Environment updates

The environment for the Overworld area of the Gentle Glade is underway. This update acts as a progress preview for the new area. Some portions will be redesigned as we find areas that are difficult or impossible to navigate during play testing. The Caverns of the Lost needs some care after the latest shader changes. It would be best to avoid the area for the time being. If you're in the Caverns and can't find your way around, please locate the nearest Luna Mirror to teleport to the next zone. If you jump down to the Gentle Glade Underground, before you can get back to the Overworld, it will be necessary for you to utilize the Dev Room to the left of the initial drop and pick up the Corruption Breaker skill. It'll be the obelisk with the purple icon. From there, head to the door switch past the first bramble hazard. Just above the door switch is a Corruption Barrier that can be removed with an arrow shot after acquiring Corruption Breaker. Please note, the Corruption Breaker skill is currently not working for melee weapons. If you have filled all 3 attack slots with melee weapons, it will be necessary to restart the game via the menu, or return to the initial spawn point by jumping into a bramble vine. Nearly all enemies have been temporarily removed, though a few still remain. The enemy system is being redesigned and new artwork is being created. The first pass of the day/night system is in place. The system tracks time of year, from which we can extrapolate the current day and time of day. This allows us to create some interesting features like lunar phases, and other things that will come later. The next extension of this system will enable certain light types to automatically turn on and off depending on the time of day.

Combat updates

• First pass of melee system implemented
• Several test weapons placed near the starting area

Technical updates

• Major overhaul of the internal asset systems to make complete use of Addressables for most things, reducing build sizes and making scene loading somewhat more efficient.
• Shader updated to be a bit faster. Some unused effects removed to reduce variant compilation time.
• Various performance improvements
• Several new systems added to help support features in the Gentle Glade Overworld

Known Issues (There are a lot):

• Art for the Gentle Glade Overworld is incomplete. Colliders are not visible, so you may find yourself running atop invisible paths.
• There is an area in the top left of the Gentle Glade Overworld where the player can clip outside the map. It's a collider angle issue and should be fixed soon.
• Collecting enough weapons to fill all three equipment slots will make it impossible to pick up another weapon. If you pick up the bow in the Gentle Glade Underground, it will still open the gate, but you will not acquire the bow.
• There is a bug causing the player to run rapidly up nearly vertical inclines.
• There is currently no intentional way to get back up to the Gentle Glade Lift. Using the vertical wall run defect, it is possible to climb and jump back up via the right-most cave. This should be addressed after redesigns are completed.
• Trigger volumes for day/night cycle effects aren't implemented. Materials affected by the day/night cycle will go very dark at night. This is particularly problematic in the Caverns of the Lost, where visibility can drop to almost none. If you get stuck, try to find a Luna Mirror and teleport back to the Gentle Glade Underground entrance by the Dev room.
• The Caverns of the Lost is a mess after the last round of shader updates.
• Ambient audio effects in the Gentle Glade Overworld have not yet been connected to the Audio Manager, so they do not adhere to volume levels in the settings.
• Melee attack effects have not been added to the Addressable Asset Manager system. As a result, going to the Caverns of the Lost will cause melee weapon effects to stop working.
• The electricity attack effect on the curved sword is tilted slightly causing some odd clipping issues on sprites that it overlaps with.
• There is a collider misalignment in the shaft drop to the Undergound area that the player can easily jump on.
• Steep angles cause player to rotate backward sometimes.
• Some sprites in the Gentle Glade Overworld are in the wrong scene, causing them to disappear at incorrect times.
• Overworld fog background is clipping in front of background sprites in Underground area in some locations.
• Camera FoV has been increased to enhance parallax effect, but that has caused some sprite gaps to show up in the environment cover art.

[ 2020-01-07 10:10:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes:

For Genevieve:

• New in-game artwork.
• New animation rig.
• Updated animations.

Environment:

• Updated environment scene testing background scenes that span across multiple midground scenes

Systems:

• Removed unused shader feature to improve build times and performance
• Various stability and performance improvements

[ 2019-09-16 01:23:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This release is mostly bug fixes

• Fixed issue when exiting to the main menu.
• Fixed issue with Addressable assets losing references to the Audio Mixer. Luna Mirror, and other prefabs that are addressable, should use correct loaded MixerGroup
• Temporarily replaced arrow with flame VFX test

[ 2019-09-06 06:21:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Well, the first build in almost two months has been pushed out to Steam. There's a lot of stuff to cover. I'll try to be thorough:

Release notes

• Updated to Unity 2019.2.3f1
• Added a new area to The Caverns of the Lost - The Crystalback Temple. The functionality isn't there yet, but this will be the area to open the gate to the first boss.
• Added a pushable mechanic. This feature will let Gen push and pull certain obstacles. Not completely finished yet, but there's a white square "block" that you can move around in the dev room to the left of the starting area.
• Added spawnable items system. Not fully implemented. There are orange placeholder squares acting as chests. Pressing the interact button while in front of one will cause it to spawn a bunch of random gems, coins and a non-functional weapon.
• Completely refactored how we're handling game assets. We've adopted Unity's Addressables system, which, while still new, looks really stable. It's a wrapper for Unity's Asset Bundle system, just standardized and much easier to use. Most game assets have been converted to this system, but a lot have not. Because of this, there are some known issues.
• The old Corruption Breaker room has been removed. We've decided to move Corruption Breaker to a later game stage to encourage late-game exploration of the world as a whole.
• The Title Screen has a new intro animation.
• Much more of The Caverns of the Lost area has been built out.
• The FoV of the camera has been increased. This gives the game a ton more visual depth and increases the parallax effect.
• Our primary shader is now using preprocessor directives for most effects, meaning we have to check a box on the material for an effect if we actually want to use that effect. While this saves on shader calculations and improves shader performance, it has caused the number of compiled shader variants to over 16,000. I suspect this shader loading is what's causing the brief lag spike during the Title Screen animation.

Known Issues:

• There is a brief lag spike at the Title Screen. I'm looking into how to fix it, but it's due to the number of shader permutations we currently have.
• Some prefabs, like the Luna Mirror and the Arrow's lightning effect, are being handled by the Addressables system. Because of this, they're losing references to non-Addressable assets, one being the Audio Mixer Group for their audio. This is resulting in the audio output for the Luna Mirror, and the other Addressable prefabs that have audio, to ignore the Effects Volume Control settings. These items will play at full volume until this is fixed.
• Because of the increased FoV, some environment elements look off and need additional tweaking and filling.
• Unity has not made the version we're using available for Linux Cloud Build. Unfortunately, until Unity resolves this issue, Linux users will be unable to get updated builds.
• The waves on water features aren't moving
• Attempting to return to the main menu results in the same level being loaded, but the Title Screen UI appears

[ 2019-09-02 06:07:00 CET ] [ Original post ]