Greetings mercs! A belated Happy Halloween to you all and welcome back to another progress report on our upcoming story-driven RPG, Vahrin's Call 🎃
From new combat animations to creature hair optimisation and a plethora of bug fixes, it's been another busy month for the Titan Roc team. Let's dive back into the world of Leyda to see what's been happening!
Combat Animations
Animation refinement had been on the todo list for quite some time, a task for when we finally made it back into combat polish. Well, if you've been keeping up with our recent posts then you'll know that's exactly the stage we're in now!
Last month, we talked a little bit about the new animations making their way into the game, specifically for the human enemies you'll encounter on your adventure. Today I want to touch on some new animations that are being used not only for enemies, but also you, the player.
The gif above shows the old, greatsword walking animation. At a glance it seems fine, but when you begin to consider the kind of stance you would expect someone to have when wielding such a heavy sword, it starts to feel a little strange.
Now, I'll make it clear that realism in Vahrin's Call has never been a major concern for us. Ensuring the gameplay is engaging, the world is exciting to explore and you're just having a fun time playing in general, has always taken priority over delivering a realistic experience.
That being said, the style of Vahrin's Call is a blend between realism and fantasy. Yes, we have magic spells and all manner of fantastical creatures, but we do have to keep things grounded when necessary. Even high fantasy worlds have consistent laws that need to be obeyed.
Okay, slight tangent, let's get back to the combat animations!
Above, is the new greatsword walking animation.
As you can see (and will hopefully agree), it's much more akin to the kind of stance you would expect to see from someone wielding such a heavy chunk of iron.
Like I mentioned before, this new animation will be used by both you and human NPCs.
It's satisfying to see your mercenary holding a sword in this way, but it's even cooler for NPCs (in my opinion). They're no longer flailing their weapons around, and seeing them approach you while holding their blades upright has done a surprising amount for making combat encounters feel more engaging.
Below is one more example, this time for the bow.
Before
After
Overall we're really happy with how these animations came together, even if they were quite time consuming to implement. It's something we've also seen members of the community suggest in the past, so we hope you like the changes we're making.
Speaking of community suggestions (and to round off this animation section), we also saw many of you commenting on the position of holstered one-handed weapons on humans.
To keep it short and sweet, when you holster a one-handed weapon, be it a sword, mace or axe, it gets attached to your waist. Previously, it was attached to the right of your waist, and you guys rightly pointed out that drawing a weapon from this position, with a character who is right-handed, isn't very practical.
An oversight on our part that has now been corrected, moving the weapon socket to the left hip.
New Creature Hair
Next up, it's time to talk about the new hair making its way into the game, for all of Leyda's friendly and not-so-friendly fuzzy creatures.
First off though, I think we need to establish how this particular area has developed over time.
In earlier versions of the game, the creatures and beasts in Vahrin's Call actually didn't have any hair.
Well, they did, but as you can see in the image above, it was just a basic texture we applied to their mesh.
I suspect many of you won't recognise this version, as it's quite old. The texture we were using while recording our alpha trailer, back in 2020, was even older!
Anyway, we always knew we could achieve something that had a bit more visual flare, to really help breathe life into the world's fauna. Fast forward to roughly around 2022 and we had introduced groom hair strands.
This is the version I suspect the majority of you are the most familiar with, as we've been using it for a few years now.
Switching to these hair strands was a big step up for us. Overall, we saw it as a huge visual improvement and the feedback from the community was also positive. Win-win!.....However..
Athough things seemed promising at first, we started to encounter issues with these strands over time. This particular method of hair generation is very realistic, but comes at the cost of having a lot of geometry. This ultimately resulted in a hefty hit to performance, and we were having a particularly tough time optimising it.
We also found that this hair was interacting strangely with our lighting system, resulting in less than desirable visuals when the hair was exposed to direct sunlight at certain angles.
With these things in mind, we came to the conclusion that we would need to think of a different solution. With other tasks taking priority at the time, we made the decision to revisit this hair later down the line.
Fast forward to today and we now have a new hairstyle that we're ready to share with you all.
The barbers of Vahrin proudly present: Groom hair cards.
As you guys can see, it's another visually distinct style that stands out from our previous versions.
We were sceptical at first how this new approach would turn out, because overall we were satisfied with how the hair strands from the previous iteration looked. However, I can confidently say that collectively, we're very happy with the end result.
This version appears more stylised, a blend between realism and cartoon that we think is better suited to the overall vibe we're looking to achieve with Vahrin's Call. Not only that of course, but these hair cards run infinitely better than the hair strands we were using before; a substantial amount of icing on the cake.
With that being said, it was quite a challenge to get these things implemented. The beasts and creatures of the world now have luscious locks, but during the process, a couple of our devs may have lost a few hairs of their own out of frustration.
Getting these hair cards working as intended was a manual process. This meant hours of creating and adding hair to the bodies ourselves. Additionally, the version of Unreal Engine 4 we are using is unfortunately only compatible with an early version of groom, which came with its own set of challenges.
Overall though, the team is more than happy with how everything has come together, and we can confidently say the time investment was worth it. Before starting this process, we actually thought it would take much longer!
As always though, we would love to know which of these versions you guys prefer.
The Aurochs is one of the last creatures awaiting its new coat of fur, so we'll check in on it again next month to see how it's doing.
Expanding Settings Options
Let's move on now to something a little different, settings customization.
When playing Vahrin's Call, we want to give you as much control over your gameplay experience as we possibly can. This comes in the form of big changes and introductions, like the difficulty options we briefly discussed last week, but also some smaller settings that can be tweaked to your liking.
The settings menu in the game will allow you to customise everything from the volume of different kinds of sounds, to your key bindings and various HUD elements. The latter, is what we're going to talk a little more about today, as that's what has seen the most change over the last month.
The gameplay tab is where you can toggle on and off all of your individual HUD elements, depending on how you like to play. Most of these elements can be set to either enabled or disabled entirely, or enabled only in combat.
The most recent additions to this tab are:
Enemy status effects
Damage numbers
Lock-On marker
Quest markers
To touch a little more on quest markers, our goal when designing the game's story progression and world exploration has always been with the thought that you will have no markers to guide you along the way. We aim to use environmental storytelling and dialogue cues, as well as the in-game journal, to ensure you always know where your next objective is. Our QA testing is helping us to make tweaks where needed, so things are as clear as we need them to be.
That being said, we are also including the option to display quest markers on the map, for those of you that need a bit of an extra nudge in the right direction, or you aren't as concerned with immersion and prefer a more streamlined approach to navigating the world.
Work in progress MAP/UI
As I mentioned, we're always looking to expand these kinds of customisable options wherever we can, not just for the HUD, but in general. With that in mind, I have a couple of questions for you all!
What kind of settings do you guys like to customise when playing an RPG?
Is there anything you immediately like to enable/disable/adjust as soon as you dive into a new game?
We won't be able to add every suggestion, but we're always open to hearing what you all think.
It's you who will be playing the game after all, and you've come up with some awesome ideas in the past, so we're all ears!
Bug Fixes
Finally, let's talk a little bit about bug fixes.
I think this is something I'd like to start covering more frequently, because we clear countless tasks and bugs every month, and they do take up a good chunk of development time.
A big bug we fixed this month has resulted in a drastic increase in performance.
Previously, there was an issue where exiting to the main menu and then continuing the game would result in a big drop in frames. Sounds simple enough to diagnose, right? Quite the opposite actually!
Figuring out what is causing a bug to occur, frequently takes the longest amount of time. More often than not, once we know what is causing the issue, the solution is simple.
This performance bug ended up being a bit of a nasty one to solve - not the worst, but still had us rather perplexed.
Keeping the game running smoothly is becoming one of our biggest priorities as we close in on release, and optimisation is a key element we're factoring into our workflow.
You can imagine we were pretty chuffed when the fps returned to normal, after the fix was implemented.
The second and final bug I want to talk about has to do with how certain bodies of water looked on lower graphics settings. You can see in the image below that something wasn't quite right.
This strange effect appeared only when shadows were set to their lowest setting and it took a lot of trial and error to figure out a solution. Ultimately, we ended up discovering the root cause (an issue with how shadows play with refraction in UE4, for those wondering), and thus, the water returned to normal.
I wanted to cover this bug in particular, because I think it's important to address how all of you can expect the game to look and perform when not playing on ultra settings.
Naturally, dropping the settings will result in a change in visual quality, but we're working to try and strike a good balance between keeping the game looking nice and keeping it running smoothly. We are trying our absolute best to ensure it performs well on both high and low end machines.
Closing Thoughts
October has been another busy month for us. It's going to get pretty old repeating that, but it's true!
We're making steady progress day by day, which is inching us closer and closer to the long-awaited release date announcement.
Everyone on the team is itching to share some big news, but unfortunately we have to bite our teeth until we're confident the game is ready.
As you all know by now, we're an incredibly small team of just a handful of devs and we're doing this all on our own. We've picked a...rather large game to develop for our first title, so to say it's an ambitious endeavour is nothing short of an understatment.
That being said, our confidence in the game's quality doesn't waver, and we're even more excited now than ever to show you all what's in store for the future of Vahrin's Call.
As always, we hope you enjoyed today's read and we'll catch you again next month.
I wonder what November will bring?
Take care!
- The Titan Roc Team
