Kandria
Kandria's first team update!
This is the first update that's not just from me, but the Kandria team! To keep things clean I think I'll start splitting the updates up depending on who did what to give everyone their own space to speak.
Nick - New lighting and fixes
The week started off with more bugfixes, some of which for bugs that Fred immediately discovered while I was getting him set up. That was quite embarrassing for me! Here I had thought I had prepared properly and ironed out all the obvious bugs. I should have known better.
Anyway, one of the bugs that got fixed is support for surround upmixing. The game should now also work on systems that output 4.0 or 5.1 surround, which are the most common cases. The game renders audio in stereo, and then upmixes that to match the desired speaker setup. Doing so is not as easy as it might seem, so that caused some headaches.
Another bugfix hunt that was really frustrating were some issues surrounding slopes (again!) I spent the past two days trying to get that going correctly, scrapping most of my existing system and writing it anew. And then anew again. And then again. And– well, you get the point. Now it's, dare I say, almost perfect. There's only two minor cases left where it doesn't behave quite as nicely as I'd like it to, but those are just a manner of handling them and then it should be good.
Famous last words and all that, but I really do think I got it down this time around.
Finally, I also rewrote the lighting engine. This has been a long time coming – I always knew the way I used to do shadows was not suitable and would lead to tons of issues. With the new system we not only get correct shadows, but also much more in-depth lighting capabilities.
Tilesets now not only have an albedo colour and an obsorption map, but also a normal map to correctly compute the light incidence and thus properly light depending on the light position. The lighting and parallax background information is now also per-chunk and can be defined as globally available "settings" that can then be easily applied to further chunks.
I don't have an editor for that yet, so it's currently just defined as Lisp source, but that's fine for now. I do want to make an editor, but it'll take some time to get that together and there's more important fires to tend to right now.
What I want to work on next most of all is an effects interface to allow tying stuff like sounds and sprite effects or other kinds of influences to animation frames. Right now that's ad-hoc and terrible, so I'd like to replace it with a more flexible system that'll be usable throughout the game.
After that I'd like to work on getting a first NPC into the game to test out more dialogue option, NPC movement, and quest handling.
If I still find the time I'll also get a beta tester programme set up, though I feel like I'll most likely only get around to that in November.
Fred - Starting on new attacks
I had fun trying to think of how The Stranger would fight, and trying to find new styles that match her personality and have the appropriate weight to them depending on the move. I also thought about the hitbox placement to make that interesting for gameplay.
Here's a first draft of a new light attack sequence:
I'll be working on redesigning the other moves next!