Here at perpetual games, as with all indie game studios, things progress on a scale of Sloth to Speedy Gonzales depending on the day. That’s why we thought it a good idea to do a weekly roundup of the various areas of the project to help give a rough overview of our development progress.
So let’s get into it!
Systems and Mechanics 🖥️
This week has seen the dev team split into two areas, combat and modding.
Combat
We continue to focus on refining the basics of the hand-to-hand combat that will be in the game. We could have easily gone down the route of buying a pre-built package for this but we felt that the combat mechanic is going to evolve into something central to many of our player's play styles so it’s vital for it to feel purpose-built for every scenario.
So far this includes:
- Switching of NPC aggression states
- Damage tracking
- Animation triggering
Basic hit detection
Modding
As we have been saying from the very beginning the modding aspect of our game is one of the core pillars of its design, so at every stage, we have modding in mind. Simon has made some great progress this week in the following areas:
- Designing the file and folder structures that will be used to organize mods on disk.
- Adding support for mods being in folders or zips to aid distribution and installation.
- Adding support for load order and multiple mods changing the same object.
- Starting of the UI and development of the scripts to import user data and content into the game.
- Development of the Mod service that will read all the data and objects from disk and process them every time the game runs.
- Development of Unity Editor scripts to see loaded mods and objects at runtime for debug purposes.
Tech Art 🖥️
It’s been a week of transformation for the village of Phacos, as our tech art team has started to transform the blockout of the village into fully-fledged buildings as designed by Magda, all using our modular kits.
During this process, we’ve been able to create new trim sets and building pieces to add even more variations to our modular building kit.
Music & Sound Design 🎙️
Matt has been adding yet more original recordings to our library of audio assets, with his current focus on the NPC’s. There isn't a noise Matt hasn’t thought of…
They include:
- Snores
- “Hmm’s”
- Coughs
- Yawns
We’ll leave you with the sound of Matt snoring into a microphone, of which he has done many versions for hours on end. It’s a thought we enjoy.
Art 🎨
The art team has been hard at work producing an array of beautiful illustrations and concept art.
Ana has been let loose on some evil beasts that players could encounter on their travels through Elegos, some of which are truly disturbing 👀
Magda has produced some great work set dressing key locations that will feature in the opening of the game, including the boat the player will arrive on and the village.
She has now joined Filip in producing some beautiful renders for our marketing material & loading screens.
Here’s a sneak peek…
Initial sketch from Filip
Team News 📰
New Team Members
We also want to welcome two new members of the team who have joined in the last two weeks, Chu and Nathan 👋.
Chu has joined our dev team to assist the tech art side of things, making sure everything looks as beautiful as it can, while also retaining the ability to still run efficiently!
Nathan has the job of QA, trying to break our weekly internal builds as much as he can to help us find those pesky bugs 🐞 and squash them as the game develops.
Develop: Brighton Conference 2021
A small number of the team will be attending Develop this November in Brighton, we won’t be showcasing anything just yet but make sure to follow our social near the time and if you see us around the place make sure to come and say hi!
That’s all for this week’s roundup, we will have more news for you next week!
