Patreon Devlog #8 - March 2022

Hello Patrons!

Hello and a wonderful March to all of you! We’ll get right into the meat of things.

This month we have some concept art, world updates, improvements to dungeons, and rifts.

This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:

dkNykita!

We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.

Reminder: Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.

We still have a few winners who skipped their turns, so please do let us know if you want to jump back into the queue and we’ll get right away to work on your picture.

Exploration:

A few days ago we posted a short exploration video for those who missed it:

Age of Aincrad: New Visuals / Exploration - YouTube

In it, you can see the new colors and sky setup. You can also see the current clothing set for beginners. For now, there’s only a white shirt and one with stripes, but we’re already concepting a bunch of clothes. With one set done, the rest gets done in a jiffy generally.

We also have underwater plants now - they’re disappearing on the video but they’re already fixed in the game. We also have fish now! Happily swimming through the water.

Clothing:

Since our new concept artist joined us, we have a few clothing sets in the concept phase. For now, it’s a mix of villager and player clothing.
We’ll be getting to modeling all of these once we have some final approved versions ready for production.

Dungeons:

We updated the dungeons and made sure they’re now different. We’ve done the same to the jumping puzzle rift.

As you can see the layouts are quite varied. The first one is a lot smaller and compact to get over with faster. The other will have some side-quests involved and a secret boss monster.

The ceilings are pretty high, some of the set pieces are quite massive in scale to allow for freedom of movement and to let us spawn some more mobs in some rooms.

3D Work:

We did some miscellaneous improvements to the female model and are still stuck fixing some issues we managed to find with animations not bending bones properly.

With that, we had to put our animation work on hold for the time being.

We also made a bunch of improvements to the map and made the layout a bit more cleaned up, according to feedback from the last demo.

Audio:

We got audio zones working properly, including code to handle the volume levels, so the water streams won’t burst your ear-drums anymore.

We finally implemented audio sounds for weather types and day-night cycles now that the code for our sky is finished up.

Apart from the dungeons, we also improved the rift visuals and layout. It's also now completable - you can get fully to the finish line.

And here are some additional screenshots of the current world colors!

As a bonus: Cows!

Endword:

Most of our work this month was programming and fixing issues, so there wasn’t much new stuff to show visually. We hope you don’t mind! :)

We’re going to produce a lot more art in the coming two/three months and we still have a few new members to onboard onto the team, so production speed will just be going up steadily - primarily in the programming section.

As always, thank you for your support and till next time!