Hello again, my Dreaded Lords! We come to you once more with great news of your dark domain, heralding glorious times both near and far! As we mentioned in our last post, we are trying to make these more frequent and reliable, to keep your Dark Majesties well aware of the goings on in the underground realm! We have been hard at work these last few months, making exciting strides in many important aspects and we look forward to sharing it all with you, so if you have a moment in-between the excessive dwarf beatings, take a look at what we have wrought thus far!
Art
- Goblin 2.0 Finished
Opening this newsletter with a bang, as promised, here we are! The final design for the Goblin has been brought to glorious 3D, fully completed and ready to receive your malicious command! We have spent a long time meticulously crafting this asset as it is our first final game asset that will properly feature in the game. This is the Goblin as you will see him in both the Demo and the final release of Lords of Nether and we truly wanted to show you the level of care, quality and dedication you can expect from us! Remember, Lord, we do not like to give mere promises. We want to show you exactly what we can and will do, no more, no less. From the initial redesign in Concept Art, through the sculpting and texturing, this asset has been an enormous step forward for us and we believe it truly, finally reaches our expectations and showcases what can be expected of the final game.
We are frankly quite impressed and happy with it ourselves, putting old and new side by side truly shows just how far we’ve come since we started this project and really puts things into perspective. We are excited to continue this trend with the upcoming assets that you will see in the Demo, as the art department toils away in the depths!
- Mordred 2.0 Design
Keeping on with the big hitters, last time we teased the upcoming redesign for Mordred, as he too would require a 2.0 touch-up in order to fit in with our newly established art style and quality expectations. We are very happy to present this redesign to you and show you how Mordred will evolve visually through the game, should you choose to embark as him on your campaign of world domination! We wanted to keep certain themes and elements consistent from the original design, yet seeing that it was terribly monochromatic and dull, we needed to do some more interesting things to make him truly stand out, especially in the environments you would often see him! There was a significant effort in also making the armor more… logical than the previous iteration. Some things about this may change as he undergoes the next stages of production, as happened with the Goblin, but this is the direction in which he will go!
- Unit Art Updates
On the subject of art, we have also gone over some of the recent concept art to either update things to more closely match recent developments, such as the weapon tier changes for the goblin, or to better set up unit tier variance for future assets and prevent having to redo any future work on time. We are making a concerted effort to make tiers more visually distinct and therefore easy to read, while also setting certain rules about how we approach their design, such as wanting the Tier 2 to be the “default” look of a unit, as it will likely be what you end up looking at most in the game and must therefore fully represent the unit’s character, while also leaving room for the other tiers.
- Animation Pipeline Preparation
After having built our brand-spanking new Animation System (in lieu of just not having one at all) We have been making heavy progress towards preparing and streamlining our new Animation Pipeline! This is, of-course, due to the fact that we are finally starting to churn out final, game-ready assets, instead of working with placeholders. These placeholders, were as the name implies, never meant to be in the final game and as such had a myriad issues, such as very poor topology which made animating a nightmare and incredibly time consuming to hide the faults, if at all possible. These new assets are indeed game-ready, meaning that our 3D modeler has taken great care in order to make sure animation goes as smoothly as possible and the results are as high quality as can be.
This all has set us on the path of establishing our new animation pipeline, in order to begin preparing these assets and the final game animations you will end up seeing. The preparation has involved a number of different things such as establishing a complete list of the general animations all units would need, figuring out how to approach physics and where they need to be applied, creating a basic, production-ready rig that can quickly and easily be applied to future models, but also edited to fit them as necessary and much more! There has been a lot of work done here and now we are ready to begin animating our new assets better than ever before! For a time, some will still use the old animations, re-targeted to their brand new rigs, but over time this will all be phased out as we launch into our Animation 2.0 phase!
- VO Updates
Additionally, we have gone in and recorded new VO for Mordred and the Warlock, both for a more complete list of assets and a greater fit to both character and internal lore consistency! We are now in the process of… well, processing these and finding the perfect sound for these two characters for the time being! It is not unlikely that much further on in production, we will hire professional voice actors for these things, should we be able to reasonably afford so, but until then we still want to make sure we have something as high quality as possible!
Programming
- Movement System Progress
The work on the movement system update continues in strides! It is extremely close to completion now, featuring the major addition of Forces! These are a big part of how entities and the world will interact, and as such also a massive part of our combat system, hence this system needed to be fully in place prior to starting the final combat system.
With Forces we can essentially set ways for units to be affected by various things. From a slight flinch at an incoming strike, to being blown clear across the room by a powerful spell or attack, we can do it all now! This system is modular and therefore highly flexible, allowing us to set variables such as things being differently affected based on distance from points of origin, just how powerful an effect is, how resistant certain units are to forces, and much more! This has been a huge and important update for us and now we only need some fixes to the overal system, as well as some fixes to the navmesh issues we’ve been having lately and we can fully move into building our final Combat System!
Alongside this we will also be building the first stages of our AI, as the two are intrinsically linked, but once the combat system is also done, more extensive work on AI will begin, in order to make an actual opponent out of enemies! I think I do not need to explain just how massive and fundamental this all is and what a huge milestone the completion of the movement system is! We are beaming with excitement, as we can begin seeing the fruits of our labor for the past several years finally come alive, and with that, finally begin showing you more of what we expect Lords of Nether to truly be!
- Fixes and Additions
Intersecting the Movement System progress has been an effort to clean up the current state of the game and add a few things to it in order to make it a bit more accessible to users. From bug fixes, both visual and functional, to adding a help screen in lieu of a tutorial for the time being. All this is done in preparation for what follows bellow.
Other
- Steam Page Preparation
Why, yes indeed! We have been getting ready to finally launch our Demo’s Steam page! A process we started some time ago, but had to pause due to wanting to have a bit more built into the game, as well as some misinformation on what exactly was required by the process. The time has allowed us to get some more insights and update the page a little, which we still have a few things to do on. We have been updating and fixing the build as we need to present it to Steam’s testers and while simply showing that you are working on something valid is usually enough, we wanted it to be a bit of a tighter and less obtuse experience for those engaging with it. This will however help out our new testers as the program expands!
With that, the testing program is nearing an expansion indeed, however it will still be a bit of time before this happens. Namely because we believed that to launch the steampage we needed a build that had Steam Integration, which can be a time-consuming process, however we found out that we do not. Steam Integration would be required to have the game function through Steam, but not for the launch of the page itself. This means we will have the page up, allowing you to follow and wishlist the Demo and also perhaps start growing a branch of our community on Steam, but for the time being there will be no build that can be played through Steam for testers to engage with. We will, over time, change this, and as soon as we do, we will begin gradually expanding the tester program effective immediately!
- Marketing and Community Building
And so, a great shift will occur soon, in our focus and way of engaging our audience! We are very aware that, due to either life circumstance or what we see as a lack of truly engaging content we deem worthy of sharing, we have become significantly lax in our approach to building our community and growing our image and presence. The time for all that is over. The gears are shifting, the times are changing and we want to begin focusing on this aspect more and more through the following months. It has been absolutely amazing reaching out to so many of you and gradually opening up more and more channels of communication. It’s incredible to see so many people that are interested in and even passionate for what we are making. It is both humbling and highly motivating!
We want to continue doing this, but we also need to, as we are gradually ramping up to the promised day, at long last! We will begin by updating all of our current social media presence to properly reflect a more modern image of LoN, as well as having relevant information clearly visible. This will likely be followed by expanding into some other platforms and services and gradually, a more consistent and frequent content drop and interaction with all these platforms! This is planned to involve things such as a higher rate of turnout on our YouTube account, streaming and just a general increase of interaction among many things. We are very much looking forward to all this!
- Kickstarter Preparation
And here is the big kicker, no pun intended. All of these things, all of these milestones, refactoring of pipelines for ease of production, new assets, new approaches to marketing and community building, it all leads to this. With all of these things finally happening and many more exciting things on the horizon, we are going to, in earnest, begin our preparation of the Kickstarter Campaign. This will be set to launch somewhere in Q2 of 2022 and we will soon begin building everything we need for it.
From A to Z, we will follow the extensive research we have made into the subject and build a powerful campaign that we hope to launch on time and finally bring to you a TRUE look at what we’ve been up to and what it is we are intending to make. This is absolutely massive for us. Never before have we been this close to this truly enormous milestone, never before have we actually felt like we might be ready to begin preparing our campaign, but here it is!
We are excited and we are terrified, but mostly excited! We will work our little Kobold behinds to make a campaign that truly stands out and shows you what Lords of Nether is all about. There are no words that come to mind as to how amazing this all feels. From the humble beginnings of a 14 year-old drawing silly redesigns of Dungeon Keeper 2 characters in his room, to the assembly of a rag-tag team of people on a whim and the eventual foundation of the BlackHeart team as it stands, to this! It has been a long road and every day it is hard to believe this is all really happening. While there is still a long road ahead, it is one we are incredibly excited to go down and one we are incredibly, unbelievably grateful to share with you all!
Thank you, Lords! From the bottoms of our little, black, kobold hearts!