Hey everyone! We want to share current progress on the game by talking about changes we made in the latest major dev build.
New GUI
In previous major build we reworked skills panel. In this one we added the resources panel to display all your current resources, highlight resources you just collected and show you which ones will be consumed by actions such as building. Also, the new chat, which is an important part of any MMO game :) Few others small things have been added to the GUI, they will be highlighted in other changes below.
Gather / Mine mode
We reworked how Tool Glove works. Now it switches mode to Mining / Gathering with small GUI change and it lets you mine stuff with left click and gather resources with right click. It's possible to break world, trees, ores, gems and other stuff with many skills, but if you use anything except Gather ability, you will get less resources.
Building with blueprints
Though still work in progress, we added the main way players will build in open world and during the battle — blueprints. You will be able to find them during exploration from chests or as loot from monsters or create them yourself. They not serve only decorative or structural purpose, some will be useful in battle by providing auras to allies or even attacking enemies.
As you can see, you need resources to build each blueprint depending on materials used and the blueprint itself.
Bees!
In previous dev build we added Beelmo — a new Lemon Bee monster. Now we added it's ability: when it stings you it starts running away and if you can't kill it in a few seconds, you yourself will become a Lemon Bee! While you are in the bee form, you can't your abilities and more vulnerable, but you can jump higher and perform double jumps to reach places you couldn't before!
With this we introduced the polymorph mechanics in our ability engine that will help us make a few more interesting abilities and cool game mechanics '^__^'
New monster — Enamored Skeleton
Skeletons will protect Dark Gems and attack anyone who will try to get their precious :) A bit more of them in this video.
New camera
As you can see on the screenshots above, we moved the camera above character's shoulder from above it's head and adjusted field of view and camera distance. It should provide better gaming experience. All abilities have been adjusted for the new camera position.
Graphics and animations update
You can see it in the video here, we updated a few important textures in game, like grass and gems and added Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. New textures give the game a more consistent look. Check this tweet about restyling to see how it was before and how we are working on game style.
We updated a few animations to add some character to them so they don't look plain as they used to :) It's still work in progress until it will be consistent throughout the game.
New sky
It's... not boring any more :)
Many more!
It was only things that are easily shareable in form of a few screenshots, but a lot of work we do can't be easily seen. Still, we want to share it with you to give a glimpse on the development process:
- Animation Engine rework. We use our own animation graph system, because the engine we use didn't have one when we started. Because of that we had problems with stuck or not working animations from time to time. No more of that since we reworked a few core things in it :)
- Fixed air control, it now works like in most action and action-adventure games.
- Updated sound engine to support more easy integration of sounds in game and fixed some sounds.
- New artefacts and resources that have no use for now. We will talk about them later ;)
- A lot of bugfixes!
Hope you stick with us to see more! '^__^' Next update will be a bit boring compared to this one because we are working on some things in the game engine that are required to ship the game to an alpha stage and continue it's development. We will see you with new DevLog when it's done!
Please leave your comments and ask questions, we will be in comments ;)