Greetings once more, Great Netherlords!
Rumors have been circulating in the Depths that the wretched denizens of the lands above are gearing up for some grand celebration. Therefore we thought, why should they have all the fun? And here we are, bearing gifts to your Magnificent Malevolence in the form of news of the progress of your dark campaign! This year has been rather harsh on the world, be it above or bellow, everyone has faced difficulties and challenges, but never the less, we soldier ever onward with your dark machinations! The updates this time around are not so much numerous as they are rather massive in scope, so let’s crack a few hero skulls and dive right in, eh, Lord?
Before we begin with the various Production aspects, we will note that we have made a massive change to our planning and organisation via moving everything to ClickUp, a fantastic tool for project management that has really helped us keep easy and clear track of everything, as well as keep important material on hand all in one place. This was quite the undertaking as it involved moving and refactoring quite a bit of planning structure as well as a great deal of documentation, which we will continue to expand on as necessary. Our previous solutions for these things were all spread among different things like Trello, Google Docs and Confluence, the latter of which was the biggest and most useful database we had prior to this, but it suffered from server issues which ended up making it unusable to us for most of the year. The change to this new tool makes things a lot easier and clearer to keep track of as we move forward!
Art
- Troll 2.0 Finished
The fantastic Rebecca Underwood, the latest addition to our merry band of mischievous misfits, has completed her work on the Troll! We have been absolutely floored by the quality of her work and we are only ever more excited to see what the future holds in store now! The Troll was then textured and it is now complete! We have started setting things up for our plans to have creature gear be upgraded as they level, and we can very much see great things ahead!
- Goblin 2.0 Model Underway
Just as soon as the Troll was done, Rebecca has already begun working on the Goblin rework and it is already starting to look fantastic! Again, these assets are being made with the idea of having upgrades as the creature gets stronger. This is perhaps one of our oldest units and seeing it finally being brought into the 2.0 level of quality that will be the final iteration for our models is extremely exciting
- Warlock Animations
Our lovely and extremely talented animation kobold, Benita, has sequestered herself in the library and is teaching Warlocks how to conduct proper research! The animations for the various stages of the Warlock’s research cycle are coming along absolutely beautifully! The character on display in these is fantastic and we are nearing a point in which the Warlock has all his basic animations. While this model is not a 2.0 design, the animations are so wonderful that we will likely only make minor adjustments to them once the 2.0 is done. The main difference there would be the outfit of the warlock, so switching should not be much of a problem.
- Music
Our ever-talented friends at WindUp Audio have continued their works on the music for the Demo, having established a structure of intensity progression between two types of cycles – Management and Combat. This is a version of the lowest intensity Management track, and they continue to work on more as we speak!
- SFX
A great deal of work has been done lately in order to have working systems for calling sounds at the right time and while there is still more to do, we area nearing a point where we have at least a placeholder sound for everything currently in the game, which is a big step! Once this is done, audio feedback for things from UI interaction, unit command and construction, to what material a certain type of weapon is striking will all be in the game. These being the first iterations will of course be, well… iterated upon in the future, but it marks a big and important step into our audio development!
We have also naturally been working a number of other things, such as designs for more advanced units, refining certain game system designs etc. The designs we would rather keep a secret for now, as we do not want to spoil everything prematurely, but we can just say that it will be a blood-curdling revelation!
Programming
- Editor Update
For what must be well over two years now, we have continued improving and adding big features to the game itself, getting it closer and closer to a more completed state. However, our editor is a separate mode within the application that functions quite differently, and as a result it had been lagging behind untouched for all this time. This meant that at some point we would be nearly incapable of making new maps as the systems and data would just not be compatible with each other, not to mention the number of general life improvements missing from the editor, like the placement grid. To remedy this, we have spent a considerable amount of time bringing the editor up to date. This was no small feat, but it was finally accomplished and we can now boast a much more functional, fully compatible editor that we can now more easily keep up to date and generally craft maps with. Naturally, the editor will see further improvements as time goes on. It is an absolutely crucial system for our Production stage and we would also like to keep it in such a state that the moment the game launches, the editor can be available and easy to work with for you!
- Ownership
In the past, being in such early stages of development and focusing much more on tooling and building the very foundations of Lords of Nether, we had an ownership system that was more of a footnote. It was there, it determined a few factors, but wasn’t really relevant or determining anything. Now that we are moving towards shaping the actual gameplay rather than the fundamentals that we’ve been building for so long, this needed to change. We have extended ownership to things such as props and rooms and generally built up on it to prepare for what’s to come!
- New Animation System
For the longest time we worked without a proper animation system, relying mostly on jerry-rigging unity’s own fairly limited systems. As a result of this, we finally came to a point where due to the more and more complex animations and the ever increasing bugs and technical debt accruing, we had to create our own animation system in order to handle this ourselves. We spent a considerable amount of time building this, as it was a fairly herculean task, but in the process also broke a great many things in the game that had been using the old methods. This meant that we had to spend additional time fixing and refactoring the old animations to work within the new system, which was a substantial amount of work in itself. However, it is best that we do this early, because as much work as it was now, it would have gotten exponentially more so the more animations we would have had to fix later in development. It cannot be overstated how massive this undertaking was, both in terms of importance and the time it took. We have been building this new system, moving to it and fixing the myriad of things that broke for well over 2 months, as it is so intrinsically tied with the functions of the game, but now that it is done we can finally breathe a sigh of relief and carry on with a truly stable and reliable solution. The reason we decided to do this now is because for a long time now we kept losing time due to the lack of a proper system, as we would have to fix numerous things that broke with small changes or additions, as there was no real system handling any of it. This delayed development and made things rather frustrating, as well as limited us in what we could actually do without a system in place. Therefore we made this big push to solve these issues once and for all!
- Resolution Options
We have also made our first foray into building the various game options, starting with Resolution. As we move further along development we naturally wanted to get rid of the Unity launcher, which is however the way Unity natively handles resolution and the various limited graphics options. These things were also further compounded by the fact that we switched to Unity’s High Defintion Render Pipeline some time ago, which handles things very differently to Unity’s regular render engine, meaning its regular options in the launcher would do next to nothing anymore. So we have built the first of our custom solutions, the resolution adjustment. We wont bore you with the technicalities of this, however as trivial as this may seem, most of it needed to be built from scratch, as will much else. We will continue adding to these options bit by bit. And yes, for those of you about to ask, we will absolutely also have to make remappable controls ourselves. In the end, not all things are all that exciting, but are in-fact understandably crucial. This is just a small sample of the many such things, great and small that we do not tell you of, as they are fairly mundane but very necessary.
Even in these trying times we have continued to work our hardest and we will not let you down no matter what, Lord! Your realm is burgeoning and coming along fantastically, and it shall be stopped by neither Hell, nor high water! We do so hate water… We have pushed through the mammoth tasks of the editor and the animation system refactor and now a few more herculean tasks stand before us – Combat and AI, two systems that will be the linchpins of our gameplay and are both extremely huge undertakings. In addition we have now, with the Troll and Goblin, started on producing our final assets for the game and replacing the placeholders that we have worked with for so long. Everything is progressing fantastically and we couldn’t be happier or more enthusiastic! We hope that you share our excitement, for it is only a matter of time until you bathe the world above in darkness and blood! Now, what a celebration that would be!
Until next time my Lord, stay safe, stay vile!