To start the week I did some work at another skill. A spin attack  that is going to be devastating for foes in an area around our warrior, this is focused on PvE and we’ll combine this skill with some On-hit effects to change its behavior in the future. I’m still going to prototype a bunch of other skills so we can get them into a test environment. We want to have as many skills as possible now so when we start working on other characters we can see what works for PvP and what doesn’t, as we don’t want a class to be always better than another, limiting skills may be a good place to start when balancing starts.

Graphics

I’ve also decided to do some different stuff regarding graphics. It’s important for me to not focus only on the character because I feel that there is still a lot of things that still needs to be done, but creating a start map opens a lot of doors for marketing, showcase, and getting a grasp of what it is that we’re going to accomplish with this game.

For that, I’m going to assemble a huge board on Pinterest (or a big number of boards) with references for biomes, villages, assets, materials. But,  the first thing I’ve worked on was actually a water shader. I’ve experimented a lot in here, with pixelated textures, cartoon-like shaders, colors, different values for opacity, and the use of techniques to simulate refraction, reflections, transparency, waves… Take a look of where I am right now:

The first image is how the water behaves when it is deep. On the second one, I’ve put a placeholder landscape to show how the shader works when the water is shallow. You can see we have some good reflections and wave movement. The waves are still a bit messy but I’ll be able to work on a feature to paint river-flows somewhere in the future.

This realist look may diverge a little bit from what we were trying to achieve at first, but it looks so good that it made me think about the combination of all elements and everything comes together nicely (in my head).

Networking

We’ve also started to work on the replications of everything, we are setting up a dedicated server and will be working with our combat system (gameplay + animations) over the next couple of weeks. By the end of this month, I think we’ll have a bunch of cool stuff that are going to be ready for testing and we may be able to invite people to test with us!

Cheers,
Arknostik!