Dev Blog #45: Weather, Combat Tweaks, and Much More

Shiny new volumetric lighting on display in Oasis

Welcome back to ye olde' dev blog! Another week comes to a close, another great deal of progress made.

The big news this week is the addition of a new team member! We brought James on board to join the programming team so we can push the bar even further in terms of features and mechanics we've been hoping to implement. Every single person on the team makes a huge difference in terms of what we can accomplish, so this is definitely this week's highlight!

In other news, we've been experimenting with some potential weather effects, that would allow us to implement fog, rainfall, and thunderstorms. Testing so far has been very promising; the actual effects look pretty great, and the performance impact is relatively low as well. Exploring exterior areas in pouring rain completely changes the dynamic; we still need to put a bit more work into it before we can share anything, but so far, so good!

Other visual effects news - we found a pretty snazzy volumetric lighting plugin on the Unity Asset Store here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/67665. We love the asset store for this kind of thing; while we would never use models/assets that would clash with the visual style of the game, these kind of effects plugins can be quickly integrated and provide an immediate visual boost, without costing weeks or even months of development time.

We've also been polishing combat majorly this week. This included adding new NPC behaviors, such as dodging and blocking attacks, as well as extensive value tweaks such as stamina usage, damage, and more. We've still got more to do, but in just a few days, combat has made some huge leaps forward.

There's still more! UI has been tweaked and reworked across the board, for improved legibility and fidelity. It's been streamlined in a few areas to reduce the amount of back-and-forth you need to do for basic menu tasks.

Last couple things that are pretty exciting; we've just started work on the "Build Mode" of the IVG item (the one you use to scan the environment, seen in our trailers). Build Mode will allow you to more easily place and interact with build-able items in the world, making it much easier to quickly assemble a new base. Work on saving and loading is finally coming to a close, and we've also implemented an incremental autosave feature. Proper loading menus have been added throughout scene transitions. New flashlight items can be found and equipped.

Phew, that's a ton of stuff. And I didn't even mention everything. Check out the full list below!

Adam