Dev Blog 18

04 Jun 2022Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Hello everyone!

We apologize for the gap in Dev Blogs over the past few months. A mixture of life events and the release of the Flame Stalker had our attention focused elsewhere. But, we will try to once again give monthly updates on the development process of the game.

As some of you may or may not be aware, we have recently changed the development timeline on our Trello Roadmap. This is because we are making the switch to Unreal Engine 5.0! With this change, we are working on some exciting new content, some of which we know you have been asking for.

Read about the reasons behind the switch to UE5 from our Lead Developer below.

A Word from the Lead Developer

Greetings everyone. I hope you are all doing well this summer.

Before I talk about UE5, let me address the elephant in the room... oh wait, that is not an elephant, it is an Inferno Ravager. Many fans have asked, "When is it coming out?" The answer to that question is Update 1.0. Obviously, the follow up question is, Why? Why was it pushed back? Well, when we finished it's animation set, much was broken. The adult back legs were too short for walking/running, the baby arms were too short as well, many of the animations were unusable. It simply did not meet my quality standards so we had to go back and fix a lot of things on the Ravager. Understand that this is our first Wyvern. The body is much different than a dragon since its wings are also its front legs/arms. With a dragon, we had the ground stuff figured out from the Acid Spitter Drake, just add wings. But with a Wyvern, it is our first Wyvern and to quote a friend, "Mistakes were made" but were fixing those mistakes and plan to release the Ravager with update 1.0. One of the things we had to do with it is go back to the drawing board and decide how it would stand on all 4's, how it would walk, etc. This is one of the reasons we hired Xilev, our 2D Sketch Artist who helped us conceptualize those things in these awesome sketches seen below.

So that's why it has been pushed back and we are committed to making it right before releasing it instead of releasing it and then fixing it later. But enough about that, let's talk about the other thing.

Most of you have heard the big news that Day of Dragons will be switching to Unreal Engine 5. This is extremely exciting for us because of all the open world tools that UE5 offers to game developers and how Day of Dragons will use them. Let's look at some of these tools.

World Partition. World partition means no portals. The old world composition system of UE4 meant to make a huge world I had to load all the maps on the server and then load and unload each map on the client using portals. With World Partition, we can simply create the huge world and the engine takes care of loading and unloading the areas and actors that are too far away for you to see or interact with, freeing up resources and memory. I love it.

Large World Coordinates. LWC uses 64bit floats instead of 32bit floats for world coordinates meaning that we no longer need to use client origin rebasing to make up for the lost precision and accuracy of movement and projectiles being synced over the network. 64bit precision allows for very far distances from origin (0x,0y) that 32bit cannot offer. In 32bit UE4, precision begins to take a hit after only 1500 meters from origin (center of the world) and for our 16km map, the farther you got from origin, the more lag/desync you would experience. LWC will fix that.

Lumen Global Dynamic Illumination. UE5 introduces an amazing upgrade to its lighting system with Lumen. FINALLY we will be able to use dynamic lighting (needed for real time-of-day simulation) without losing color accuracy, shadow accuracy, and shading/ambient light accuracy. Lumen gives us the accuracy and beauty of static lighting with dynamic lights such as the sun and moon directional lights which move during time of day transitions. Lumen is going to make our world look accurate and beautiful. I cannot wait to play the new map using Lumen lighting.

Volumetric Clouds. UE5 has something our fans have been begging for, volumetric clouds that you can fly into and above while First Flight is playing just like in the movies. ːsteamhappyː We'll make it scalable for players on low-end machines and allow you to switch to 2D clouds if needed, but for those with good PC hardware, ACTIVATE FLUFFY CLOUDS!

There's other cool features too including their new water/river/ocean system, better animation tools, new physics system, etc. Playing DoD in UE5... well, it's going to be awesome.

- Jon Slabaugh
Lead Developer

Now onto the juicy stuff!

New Skins and Skin Crafting

Concept Artwork created by Xilev

One of the exciting changes coming to the game will be the new skin system. The updated skin system will allow us to use a broader range of colors when designing each skin as well as use different patterns designed by our 2D Skin Artist(s) and then translated into 3D using Substance by our Technical Artist. Here is our first example of a new Shadow Scale skin pattern designed by our 2D Artist, Xilev and brought to life by our Technical Artist, Flicker.

Upcoming Shadow Scale Skin Pattern top view

Upcoming Shadow Scale Skin Pattern bottom view

We will be combining this new skin system with the new nesting system in update 1.0. Dragons who invest fully into the Breeding tree will be able to craft skins using color swatches derived from the dominant/recessive color genes of the parents as well as any unlocked colors to apply as a color mutation in the egg. This feature and more will be included in the next update to our nesting system.

Creating the Mega Map

The world of dragons is about to become quite a big larger. With the current Forgotten Forest Map, the world is 16 x 16 km square. While for most games this would itself be an extremely large map, flying makes traveling from one edge of the map to the other too easy. We originally wanted to remedy this by creating four separate 16km maps and having a portal system to transport players from one biome to another through our mega map system. However, with the release of Unreal 5's open world tools, our plans have changed.

With Unreal Engine 5.0, we are creating one mega continent containing multiple biomes without needing to use portals. This new mega map will be a minimum of 32-40 square kilometers, or four of the current maps combined.

Concept artwork of possible mega continent design

This new mega continent will host not only the five originally planned biomes (the Forgotten Forest, Lava Lands, Winter Winds, Shimmering Caverns, and Dangerous Dunes), it will also contain tropical, canyon, ocean, and island biomes which were being planned as an expansion map later down the line. However, our island biomes won't all be surrounded by water. Players will be able to live on floating islands located in different parts of the map, as well.

Below, check out the video of our Level Designer, ZaichoThePsycho, walking you through just a small section of the upcoming map as well as images of more areas to come.

Watch video on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

8k x 8k Coastal Region

8k x 8k Gulf Region

8k x 8k Canyon Region

Upcoming Dragons, Models, and more

Big Dragon Rig

Blitz Striker Rig

New dragons are also getting prepped for gameplay. The still-to-be-officially-named Bio Dragon is now completely rigged along with the Blitz Striker. The Bio will be the next dragon to be animated.

The Feathered Zygovo is also getting tended to. We are currently working on feathers, textures, and tweaking the look.

Feather placement test on the Feathered Zygovo

Other dragons are also getting some tweaks. After issues that arrived during the animation process of the Inferno Ravager (which has temporarily been placed on hold due to walking issues due to leg length), we are going through all of our wyvern models and changing the leg to wing length ratio. This will prevent the dragons from having legs that are way too small for their bodies.

The Singe Crest was the first to receive the new portions and now has a more suitable leg length (and smaller feets).

Tweaked wing and leg length on the Singe Crest

We plan to release the Inferno Ravager along with the Bio Dragon, Blitz Striker, Sandslayer Worm, and Magma Elemental in update 1.0 which will debut on Unreal Engine 5.

On the VFX side of development, our team has been preparing for the transfer to UE5. Our VFX in UE4 were built in Cascade and UE5 uses Niagara, and so Flicker had the task of converting all current UE4 FX over to the new particle system. Unlike most animal survival games, Dragons use a lot of visual fx for their element abilities, so making Niagara versions of our VFX particles was required. VFX has also been working on creating the damage skins for the remaining modeled creatures as well as some other projects.

Bio Dragon damage vfx

Cave Cutter damage vfx

Dune Weaver damage vfx

For Environmental Assets, we are nearly finished with our next two set of corpses. The Swamp Snapper corpse will be added in the next update. Since this AI has a unique body plan, he will be getting his own yummy corpse for dragons to snack on.

Wyvern corpse model WIP

Swamp Snapper corpse model WIP

After the corpse are completed, our Environmental Asset Artist will move their to creating the nests for the next set of dragons as well as starting some new projects to create special environmental landmarks for the new mega map/continent.

With new diets soon to be added to the game, we will need food sources for these dragons as well. The Bio Dragon is a nectarivore and will need a plant to drink from. Our concept artist is currently working on designing the Bio Flower and it will then be sent to Brigade to bring to life. This current design is inspired by Columbines and Passionfruit flowers.

Bio Dragon Flower WIP concept

That's all for now. Our Lead Developer, Jon, was able to do an unscheduled Dev Q&A. If you haven't seen it yet, we suggest you check it out!

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!

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!