New week, new blog!
More work was done on the simulation and especially the translation from sim-space to real-space, as mentioned last week - also in accordance with a new, smarter asynchronous loading/streaming system we've built.
There's a lot of popping and don't mind the floating trees here, but at least most of the stuttering is gone and the system can load a lot of assets. We'll work on more smoothly transitioning assets into the screen soon, but we're already happy with this progress - especially on the eye level of the player, not much popping is visible.
The Waddletooth was cleaned up this week - up next is adding whiskers, fur and more texturing!
Some more (bespoke) Gobbledew animations were finished, such as an idle insert overlays (looking around), a death animation and the hit overlay animations!
The Gobbledew houses were finished last week and put ingame including collisions this week, so now we can even run around on them.
The Dry Bay vegetation was also worked on, including this new acacia tree!
Until next time!
Nice week for Pine!
We finished a system that was really important for the simulation (entailing shifting between high-level simulation to observable organisms) and got quite a bit of nice content done, mainly for the Gobbledew again.
For the Gobbledew's combat we're trying a lot of aerial stuff, even though they can't fly - which means they'll hover and kick off a lot. It will hopefully be a very unique style of play!
We're allowing the Gobbledew to mix and match moves with hovering in a few directions for a very short while too.
The Gobbledew houses are now put in Unity, shining on the island!
On the player-side we've been cautiously starting to implement a much-requested feature: a way for players to keep track of things to collect in order to trade or craft something. We call this the list of errands and it's a handy tool under the compass that can be easily expanded, turned on and off.
Next week we'll have some final Gobbledew things to share and hopefully more on the simulation.
Until next time!
A long blog, as we have a lot to say! Last week and this week had a bit of time snatched away because we were moving into a new office, but we've made a lot of good progress on Pine too.
Check out our new office!
The Gobbledew is quite a central theme in the art department - after the first rig tests were successful, we could finally start on all animations.
The Gobbledew's actions often come in two forms: casual form and engaged form. They are always elegant, unless they're aggravated by you or other species - then they tend to lose their calm.
Normal walk and run:
Enaged/combat run:
A few simple combat moves have been animated already too!
Their houses are also finally almost done - we'll show a few good shots in the engine of that next week.
The biggest theme for the technology department is still the simulation - we're getting there. It has evolved into a highly sophisticated system with great usability, scalability and performance.
We can now, besides giving organisms certain goals, direct groups of organisms to do things. This seems like something simple, but requires commandments from a few different levels. It does look a lot more logical, however!
On a high-level scale, that looks like this.
Conflict is one of the last big bumps - we are building sensible systems to let them decide whether they should engage, trade, explore more or do otherwise.
On a much more detailed scale, we've upgraded a bit of the UI - the dialogue window got a nice update and we can now include icons and sprites in texts.
We've been updating and finalizing the Gobbledew model, worked on our new species a lot, upgraded the main character... more on that soon! On the sideline there was still room to work on some new weapons and apparel:
Finally, we've joined Instagram! Give us a follow if you'd like to see updates in the form of shots from Albamare, cool dev gifs and other visual insights.
Until next time!
More work on the simulation in combination with our goal-oriented action planning this week! We expanded to now simulate villages on the whole island, trying to balance the territories. It's a difficult task, but important of course.
We're also looking into sequencing and cinematics a bit more - although it's early, we're excited about the insane possibilities with Unity's timeline and Cinemachine. It's extremely easy for us to put down a situation, and then animate and shoot it accordingly! Most importantly, we can blend between cinematics and gameplay seamlessly.
We've also started animating the Gobbledew - good to see them come to life!
Until next time!
