Kandria
The race is on!
Not much to visually show this week I'm afraid, though there is a neat video!
Nick
Well, things got delayed quite a bit on my side. While the movement AI I showed last week worked fine within a single "chunk" – an area of the game that the camera stays contained within – it did not know how to navigate its way across multiple chunks. This week was mostly spent with getting that to work correctly, and adding a bit of additional AI to make NPCs make use of it.
Now we can have characters follow the player around, or have them lead the player somewhere. The AI will also take care to alert you if you're going too far off track, or teleport to you if you should find a faster way to the goal.
I also spent some time fixing general bugs and optimising a few things. Garbage accumulation – how fast the game creates data that it doesn't need anymore after a short while – as well as general performance should be a lot better now. There's still a bunch more optimisation targets I know about, but I'm pushing that out for later.
Then I spent a brief amount of time integrating the new aerial drone enemy that Fred animated last week. It's still too rough to show off, though, so you'll have to wait a bit longer for that.
Finally, I made some fixes to the quest system, and added the ability to track the in-game time during which a quest is active. That way we can track your performance during the entire game, but also offer challenges to push your platforming! We have a few quests in mind that'll explicitly test your speed traversing the terrain. I made a quick sample quest to show this off in this weekly:
There's still a lot left to be done, though. Need to add an easier system to specify quest rewards, some more fancy effects and animations to display on quest start and completion, sound effects for everything, etc. I'm going to push all of that out for later though, as the next thing I have to focus on is designing the camp and first region of the game in which the vertical slice and Act 1 of the story takes place.
I did start on that a bit already and made another rough sketch:
It's going to need to change a bit more from that, though. For one the ruins are too small in this, and I'm not happy how this is going to fit into the larger game world yet. I'll also have to implement a sandstorm effect to properly gate off the surface areas for now. Doing that ought to be interesting!
There's also a few more things to implement with the movement AI, for one it needs to be able to deal with some dynamic obstacles like crates blocking the way, or ropes being available. That shouldn't be too much trouble though. Time has been moving very fast and I'm growing a bit concerned about whether we can actually get this done on time. Tim and Fred are bot very well on track, but there's a lot of programming and design work left to be done, and there's only me to do those...
Anyway, expect some more concept art next week!
Tim
I had a shorter week this week, so only had time to discuss the quest designs with Nick, and update them with the feedback. I’ve also started to think about the factional allegiances that will come into play after act 1, and how they could be tracked and used to inflect the narrative. The meat of that will come after the vertical slice though.
Fred
A lot of fun seeing Catherine come to life in the game, and had fun doing even more movements for her this week. Excited to see her use them soon.
Conclusion
We're working hard, but as usual with software, it's really hard to estimate how long things are going to take. Please bear with us!
If you want to help us out, it would be great if you could tell your friends about Kandria. Having more eyes on the game would be fantastic!