We are happy to announce that we are going to present you a tech playable demo of Floatlands at EGX Rezzed 2017 in London this March. We are working hard to create a version of Floatlands which has some finished gameplay elements such as resource gathering, exploration with your personal buzzard and perhaps a quest or two. Lots of you are already asking us when will you be able to experience Floatlands, so here is the perfect opportunity to join us live, have some fun and give us feedback to improve the game even further. You’re all kindly invited!
UI & HEALTH MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
I’ve been working on various things this week, from UI to gameplay perspective. I’ve been trying to create a smooth UI elements without artifacts/pixelization. To avoid this problem we used rendering technique called Signed Distance Field. The inventory, crafting and build mode menus and their functionalities are now finished. All that is left is to completely rethink the UI design. NPC health bar was also added, it pops out whenever NPC gets shot or hit. There has been a lot of work done on health managment system and on the survival aspect. I’ve implemented a consumable type of items (repair kits and energy cells that Andrej and Mito designed and modelled) to manage your health and energy. For more about Floatlands progress check out the video below! I had a great time making it!
ROCK TOOL, REPAIR KITS, ENERGY CELLS & LIGHTHOUSE
We realized amidst all the weapon creation that the player doesn’t have a certain initial free tool for mining/chopping wood, which jump-starts the resource gathering. To fix this, we first had to put some thought into it and in the end we came up with a simple solution – a rock! So my priority was to prepare all the animations for the rock tool.
Then I made models for consumable items, which Mito prepared some concept art for. So far we have two repair kits for the player to heal himself and two power cells to store and carry extra energy arround. This comes in handy when your robot runs out of energy and you have to replenish it.
Repair kits and energy cells
We decided to add another point of interest – a new lighthouse. It will be defended by enemy robots and hold loot like other towers, with the obvious addition of lighting up the surrounding area at night. I also reworked the broken pieces of the crates that the player will be able to smash the crates into and did a little work on the assets for the caves.
Lighthouse model & crate
WORK ON WEAPONS
Weapons still needed a bit of touch in order to behave more fluent, so my focus included:
- weapon logic (reload, shoot, zoom, bullets, taking bullets from inventory, meele, proximity)
- implementing animations made by our 3D artist
- implementing “weapon follow player” logic, so that movement looks much more natural
- muzzle flash effect
- projectile effect
Assault rifle in action
Shotgun in action
ENEMY AIRSHIP
We continued the dungeon brainstorming with so I started making another concept of the cave, so we can easily visualize how various elements would fit together. We will create different versions of dungeon tiles so everytime a dungeon will be created it will be completely randomized. Another cool feature we’re working on is the airships that will patrol around the area. Airships will be dangerous encounters and will produce great rewards if defeated. Here’s a concept sketch I drew up:
Keep up the great work! Loving regular devblogs. I wonder if you got inspired by Rust to do such consistent devlogs :P
Exactly that, not only inspired by the game, but also their devlogs.