Good morning, afternoon and evening everyone!
Greetings to all and especially to all newcomers! Welcome to our weekly development update where we share and show what our team has working with. Those who are new to our server: we have split our team into three (3) teams; creatures, world and programming with other backend progress. To keep up the efficient weekly schedule we cycle through these three teams and give all three weeks time to show something off in their team's turn. This way nobody gets burnt out!
NEW Cactus Cruncher - Creature Concept!
This is the smallest subspecies of Woodcracker, and it lives in a hot and dry desert areas. They are very smart and curious, so if not spooked or provoked, they may be relatively easy to tame and teach. They can survive in very high temperatures, but if it is too hot, they are known to dig a holes in the sand and spend the hottest part of the day inside, and while they are spending those days underground, you can still notice their eyes and noses above the ground, so it is advised to watch out for their spiky eyebrows.
Cactus Cruncher diet is composed of just cacti, they are not eating anything else. Those animals are opening a cactus with their large beaks and claws, and once the top is gone, they will eat insides of a cactus, leaving prickly shells behind. They can also survive for weeks without drinking water, as long as they have plenty of cacti to eat and hydrate. But they still have to drink water from time to time. They are very fast for a medium sized herbivore. They may be great companions for desert areas. Smart, agile and helpful to their masters. They are very effective against scorpions.
Disadvantages: They can't stand temperatures below 0 degrees Celsius, that's why they won't be useful companions for humans who prefer colder climates.
NEW Arctic Woodcracker- Creature Concept!
Arctic Woodcracker subspecies, second biggest subspecies. They feeds on moss, lichen plants, needles from small conifers and roots, which they dig from under the snow and ground with its strong hooves and claws. It is possibly the strongest of all subspecies, and able to withstand very low temperatures. Additionally it can go for days without eating much, on the other hand, they can't survive long without water.
Disadvantages: They can't survive in temperatures above +10 degrees Celsius, meaning that they will not be efficient companions to players who prefer hotter climates.
WORK IN PROGRESS Dustrius 3D Model Sculpting!
One of our 3D artists, Flow has been continuing sculpting progress with our 6th playable dragon Dustrius! This rocket punching medium herbivore dragon is going to be backing up a lot of fire power. Pun intended.
UPDATED Icy Crown Animations~
SadEch [Mother of Williams] has been working on updating and giving a quality of life update to Icy Crown. There has been a massive animation overhaul with updating all of the past and older animations. Please not that the animations showcased may appear faster in the video provided as in the game animation speed is dependant on the character's velocity and speed. Though we will polish animations further in the later development, this is how we are choosing to leave Icy Crown for now for the tech demo and move onto updating other aspects of the creatures, such as animating our AI.
NEW Wraith AI Creature Animations!
Speaking of AI, @SadEch [Mother of Williams] is also working on animating the Wraith. This massive predator is an AI creature that humans can encounter in the world and tame. We gave our community a task to vote in dev-polls on which people wanted to see being animated in our development update livestreams on Sundays: and Wraith doubled down and took the cake and probably ate it too!
So far simple animations are being created to provide some first sprinkles of personality and characteristics for the creature. An idle animation is a great way to start.
(YOU WILL HAVE TO JOIN DISCORD TO SEE AS I CANNOT POST GIFS :c )
Updates from our lead skin artist~
Our lead skin artists, SinfulVox has been busy with the skin system, here is some progression update message from him in his words!
Due to limited amounts of time, I have not been able to finish a new skin. However, I have been working in Unreal with the colour customisation. Here is a list of what I have been able to make:
- Implemented all previously shown Static Kirin skins to the build
- Paradise Kirin is now a customizable in terms of its coloration's
Colour Swatches: When starting out, players will have a mostly limited colour palette they can work with when creating their dragon's skin. These swatches will either be themed around the skin or will be based around the original colour palette of the static skin. As players advanced through the game, the ability to have all colours available to them will be unlocked.
- Created an RGB themed Colour Swatch for Grimm Aurora Icy. This still needs minor tweaks
- Created a Limited Colour Swatch for Paradise Kirin, however this swatch needs to be heavily adjusted still
The videos below show a brief demonstration of Grim Aurora Icy and Paradise Kirin's customisation. Again understand that there are still adjustments to be made to both colour palettes.
(YOU WILL HAVE TO JOIN DISCORD TO SEE AS I CANNOT POST GIFS :c )
What's our sound designers doing?
OmniSound’s focus has been on moving from FMOD to Meta Sound and setting up infrastructure within the session to allow for a seamless move on the audio front. For the Icy Crown we made sure the that the flying sounds are synced correctly. We also tweaked a lot of individual assets, because of the switch to MetaSound a lot of sounds need some finetuning that was previously done in FMOD.
Something from the Patreon Test Patch!
Last but not least we have been hosting stress testing meetings with our Patreon supporters! What is a "stress test"? Stress testing is summoning as many testers into a server as possible to test out game features and seeking feedback on current version of the build. Since our latest patch has improved game performance immensely, it has been one of our primary concerns during the recent stress tests. So far we have been receiving great performance feedback and especially the low end computers are feeling the improvement!