Insanity realm.jpg

The last couple of months have rather enraged enduing, to say the least. As a result, there were not many updates. In game development, all you can do is take one thing at a time and slowly work through things the best you can.

A couple of months back the entire project was bricked. Like many nights I would log out with everything working just fine. The next I would log back into Unreal Engine 4 and the project would just crash on loading up.

As a result, the project was restored from a backup. While something like 16 hours’ worth of development time was lost. That just how it is. When I do have time to work on the project I put in a lot of long hours at once. The raw files for the game itself before I do some cleanup can sometimes hit 70 gigs so that becomes somewhat pragmatic for dealing with it with the resources I have.

I thought that was the end of it. That however ended up not being the case. Between some bugs that were not found with the way, I was testing things and some others that were discovered along the way. Many things are just not running the way I like and are still being worked on a little at a time.

Bugs are always a consent threat and reminder that it only takes one tinny little thing to break a lot of stuff. Just the other night I was importing some animations for monsters in the game. Something went wrong in the process and it broke the skeleton. The skeleton that was being updated affects many dozens of monsters and all their animations stopped working.

I guess this is why so many just give up on trying to make a game. The world of game development can be seen as just a wasteland of unfinished projects. Even triple-A studios are quite well known for canceling projects that have been in development for years or longer. It’s just how it is.

Sometimes you just have to readjust timelines and try to chip away at things one line at a time. While it always feels good to make progress on such a massive undertaking that I’ve taken on sometimes you end up needing to take a few steps backward to move forward again.

These past two months were spent not making a lot of forwarding progress as I would have liked. This for a game developer means being frustrated every single time you load up the project and try to work on something. Sometimes you just try and reduce that mountain you are working on the worth of work.

death screen.jpg

There are a lot of little things that make up a game. One thing I decided to finally get around to doing is having an actual death screen. There are a lot more things just a simple text widget involved. I had to research and change some settings on how physics works on the character’s corpse. I felt the ragdoll effect you have seen in many games to be somewhat funny and also what I wanted.

This also required some thought on what happens to the character once they have died. There are lots of little choices to make. How long do you make the player sit at a deaths screen? What kind of respawning system are you going to have in your game? What is the cost of the death to the player?

With the way, this game could end up being set up. I felt it was just the best to send the player to the main town on death. This resets the instance and the cost to the player has to rerun the dungeon. They also do not get any of the loot they acquired since they did not finish the dungeon.

server side damage.png

Some more things were also migrated over to be server-side. While the damage system is not fully expanded out yet to do everything I want it to do. As some who have sneak peeks or items will have noticed there are different kinds of resistance on certain items. There are still many things about UE4 I have to learn with what they have built-in and what you need to create yourself.

A lot of time was also spent working on the inventory system. I’ve written endlessly about it in the past so I won’t this time around. There are some bugs I can’t quite work out causing the armor to not be equipped to the proper slot on the character. When I do finally get it working I’m just not going to question why it works I’m just going to leave it alone the best I can.

There has also been more progress on reworking and adding further functions to the NPCs. Since there are 25 zones in the game it’s just something that going to take a while as seen with a couple of posts now saying how progress has been made on that front. Zones Underground Ruins, Insanity realm, and Area Trial 3 have been worked on.

There have also been a lot of minor bugs that were far too many to recall that I’ve been resolving over the past two months. Maybe next time I’ll do a better job at writing them down for the patch note-like style of posting I’ve tested out doing a couple of times.

I know from the perspective of the player side it’s always nice knowing what got fixed in a game. I can now understand from the development side you sometimes just can’t be bothered with keeping track of every little fix when you are the only one working on the project.

As far as when will this large update be released? For anyone that has been paying close attention to the project, I’m sure every month now you have seen the Combat And Loot Demo pushed back by another month for a few months now. While I currently have it listed as trying to release it on Oct 2nd. That is being quite optimistic. Hopefully sometime in October if not on that exact date.