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Attention, survivors!
We are excited to provide you with detailed information on what has happened since the last dev diary a month ago. If you haven’t noticed, we have changed the dev diary cycle from biweekly to monthly to give us more time to work on the report and have more to show. This edition will be quite large, and we are super happy about the progress we have made. As always, give us a thumbs up if you like it and leave a comment if you have any questions. Let’s dive in!
Art
On the art side we have worked on two major aspects of the game.
As we continue to unify our flora and fauna to make them as authentic and realistic as possible, we have focused on leafed trees this time. As you might have noticed in the playtests, there was a noticeable discrepancy between the highly detailed conifers and the low-poly leafed trees, which made the scenes in mixed forests look a bit off. We have now replaced these legacy trees with a brand new set that matches the conifers in fidelity. Since vegetation is a major part of our level design, this has been an important step in enhancing the overall immersion when moving through Ardem, especially in dense forests.
The lion's share of the work went into the technical art of the trees, ensuring they properly react to wind and weather conditions and enabling players to chop them down. What might sound like the easy part actually involves a lot of work, including fine-tuning values and extensive testing until the visual appearance meets our expectations and blends seamlessly with our existing trees.
However, the level designers have already started working with the new trees and have fallen in love with them. It’s a nice change and offers an almost biome-like variety of flora in these new areas.
Many of you have been asking if there will be additional weapons, and the answer is - of course -“Yes!” The currently integrated weapons have been more of a placeholder to enable us to implement the weapon system and provide a means to defend yourself from enemy players or hostile animals. However, we have started working on the enhanced weapon system, which includes the first “real” weapons with attachments and more.
As Ardem is set in a fictional Midwest state of the US, we aim to depict reality as closely as possible, including the range of firearms you would find in such a state. When Ardem hits early access, you can expect a wide variety of guns and corresponding attachments to visually customize your weapons and improve certain attributes such as precision. More details on the enhanced weapon system will be covered in the programming section.
Leveldesign
With the fresh air of new trees being implemented, our level designers went into ultra hyperfocus mode and managed to design nearly 7 square kilometers of the map within the last few weeks. This corresponds to almost 10% of the entire map size, marking the most significant level design progress we've made on the project so far and bringing us one step closer to closing the gap on the south coast of the map.
The new area is full of unique and handcrafted points of interest, enabling players to explore and discover various places with their own stories. To provide players with more convenient guidance, we have added several landmarks and hiking trails that will lead them to key points on the map. With the new foliage in place, the entire area offers beautiful scenery with plenty of opportunities to hide and build hidden shelters in the dense leaf forests.
We are super excited about the progress we have made over the past few weeks and would love to show as many points of interest as possible. However, the area is just too large, so we will share individual locations in the next dev diaries. As mentioned in the last dev diary, we have now finished the flooded area with the collapsed bridge. The result is amazing, and we can't wait for you to discover all the pathways and routes we've added around the bridge to ensure you don't get too wet.
Besides all that, we have been experimenting with rivers, as some of the playtest feedback clearly stated that the rivers in Ardem are too steep and not visually appealing. After some experimentation, we found a good workflow that offers a good balance between effort and fidelity. For steeper gradients, we will now use shorter water terraces connected by small waterfalls instead of one overly steep river. We are very pleased with the results and believe it enhances the overall aesthetics.
So, as you can see, we are not only adding new places and pushing forward the general progress of the map, but we are also focusing on improving the aesthetics of the existing areas. We are committed to steadily enhancing the look and feel of the game.
Sounddesign
Huge progress has been made on the sound side, where we have completed the new Ardem main theme that will be featured in the game's main menu. While the old song was more of a placeholder, meant to be found in-game, the new theme encapsulates all the emotions that we believe define Ardem. With the main theme in place, we can create different iterations for various purposes such as in-game music, tutorial ambient music, and more. We might share the theme song in one of the upcoming dev diaries, so keep an eye out!
We have also been working on sounds for many different object interactions, such as item consumption (eating and drinking), vehicle wreck doors, and tools like hammers, pickaxes, and saws, among many others. Next, we will be reworking all character footstep sounds to better represent the different ground materials in the game.
Programming
On the technical side, we have been working on robot AI and have implemented a first version of the robots for in-game testing. Robots now spawn and despawn based on player proximity. Once spawned, they follow a certain idle behavior, such as patrolling an area, until they perceive player movement and switch into combat mode. There are different types of robots (military, security, police, medical, etc.) that will spawn depending on their location. For example, when you enter a hospital, police and medic robots will spawn, while heavily armed military robots will spawn in military camps and outposts. Higher-tier loot areas lead to more robot presence. Additionally, robots mostly spawn near urban areas and structures and are less likely to be found in highly rural areas. During testing, we found a couple of technical issues that we are now addressing before deploying the AI to the alpha tester branch for more in-depth testing.
The new enhanced weapon system has made significant progress over the last couple of weeks. We have taken a lot of feedback from the playtest into account, and the range of changes and new mechanics is quite extensive. These changes can be divided into character behavior and weapon behavior.
On the character side, we added leaning to enable players to lean around corners or perform the friendly dance by using the Q and E keys. Additionally, there is now an improved over-the-shoulder (OTS) camera when holding the right mouse button, and an aim-down-sight (ADS) mode when single-clicking RMB. This enables a more accurate aiming experience.
On the weapon side, we have implemented weapon effects such as recoil and sway, as these go hand in hand with the new attachment system. The attachment system introduces several different attachment slots, such as handguards, buttstocks, and more. Each of these attachments can have certain functionalities like flashlights, lasers, etc., and/or increase values for sway, recoil, precision, etc. Attachments are generally rare and can mostly be found in military areas, guarded by corresponding robots.
Even though we are not currently in a bug-fixing/polishing phase, there are game-breaking technical issues that need immediate attention. One such issue was found by our alpha testers (thanks to all active alpha testers!) and caused any level changes, such as base building, chopped trees, picked-up items, etc., to disappear under certain circumstances. Although it took some time to identify the cause, we discovered an in-engine limit for network packages and were able to fix the issue by splitting the packages into smaller ones.
Miscellaneous
There are a lot of things happening on the development side that are not directly visible to players but are very important in the long run. One of these is optimization, which, if done properly, will enable more players to enjoy the game even on weaker hardware. Over the last two weeks, we gave Albington a full optimization pass. This involved merging certain infrastructural parts of the city, unifying textures and materials, and creating LOD meshes for most of the larger structures in Albington. By doing this, we were able to replace around 10,000 objects, optimize collisions, significantly reduce RAM usage, and improve GPU performance.