Greetings Wizards,
During the month of September a lot of artwork has come and is starting to really fill out the content for the main storyline of the game.
Alex has completed the final artwork for the Owl pet and now he’s ready to be animated. We’re still not quite sure what kind of help or abilities the pets are going to have, but we’re looking forward to your ideas and feedback as the alpha and beta programs start in a month or two.
We’ve also spent a huge chunk of time getting some new environment visuals online, but they’re not quite ready to show yet; So we decided to give you a little behind the scenes look at the tech used to create the environment and game world. Below is a screenshot of how all the 2D images are laid out in the 3D game engine Unity.
Normally the camera is looking straight on the images making the set of 2D images appear to be 3D due to the forced perspective in the art. However, here we’ve altered the camera perspective and position so you can see what the world looks like when viewed from the side which just a bunch of 2D perfectly flat images.
Although most of the environment is built by the random generator, we also have a set of tools that allows us to create small pockets of a level using a hand placed layout. This screenshot shows a small arena we’re building for a boss battle in the Rift of Fire using hand created placement for floors, walls, and all deco objects that can then be inserted into a larger level by the random map generator.
Below are the development highlights and details from the past month. Visit the Spellbind Studios September 2015 development blog post to see the full on details or talk about the changes in our Online Forums.
Major Features and Changes
- When a town dwelling inhabitant has something new to say, clicking on that structure now bypasses the entire context menu open/selection and immediately executes the play dialog logic on click
- Cavern environment art nearly complete
- Added foreground parallax silhouette to Cavern environment
- Added unique environment elements for the Rift of Fire
- Music enabled is now saved via application settings file
- Added placeholder images to town intro cinematic
- Added non-placeholder text for town intro cinematic
- The town travel gate now has swirl and glow effects only when there is a valid destination to travel to
- Item summary UI which shows the attack/defense defense delta for the item in the slot is now colored green/red with +/- in the context of *that* item (not the item being compared against)
- Cosmic Rift now has floating small floor diamonds as walls
- Hooked up remaining NPC dialog logic for Dungeon Blacksmith Quest (Adira)
- Hooked up all in dungeon npc dialog for armory quest
- Caysin is now found just inside the Rift of Fire
Balance Changes
- Drastically reduced drop rate of items
- Drastically increased power of spells
- Drastically increased the material cost of spells
- Removed the champions extra health affix
- Drastically reduced the damage and defense bonus for champions
- Improved the effectiveness of a lot of spells like Freeze, Banish, etc
- Increase field count for electric field at lowest levels
Art
- All Kickstarter NPC backers are fully animated
- Hosperak big bad boss artwork complete
- All 6 guild wizard mid-bosses artwork is complete
- Male and Female medium armor artwork complete
- Male and Female heavy armor artwork complete (includes rework of existing male heavy armor)
- Cleaned up Gryphon layer names and edges
- Exported all Gryphon art layers to be animation ready
- Tweaked Dryad hit animation to be faster and not tilt back so far
User Interface
- There is now a pulsing level up on the AttributeSummaryUI on the character pane when there are attribute points to spend to make it more obvious
- When NPCs in town have multiple new unread dialog, the dialog is now auto-batched up into one since seamless display in the dialog UI one after another.
- Armor now has item summary UI’s appear on them
- Hovering the mouse over an inventory slot now causes a visual selection box to occur on slots that contain items
Visit the Spellbind Studios September 2015 development blog post to see the complete details.