doing it by rendering with a post process shader, but that ended up causing some problems so we had to revert for now, but we’re still investigating how we can up the performance on that end. We also made further updates to our library as per our work in the last devlog, and some other server work to get ready to integrate some of this with the game server.
THank You!
That should be just about enough to wrap up these 2 weeks. We appreciate all of you who have read this far and sincerely hope you’ll continue following our process and this project through release. Please keep an eye out for anouncements about our socials in the next few weeks, then you’ll be able to give us feedback more directly and quickly. Thank you for checking out this devlog!