Dear Akamori Enterprise Employees,
In this News-Post I'd like to adress the development progress of the last two months. February and March have been an exceptionally busy time, which is why this post took a bit more time to cook.
Multiplayer Mode is almost finished
And by "almost" I mean its technically completely finished. The only things missing right now can be considered to be optional, and at the same time necessary for a modern gaming experience. The features that I'm talking about here are Proximity Voice Chat, a fully-fledged Lobby-System, Quality-of-Life features (such as Emotes like dancing and waving etc. etc.) and a few things down the line.
Speaking of which: The All-New Spectator-Mode is now finished as well!
As soon as you lose your echo during a mission, you're switching over to a 3rd Person spectator mode to see what your still surviving Team-Mates are up to. The plan is to also separate the Proximity Voice Chat Channels between alive echos and un-alived echos in order to make it impossible to warn others about how you deceased.
Here is a first glimpse of how it looks right now (UI is very WIP):
Sacrificing Iron Coffins
Another thing that made great progress is the sacrificial ritual of the Iron Coffins. A lot of work went into creating the machinery for that job. The short gif I'm showing you here isn't really living up to the idea of delivering the whole feeling - but I'd still like to show at least a part of what you can expect.
Ragdolls!
To make inevitable death more fun I added ragdolls into the game. The death blow usually decides which direction your character gets thrown to - the rest "just happens".
Small wins
The rest of advancements I made the last couple of weeks aren't "big" per se, but they're still contributing to improving the game and in general working on the project.
One example is procedural hand animations for generic Items. As you might know the game has a few Items that require hand-crafted animations because of their dynamic nature. A Pan that you can swing to attack needs different animations than maybe a wooden box which gets essentially just carried and thrown around. These "throw around items" without any further purpose are now getting procedurally animated. This saves a lot of time during development and still looks amazing.
Another thing is the travelling inside the train.
Maintaining stutter-free visuals while syncing all players and items inside the train through the network unlocked a ****ton of headaches for me. Luckily, after a few sleepless nights, I managed to find a little workaround to that problem called "network parenting". Turns out this problem is solved easily with that approach - so no more stutters, lags and jumping around of characters during train rides! Not even if someone has a bad connection!
Upcoming iterations
Next up is going to be a lot of bureaucracy actually! I'm aiming to get into another funding program, so I gotta do some paperwork to make it possible. Wish me luck!
GameDev-wise I need to wrap up some lose ends and implement more UI Logic. The Main-Menu lacks a comfortable way of hosting and joining games and not every edge-case is covered yet, so I gotta do some more work in that area. I'm also working of an in-between area for the train-rides, so stay tuned for that. I also gotta take a sniff into shader-coding for some important UI-Effects I have in mind.
After making sure these areas are covered, we're going to dive-in fully into content creation. Meaning: More Levels and actually UNIQUE environments, more Items, improved dungeon generation, fresh Monsters, different ways to die, Train Upgrades, Game Lore and and and.
It's going to be a hell of a ride - so stay tuned!
Thanks you so much for reading. please take care, and have a wonderful time.
Cheers!