Kandria
I'm getting snowed in
We've had a lot of snowfall in Zürich the past few days. I haven't seen this much snow here in about 15 years!
Fortunately development on Kandria can continue despite all that. One of the perks of being a computer game, I suppose.
Nick
This week had all sorts of things in store for me! First I implemented a new menu, which allows you to see the current quests, your items, and lets you change the settings all in one. Once we get to it it'll also contain a map as well as other handy information you might find useful if you get lost.
I also added a simple hud that shows your health while in combat. I imagine there won't be much in terms of hud that we'll really need to show, but that little bit is still handy.
Next I reworked the screen-shake to be deterministic – this is important since we have the ability to change how fast time moves in the game, and the screen-shake should speed up or slow down in accordance to that. The previous screen-shake would just randomly move the camera every frame, which made it appear way too strong when time was slowed down.
Then I had to go back and fix some issues in the engine. Previously when you added new stuff (like effects, particles, new enemies) while the game was running, it would not properly sort things according to their depth. This now works correctly, so for examples particles no longer sink into the ground.
I also had to spend some time thinking about how things are organised with regards to story progression, save states, and so forth. The details are quite involved, but I think I have an idea that should serve our purposes. The idea requires having the game without any distinct "loading regions" like I planned to have before, though, meaning that we'll have a proper open-world game without any loading screens during gameplay. That sounds excellent, but it also mandates investing a lot of time in optimisation, which I'll have to get to pretty soon, I imagine.
Finally, I remade the movement AI that I wrote about before. It had been laying deactivated for a while as the previous implementation was quite slow in computing the node graph, and also had some big issues in the graph it generated and how it executed the movement. All of that's much better, now! Check out a short video of it in action on YouTube:
It's still not perfect, though. Sometimes the AI makes weird movements or chooses a route that looks a bit weird. For now though it's working well enough, so I'm putting that off for later. Can't get stuck on perfectionism when you're trying to get a game done!
Tim
I completed the quest design document (21 pages!), outlining 3 main quests and 3 sidequests as previously planned with Nick, and listing their asset requirements. Next stop: feedback, scripting and iteration!
Fred
Had some frustrating issues with git, which were finally figured out, glad about that! :p Continuing on character animation is fun. Looking forward to testing the new drone enemy I'm working on in game and figure out how it should move, it can be tricky to make flying enemies feel good and create a good connection between the animations and how they fly / float.
What's next?
Well, next is fixing a bunch of bugs that were reported (thank you!), and then getting to work on implementing these first quests! This requires designing the hub and first underground area, so expect some concept art sketches for that next week.