BOO!
Welcome to a spooky edition of our Development Blogs (not really spooky). We hope you are enjoying yourselves and are going to have a safe Halloween, whatever that means during this pandemic. We've been hard at work adding new content and continuing to work towards our large "Genesis" update. Check out all the exciting and (not) spooky work we have done this month.
A Roadmap for the Future
Many of you have been asking, so we've updated our roadmap! This amazing roadmap, made by the talented Nicole Steinbacher and edited by our own Lead Dev Jao, shows our plans for the next round of large updates. We plan to add the dragons and creatures we already have concepts for before starting on the rest. We will keep updating this roadmap in our future dev blogs.
Click the thumbnail below to see the full size of the image.
Enter the Elemental
A monster with the taste for dragon flesh, the first Elemental will be entering the world coming in DoD "Genesis". Players will have the chance to unlock these beasts to terrorize the local environment, consuming everything in their path. Only an alpha dragon has any hope against these monsters.
What do you need to do to unlock these beasts? Well.... we aren't going to tell you. It will be up to the community to find out.
Choose Your Faction
Once you have completed the requirements for unlocking it, you will be able to select the Elemental in the Character Select Screen by changing your Faction. Like the dragon species, your Elemental will be saved until you die, even if you switch to another saved creature. Once you die however, you will need to complete the unlocking requirements anew before you can play the Elemental again. Elementals are not just Alpha-class terrors, they also have their own end-game mechanics as well.
Bringing a Monster to Life
Speaking of Elementals, the Magma rig has been finished and is now being animated by Russel Chou, one of our new animators, who is tasked with bringing this creature to life. Russel is no stranger to animating beasts like this and has done so in many AAA movies.
Test Animations
To make sure the rig works before animations start, we had Karly make test animations. These are basic, unpolished animations to get the overall feel of the model's movement capabilities. Above is a fun little video of the Elemental's test walk animation. The true walk animation will be created by Russ.
By the way, did you enjoy the image at the end of the video? Jao made the pose and it was edited by several of our lovely testers. Here is a free copy of the image you can use as a background or such to show your hype for the upcoming update!
Click the thumbnail below to download the full sized image.
Phase 3: Survival and Nesting
We are late into the third phase of our progress for our "Genesis" update! This phase focuses on everything survival related, a core part of the game.
Survival a New Way
We've done hunger and thirst in a new way. The level of hunger and thirst will be shown in your Character Info panel as a red bar, ranging from 0-100%. As the bar increases, you will become hungrier/thirstier. As you consume water and food, these bars will decrease. You don't want these bars to reach 100%
Unlike other survival games, having 100% hunger or thirst does not slowly drain your health until you die. Instead, it will increase your torpor. If your torpor reaches 100%, your character will be forced to fall asleep and getting up before the torpor is drained will cause damage. You have a choice, get up to find food/water and take damage, or sleep your torpor off while remaining vulnerable to hungry predators.
Eating and Drinking
No more are the days of having difficulty eating due to small hit boxes on the corpses. DoD "Genesis" will include prompts to let you know when you are in the right position to eat or drink.
Characters will be able to drink from any water source on the map, but age also plays a factor. While a tiny puddle won't be worth the effort to an adult dragons, hatchlings may find these sources ideal and mothers may even want to choose their nest site near a puddle instead of a pond or river.
Death and Corpses
Instead of a sudden black screen upon death, players will now see a "death screen", where the camera zooms out and shows your body following to the ground. This will allow players to get an idea of what killed them and be a smoother transition.
Players will be able to carry corpses in the game. Corpses now have "ragdoll" effect, making them limp and interactive with the enviroment. The size of the corpse will dictate how fast the player can move while carrying the corpse, if they can carry it at all.
Corpses will also leave a blood stain where they died. So if you are wandering around and see a red stain on the forest floor, be wary; something was likely recently killed here and the killer may still be nearby.
Swimming
While swimming was already included in the alpha version, we have added some to it in the upcoming "Genesis" update.
Players can now dive underneath the water. This will allow them to hide from potential threats, wait for unsuspecting prey, or claim a corpse at the bottom of the ponds. Just make sure to keep an eye on how long you are submerge. Dragons can't hold their breath forever.
Still To Come..
The final addition in Phase Three with be a core feature in the game; nesting. Genetics and nesting play a huge role in the world of DoD and we are excited to make a unique and engaging system for you all to enjoy.
After nesting is completed, Phase Four will begin. Expect to see news regarding this phase in our upcoming Dev Blogs. Lots of new mechanics will be added and we guarantee Phase Four will leave you soaring ;)
Shadow Scale
OKAY!
We know, we know. We keep saying, "This will be Shadow Scale month." It's been a bumpy road getting here, but the Shadow Scale rig is complete! We've also finished the texturing its skin and are excited to watch it come to life.
First Steps
Karly has already made some AMAZING test animations. Like the elemental, these are not the final animations and are just used to test the rig before we send it to our new animator, Keira Kao who will be animating the Shadow Scale. Test animations or not, we think they still look pretty beawesome!
Thoughts of Testers
You know we think the upcoming "Genesis" update is going to be BEAWESOME, but we thought you might like to hear some other opinions as well.
We've asked our Closed Testers to give us their thoughts on what they think of the progress we've made up to Phase 3. Check out what they say and find out for yourself before the release of "Genesis" by applying to become a Closed Tester by filling out this form!
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Hi, tester here, been playing around for a few weeks in the upcoming Genesis update. So far, the game feels much better, movement glitches out less and I don't get stuck all the time like I used to in the alpha. Picking up corpses and interacting with the world is now much easier (all done with one key!), and seeing Jao push updates and bugfixes every few days (and sometimes hours) is very satisfying and encouraging. I'm really excited about nesting and the way hydration and hunger will work - it'll be more realistic and refreshing, compared to how most survival games do it. It's also amazing to see how much the devs listen to our input and suggestions, and how responsive they are when something needs fixing. I've also had a LOT of debates with testers over these past weeks, and it's been fun to brainstorm how mechanics could be changed or improved. See you all in Genesis!
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The closed beta is an absolute beacon of hope for Day of Dragons. Every mechanic from the Alpha has been fine-tuned to a much more enjoyable state. Movement feels so much better, picking up the corpses and interacting with food/water is smooth, and the biting and hitbox is incredibly accurate. The clan and new social panels make such a difference as well as compared to the Alpha, your gameplay isn't dominated by worrying about group members and things. Even the little things like interactive foliage make a huge difference. Us testers give both positive and negative feedback as well as bug reports and everyone involved is doing their best to make the game great with very open communication. The streams in discord really don't do it justice-- you'll all have to play it yourself to feel just how much more responsive and user-friendly it all is once testing goes public. I really look forward to it
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I’m gonna be honest, my faith in this game has not always been the greatest. After the situation when the Kickstarter ended I thought the game would lose its momentum and eventually fade into nothing. Let me tell you right now I was completely dead wrong in thinking this game would ever lose its momentum. The devs are constantly hard at work getting out new stuff for us to test. The game ALREADY feels ten times better than the game you know movement wise and the quality is more than just the streams show. All of the testers here are hard at work finding everything we can, and giving as much feedback as we can when not online bug testing to make this game the best that it can be. From what I’ve seen so far, I’ll say that when genesis hits the live branch you will have a dragon survival game unlike any other I’ve seen.
As always, thank you for reading and for your support. Without our supporters and fans, we never could have done any of this. A special shout out to our beawesome Closed Testers for helping supply images and feedback for this month's blog! We look forward to sharing more behind the scenes details with you in our next dev blog.
Dev Q&A Livestream
Our next Q&A livestream has not yet scheduled. Stay tuned and watch for updates to find out when the next one will be! It will surely blow fans away with all the progress reveals so keep an eye out.
And now for a word from our Lead Developer, Jonathan Slabaugh.
From the Lead Developer
It's that time again, another month has gone by and we've made a lot of progress. Day of Dragons Genesis is getting very close, we're in the final two weeks of Phase 3 closed testing before we move on to Phase 4 where we will be adding in Sound FX, AI, Magma, and the Shadow Scale and other items on our focus list. Then when Phase 4 is done, we will move on to our final phase of closed testing, Phase 5 where closed testers will test v1 of the Mega Map with the Forgotten Forests and Lava Lands biomes. Once Phase 5 is finished, we'll move to Open Testing where all players will have the opportunity to test DoD Genesis 1.0 before it goes live, which it will once it is polished and the Flame Stalker and Inferno Ravager have been added.
Both biomes in Genesis were made by myself using Gaea and the Unreal Engine with Environmental Assets created by Willie Hammes of Mawi United who has been doing fantastic work for over 25 years. The mega map will include caves, spawn locations, explorable areas, and nesting sites. The Shadow Scale, & Acid Spitter will both spawn in the Forgotten Forests, while the Flame Stalker and Inferno Ravager will both spawn in the Lava Lands, home of Magma, the Fire Elemental. The other two biomes will come later in future updates to the game as seen on our new Roadmap.
The Roadmap will give you an idea of what major features to expect in each update. We're confident version 1.0 "Genesis" will release in Q1 2021, with the other updates following just as soon as we can pump them out. We don't know what quarter of 2021 each will release it, only that they will release as soon as they are finished. Other dragons and elementals will come after v1.4 starting with the Bioluminescent Dragon, the Behemoth Ice Drake, the Micro Feathered Dragon, & the Behemoth Fire Dragon along with more AI creatures, the Lightning Elemental, the Ice Elemental, more skins, a Singleplayer feature mode, Localization for some non-English languages, and much, much more!
I have a lot planned for this game and as I said back in Kickstarter, I'll keep updating it and expanding on it as long as you, the fans, keep playing and supporting it. This is the dragon game we've always dreamed of playing, where you get to be the dragon and survive in a dangerous world, make friends and enemies, explore, learn to fight and fly, and even become part of a clan.
This is DoD, and we have DRAGONS.
A special thank you to Parrot for putting this devblog together, our developers because I couldn't do this without you, our closed testers for making the game better, and our beawesome fans for believing in us. As we get closer to Thanksgiving here in the US, I want you all to know that I thank God for each and every one of you. You are BEAWESOME and we will talk to you again in the next Devblog!
From the Community
Each blog post, we pick some of our favorite screenshots and artwork posted by the community to showcase here. Want a chance for your submission to be showcased on our next blog? Post it in the appropriate channels on our discord!
Some of our favorite recent screenshots...
by |JD| Tt#2554
by Death Wing#1646
by Breezy_Wheezy#0001
Some of our favorite artwork from the community...
by mickeyrose97#3400
by Milo#3392
by Kezran#0001
~The Day of Dragons Development Team
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