Category Archives: Programming

DevBlog 66 / Jetpacks, picnics gone wrong and tribals!

Hi there!

This week we continued working on the current chapter’s end boss, nearly all of its move-sets are complete, while the AI polish and behavior are currently in the works. This boss has a lot of extra moving parts and we experienced some problems managing several of its animations simultaneously, but we’ve solved this in the end.

A fully functional jetpack!

We also finished populating the environment of this chapter while also adding the logic to support it, now it’s time for testing and to finish balancing! Here are some combat encounter screenshots:

Two’s a company…

…three’s a crowd!

Unity 2017 released an awesome new tool for cinematics, so we’ll have to port our existing ones and create the future ones with it for a more cinematic and professional feeling.

Regarding the next chapter, players will mostly be facing a new threat, the masked youths that dwell in the depths of the Rift! Their visual concept was inspired by a Portuguese tradition, the “caretos”, as well as Princess Mononoke’s battle costume. Their motives for attacking the girl on sight will have to remain a mystery, for now…

Orphan kid.

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DevBlog 56 / Combat improvements

Hi there!

This week we worked on getting the new undead soldier ready for in-game logic and AI behaviors. Our animator is giving life to this undead soldier (no pun intended) and we can already show off a simple idle animation and the dynamic armor system in the gif below.

Undead Soldier turntable.

With this new enemy comes a new armor set and weapons. The player can farm this armor set by killing only these type of enemies, or by finding hidden chests with core armor pieces and weapons. With each full armor set the player has a small bonus in defense, so keep looking!
Lock-On Camera behavior and improved hit detection is something that we can now say is much better than in the PAX build. Sword/shield logic has been improved, much less bug prone, it’s really starting to feel on point.

Smooth kill.

Parry all the way.

We also added some audio details, for example if Ada has a full helmet armor, her voice is muffled. We love this type of small details, when possible/fast to implement, we add them right away.

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DevBlog 51 / Performance, Performance, Performance

Hi everyone!

A short devlog this week, ’cause the team is away during Easter. Chapter 2 is going great in terms of art, in the next devblog we will show you some cool screenshots and a glimpse of what the central hub village could look like.
Meanwhile, Andre did a complete revamp of the logic AI system. We were aware of some performance issues that were aggravated with the constant additional complexity growth of the AI. Sometimes, the best way to fix something is to scratch what you have and start again. Obviously a lot of states were recycled, but it’s a different approach in AI handling. In the gif below, using the old AI logic, we could hit an outrageous 25ms time of processing time, now it’s around 1ms. The problem used to happen if the build ran for long periods of time with various AI agents active.

Overcrowded combat – DEBUG MODE not actual gameplay.

Until next week, have a great Easter!

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