Post news Report RSS 4-Year Development Anniversary

Overview of our development progress over the past year (Nov. 7th 2017-2018).

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Another year, already!?

Well, as usual, here’s a overview of what we've accomplished over the past year:


STARTED NEW AREAS

  • Castle

  • Castle Way: Connects the Upper Town to the Castle

  • Harbor

  • Farmlands: Connects the Graveyard and Castle Way

  • Lava Cave

  • 2 additional areas yet to be revealed.

SHADERS

We dived into a bevy of custom shader madness! Here are some of the successful outcomes, despite many failures, so far:

  • Eyeball – Iris/pupil drawn right on the eyeball, instead of using another mesh.
  • Crest – Very similar to the eyeball shader.

  • Splatmaps – Blending between multiple textures, e.g. dirt path and grass

  • Water – Alas, refractions are broken at the moment…

  • Lava

  • Slime – Vertex animation and multiple scrolling uvs.


  • Invisibility – Refraction only shader that fades in/out.

  • Billboard – Causes object to always face camera. Used to be on the CPU, now on the GPU!
  • Grass – Normal interpolation upward.

Added some misc. shader effects too

  • Smoothness and specular, of various materials, increases during rain

PROGRAMMING

Here’s a some notables on the engineering side:

  • Swapped AI from GOAP system
  • Progress on Encounters/Scenarios
  • Created XML Database
  • Random loot using XML tables
  • Changed weapon collisions and item physics
  • More added effects & potions

I have also continued cleaning up and rewriting various older systems. Since there’s over a quarter of a million lines of code in the project now, it takes some time… I have also learned a lot in programming over the past 4 years.

In programming, I’ve come to favor the Service Locator Pattern over the use of Singletons as it allows more flexibility/ease of changing. I find focusing on flexibility in this scale of a project is the best way to go. I have also wasted(?) a lot of time trying to pre-optimize things, focusing too much on performance early on. Favor code clarity and function over performance until later on, I say.


RELICS!?

We’ve also made a lot of design progress and figuring out the direction we want to take the game. We’re finally figuring out what these Arcane Relics are going to be…

We’re not spilling the beans just yet, though. :)


CHIPMONK!

We released a side-project this year, Chipmonk!


Believe it or not, this has already helped with certain things in TAR. I got to learn a lot more about Finite State Machines and how useful they can be!

We also wanted to test launching a less complicated and smaller file-sized game on various platforms.


Unfortunately, it looks like we won’t be rolling out an update this year as there are still many things broken. We are also still transitioning many prefabs to Unity’s new nested/variants setup, which is going well so far. On the bright side, there’ll be more changes/progress when the next version comes out!

We're getting there... Take care!

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