Patreon Devlog #4: November 2021

Hello Patrons!

Boy, oh boy, was this a month.

We’ve been grinding every day to get the Patron demo as polished as we can and our efforts are slowly bearing fruit.

We’ve done a lot, so let’s get the formalities out of the way, shall we?

This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:

SinnloserSpieler!

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.

NOW - let’s get into the big update.

Mobs:

The very, very secret mob mentioned last month is finished together with variations, animations, and promotional material.

Thus, we’ll be giving a little info on it now. The mob is called “Gremlin”. They’re going to be companion pets primarily, but will also be part of various quests and storylines due to their… energetic nature.

Visuals:

The vegetation rework is complete. All trees (nearly 60 pieces) and bushes are in and working beautifully. We had to modify our shader code to squeeze a bit more performance out of them, which took some additional time but as always, it was worth it.

What we still have to do to mark vegetation off the list and never look at it again is flowers as well as some misc plants like wheat. Thankfully those are the easy, enjoyable ones to do.

Here’s a video of how they look in-game. You can also see the HUD a bit more on it, talking to NPCs, accepting a quest, etc.

Age of Aincrad - HUD & Vegetation Run-through (PRE-ALPHA) - YouTube

Also, now that the trees have been finished, we are in the prop creation phase for the village. Here’s an example of how a simple wooden board is created:

First, we create a simple shape for an object, next we prepare a standard color texture and a detail map to add all the color and detail you can see in the two middle samples. Then we just combine and bake them into one. This is a very healthy approach, as all that crevice and detail data is on the textures and not the object - which gives you the same result, but saves time and increases performance significantly.

There's a lot more already finished and by next month we'll most likely have the entire village filled to the brim with props as we have a new level designer helping out.

Back-End:

We sacrificed a lot of time on this, but it was necessary - our code back-end got a whole new update which fixed dozens upon dozens of problems we had for a while, like clipping mobs while in combat and various random behaviors with swimming or server delays.

Other than spending two days worth of just merging our custom work into it, it was the main reason we started re-working the interface this close to the demo.

Not just the UI had to be re-done, though. All sound, visual and gameplay effects are now stored securely on the cloud server so that nobody can cheat locally on their machine and change times for tasks - but this came at the cost of redoing every single one. And there are already hundreds. Which we still need to test before the demo. Coffee will be indispensable.

On the side, we started a small community effort to fill in item descriptions for the database. Thank you for all your contributions! We’ll select what we can and make sure to squeeze it into the game this month still. Some things won’t make it most likely, partially because they’re illegal and/or offensive. Still, we appreciate the enthusiasm!

Near Future:

Right now we’re quickly adding some additional controls and keybinds, as well as adding features to handle graphic settings. The primary goal is to let you customize the visuals, as the game runs on ultra by default for now which is quite heavy.

Settings we need to plug in are mostly related to visual fidelity, like bloom, sharpness, as well as settings related to world behavior (mostly grass distance, as toaster-users, will most likely want to lower this as much as they possibly can).

We also still need to improve our dissolving effects for when players/enemies die. There are still a few issues with it.

On top of all the above, due to the back-end upgrade mining has already been re-worked, but fishing, woodcutting, and gathering are still sitting there. We’re going to get it all working by the end of this week, hopefully.

The Demo:

Happy to report, yet again, that we’re on track. The backend update was a bit of a setback and pushed us off by a few days, but we’re just running a bit more overtime on top of overtime to make up for it. We believed it indispensable to give you a better impression of the current game state. We’ve also done some mini-builds for 2-3 people at a time to jump in and already take a look at to make sure building the game works - happy to report, it does work. Which is a very good thing.

Endword:

This post is a bit on the shorter side, but that’s mostly due to the programming side being the focus right now when it comes to quantity.

Thank you for the support as per usual - we can keep going as fast as we go thanks to you. If not for our Patrons (yes, you!), we’d most likely not be considering a lot of the tools we have in our shopping list that we still need to make the game better. Fewer corners have to be cut than we initially feared we’d have to cut. You can be proud of yourself :)

Till next time!