Weekly Report - 30
This week we have the introduction of another major new gameplay feature, along with some pretty cool audio and visual improvements. The game continues to grow strong, even in this month of blockbuster game releases. Vizaris is gaining feature after feature, and improving every day. A big thanks to those that support us, even while the game is still in it’s infancy. You guys rock!
This week's additions
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Crafting - This week, all of the code work was focused on making crafting a fully functional and integrated system in the game. You can now open the crafting menu by pressing B (default key). Crafting in Vizaris has multiple layers and complexities. In order to craft an item you must know a recipe. The recipes are listed in the crafting menu in an easily sorted and filtered list. The recipe indicates the requirements for crafting the item. The requirements include three things: Resources, Tools, and Workstations. Resources are the actual items which are consumed from your inventory when crafting an item. Tools are items that you must have in your inventory, but aren’t consumed. Workstations are objects which you activate which allow you to create specific items.
Many objects will also have associated resource values, which allows you to deconstruct an object back into lesser supply of resources. While not all objects can be deconstructed, it will allow you dispose of junk in exchange for something useful. The player can learn recipes from a variety of sources; and you take your recipes with you when joining another player’s world.
Support for ALL of this has been added in code, along with even more backend work. For gameplay purposes, you can now cook dolfog meat (Including Haunch, Shoulder, Fin, and Tail) into something that won’t poison your character when you eat it; but you’ll need to buy a roasting spit from Ka’tro, or find one in the environment. Moving forward, many, MANY more objects and gameplay will be integrated into the crafting system.
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Expanded Area: Upper Da’te’coro Canyon - The same canyon expanded last week has been expanded even further. It now dead-ends at “The Pit”, which as the name would imply, is a large hole in the ground which you can descend into. The Pit will eventually lead into an expanded Sa’le’talo Canyon. If you look at the map ingame, it should be pretty clear how and where Sa’le’talo canyon will be expanded to reach The Pit.
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Dithered LODs - This makes the transition between different Level of Detail models more subtle when moving through the environment. This should remove most of the pop-in caused by the Level of Detail, which should significantly improve the visuals.
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New Dolfog Attack Sounds - Dolfogs now properly play a crunching sound when they bite you, rather than the completely inappropriate placeholder metal coin sound. (Oops!)
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New Footstep Sounds - Replaced many of the footstep sounds with a newer set, which should hopefully sound a little more realistic to most people.
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Improved Starting Tutorial - Using a new popup message system, we’ve improved the starting tutorial area to be a little bit more descriptive and useful. This should help prepare you for your adventures a little more effectively.
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Heat Shimmers and Distant Blur - We’ve added two new visual effects to the game, distant blur, and a heat shimmering effect which goes away at night. These two effects notably improve the visuals.
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Stamina Meter Loss Indicator - Added a simple secondary graphic to the stamina meter on the HUD, which should help indicate the amount of stamina your previous action consumed.
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Fixed: A handful of broken interface graphics - Fixed a few buttons that turned solid white when hovered, fixed a few others that had the wrong colors in general. Fixed the map button on the UI shell not activating as the open tab properly. Other small tweaks.
As previously mentioned, the crafting system will continue to be integrated into the game. There are two major elements to the crafting system, which will need to wait a while to be integrated. The first is skill based crafting, where your character needs to have skill in the specific area (Cooking, Blacksmithing, Bombmaking, etc.) before being able to craft (or at least know how to craft) certain objects. This of course needs the skill system to be completed and integrated into the game. The second major feature is object quality, which allows you to improve (or diminish) the quality of the object you craft based on the quality of the resources you use. This is part of a major feature of the crafting focused characters, where you need to invest some effort into finding the best quality materials if you want to make truly exceptional items (If you use crappy iron, you’ll end up with a crappy iron sword.). This system will need to wait until we have more objects in the game.
Crafting is the foundation for many skills in the game; and many play styles. Crafting is also the foundation for “tech” based characters; which will have some very cool gameplay implications, no matter what type of character you choose to play.
–Luke
Vizaris is an open world, fantasy roleplaying game, with singleplayer and 6 player co-op multiplayer. Vizaris focuses on player choice and freedom.
You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play , Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!
