World Management, Character concepting (Patreon)

Party & Lore Management

There are a lot of underlying systems that will be giving our world more life in terms of dynamic events (flashbacks to Forge Industry, shudder). Whilst the player won't directly interact with these, they still need to be visualized in order to correctly determine the difficulty of certain quests, if there are special party needs,... 

The main code blocks for these systems have been written now, with some very crude, very rudimentary UI. This UI is not permanent, it's not the priority right now to find out if the game is fun, to have a pretty UI, hence we'll keep it barebones. Instead, we'll focus on getting the game into a playable state as fast as possible instead, instead of having to wait 9 months on this such as with Forge Industry. 

Advisor concepting

Our character artist Sarah-Luna has been spending the past week determining the visual style of all our characters (turns out you can't just slap colors on a cube and that's it!?). The focus here has been on our advisors, the characters that will be present at the various parts of the guild (bar maid, nurse, blacksmith,...). 

Since you'll be seeing and interacting with these a lot, it makes sense to put a bit more effort into getting them more distinct, each with their own defining features. Once they all have their concept art done, Sarah-Luna can get to working on turning them into 3D models that fit the visual and technical requirements of our game as well. 

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

- Our game now has the concept of day/night, something that wasn't previously implemented.

What's Next?

There hasn't been that much cool this week in terms of actual features, since we are currently all working on some pretty big issues, such as our in-depth character creation engine, so that all our NPCs actually have believable backstories. Similarly, getting our parties & lore UI to a "good enough" state will still require some additional time as well. 

Once our character concepting is done in the coming days, we'll be shifting our art focus to further configuring our shader, to get that final "anime" feel, before moving on to turning the concepts of our characters into actual 3D models.