Weekly Report - 41
This week we’ve got quite a list of little changes, tweaks, and improvements, including some new sounds, music, animations, and some refined gameplay.
This week's additions
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Revised Sek’ra’coro Canyon - Sek’ra’coro Canyon was revised this week, in keeping with the schedule of revising play areas. Sek’ra’coro was one of the newer areas, so the most significant differences are just in the landscape textures and new foliage, a fairly limited amount of new rocks were also added. With the completion of Sek’ra’coro, we’re now over two thirds done with the revision of the landscape.
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Added 2 new music tracks - A new exploration music track was added this week, helping to keep exploration novel; we did some significant improvements to the music system in general allowing us to do unique music for different areas of the game, and due to this, a second music track was added for the exploration of caves.
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Combat Aiming Angles - A modification of the combat system was made so that the angle of the player’s torso is now linked to the angle of the camera, allowing you to hit smaller than average, and larger than average targets much more easily. No more pesky ankle-biting dolfog pups that you have to dispatch with power attack… now you can slice and dice at any angle!
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Virtue Penalties on hunger, thirst, and low sleep - We added a level of virtue penalties which begin to accrue as your primary needs of food, water, and sleep go unfulfilled. These virtues are moderately affected if your needs are below @, and more severely affected if those needs are below . Different needs affect different virtues. Hunger lowers Strength, Finesse, and Agility, while Thirst lowers Charisma and Intellect, and finally a lack of sleep impacts Endurance and Willpower.
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Experimental Timing Bar Changes - Some experimental changes were made to the timing bar this week. Clicking the 4th section of the timing bar is no longer a whiff which barely penalizes you, but instead immediately launches your second attack. With good timing you can now perform attacks much more quickly. Clicking in the 2nd quarter of the timing bar will also allow you to attack more quickly.
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Timing Bar Sounds - The timing bar now also plays sounds for good, bad, and perfect timing, giving you a little bit more feedback when attempting to use the timing bar.
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New Block and Perfect Block Sounds - Blocking and perfectly timed blocks were also given more specific and unique sounds this week; it’s much better than the old sounds which was a re-purposed metal resource pickup sound, and a money pickup sound.
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New Dolfog Animations - We were able to implement our new dolfog animations this week, giving the dolfog a higher quality of animations, and more specific animations. Not all of the animations were used yet, as many of these animations will be used to extend the dolfogs capability. The capabilities of the dolfog will then be used as a starting point for getting more creatures in the game (Creatures which at this point are really only missing animations)
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Tweaked Medium Sized Rocks - All of the medium sized rocks received a slight modification to their textures to make them not share the exact same texture as the rest of the rocks (or more accurately, the same texture in the same spot)
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Tweaked the fog (Again!) - Once again we overhauled the distant fog. This time creating a much more gradual transition which comes closer to the camera. I noticed after the fog update two weeks ago that it was getting difficult to tell really close rocks away from moderately far rocks, because the distant fog didn’t start taking effect until 3/4ths of a map tile away from the player. This recalibrated fog should help provide more clarity to the player, without making it look like a bad day in Singapore.
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Improved Main Menu - We added music to the main menu, and we also modified the new-game character studio a bit to have different lighting.
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Exhaustion sound now stops when dead - The exhaustion sound will now stop playing once your character dies. No more breathless corpses!
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Reduced health icon display time from 5 seconds to 2 - The changes that we made to the over-enemy health icon last week were a little to extreme. We reduced the time the icon remained on the screen after looking away from the enemy from 5 seconds down to 2.
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Slightly shrunk health dot size - We also slightly shrunk the health dot size as it was a little too large, after the changes made last week.
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Unarmed ready / unready animations - The animations for readying and un-readying unarmed combat were made more specific. No more reaching for a weapon that isn’t there, and no more sheathing your fists!
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Backend: Loose Items Finished - The backend work on Loose Items was also finished last week. This is a major new system that will completely change the way the player interacts with certain types of objects, and it will allow us to introduce quite a few new cool gameplay features. The actual gameplay which uses this code hasn’t made it into the game yet as it still needs a bit more work, but the actual code is done barring a few refinements in the future.
Today, the exterior stairs for the village were completed; This is important and notable because that is the last critical exterior art asset necessary for the village. Now we just have to finish assembling everything and put in some finishing touches. We’re going to be focusing on non-combat related NPC capabilities in the coming weeks to make sure that our village is as lively as possible.
With the completion of the Sek’ra’coro Canyon Revision, I’m now going to push down south to the final third of the map which needs to be revised. These sections of the map are the oldest, and will likely see extremely significant changes, especially as I continue to move further south towards and eventually into Salis’da’coro Canyon. After that, the caves will be revised, and then I’ll go back to creating more landscape – but there probably won’t be any -new- new landscape until after the village is ingame.
–Luke
Vizaris is an open world, fantasy roleplaying game, with singleplayer and 6 player co-op multiplayer. Vizaris focuses on player choice and freedom. New updates at the start of every week!
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!
