DevBlog #22
[h2]Filipe - Lead Programmer[/h2]
Hey everyone, this month I spent the majority of my time on two things. Firstly, a small patch contains an enormous amount of bug fixes. Many of those bugs caused issues to various basic interaction mechanics such as eating, drinking, as well as inconsistencies in certain abilities. Then I’ve also been working on the Skin System which is slated to debut as part of Update #5, which is going great, but we’re still testing and deciding ways to grant players the most amount of customization options without causing unexpected results.
Lastly I’ve also dedicated some time to a Music Manager system, which should be integrated as part of the soon-to-be deployed as part of the small patch. Keep in mind that it will still be changed in the near future, so the system itself will improve and have different outcomes as we move forward in development.
[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
I’ve spent much of the month working on Update #5’s nesting mechanic. There will be at least two types in the update. Mound nests are easier to construct, but require more maintenance once you are incubating the eggs. Debris nests are constructed from materials you will have to find, but they keep the eggs warm for you. I feel like that ended up being a fun little mini game. I had various other tasks related to them like saving or setting up a UI indicator too.
Naturally we always have bugs to fix and balance changes to make, you’ll learn more about that in Hypno’s post somewhere further down the blog. I also ended up making some significant changes to the charge mechanic in the background. You should be able to hit your targets more reliably from now on.
[h2]Hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
Around the end of last month I had been working with some of QA to streamline our bug testing processes, more specifically how we approach our “adhoc” testing. For those unfamiliar with this process, it is the act of testing something without much planning to see if any defects have appeared with each build. Before the changes, we were doing more work than what is necessary, which resulted in the process taking longer than it should have. This issue has since been resolved as we now have an “intended behavior” section that each tester can simply mark whether the behavior ingame matches what we have on the sheet. Adhoc testing is now a much simpler process and has allowed us to cover a lot more ground on bugs, so hopefully the change should reflect in the quality of the upcoming patch.
The above is just a glimpse into the many sheets that we cover in QA, specifically how meat chunks can be interacted with. To cover from the left-most column to the right, we start with a query (e.g. what happens if I “Try to grab more than one meat chunk”?). We compare the results of the query ingame to the intended behavior on the sheet. If it’s working as intended, we mark the query green, if it has a defect then the query is marked red. We open a report on our internal issue tracker, link it to the sheet and then update the “Last Version Checked”. This process has to be repeated for every mechanic, for every species in the game and kept up-to-date as much as possible, due to changes/bug fixes causing unforeseen circumstances - even things that you would typically think are unrelated can break each other! Just because a mechanic works in one build doesn’t mean it will work as intended in the next.
Moving on from QA’s processes, I’ve been spending the rest of this month ensuring that the upcoming patch to EVRIMA will improve the gameplay experience while we pursue Update 5. Firstly, the balance changes:
Secondly, I’ve been working more closely with Jace on some essential map changes to further encourage players to move around more, using the data we gathered from Amarok’s heatmaps:
Commonly referred to as “Oasis” in the community has proven to be an issue throughout the public quality assurance testing and in evrima. This area seems to be a huge draw for players of all species due to it having almost every resource surrounding it. It was decided the best course of action was to remove the water and turn it entirely into a mud pool, ensuring players are distributed across the entirety of the map.
A new river has been added to the central grassland. This is the “buff” for Deinosuchus that I teased in the public Discord last week. It has allowed semi-aquatics to traverse with ease from the East/West sides of the map and opened up a lot of new space for them to ambush from.
Another area that we found problematic. Experienced players will know the community name for this river as “Shallows” due to its significant lack of deep water. It was decided that, due to it not having much space to ambush from and a new river being added, that it no longer had a purpose as a river. Almost all of it is now a dirt path that terrestrials should consider using to avoid being spotted in the grasslands when crossing the island.
A large portion of the North West of the map was completely made of jungle and not much else. According to our heatmaps, this area was barely visited by players. We’ve cleared a lot of the jungle out and moved some of the herbivore food out there to, once again, encourage players to distribute across the island more.
As always, please leave us feedback in our public Discord so that we can continue to address any issues and make the gameplay experience as fun as possible. Thanks for reading!
[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This month I’ve mostly been focused on vocal designs in various forms. I started off with completing the courtship vocals for our current roster, some of which you have already heard. My attention is now focused onto the next vocal calls that will be making their way into the game. Firstly I have been cleaning, mixing as well as minor tweaks and additions where possible to the already existing vocal sets of Legacy creatures, bringing the fidelity up as much as possible whilst maintaining the sonic identity already established. Once complete I will be moving on to creating new supplementary sounds for these creatures to expand on their identity.
Secondly I have been designing the unique set of vocal calls that the Beipiaosaurus will emit when underwater. This allowed for some experimentation and deviation from the standard calls, introducing some new sources alongside ones already used and also having a bit more freedom to play with the processing used based on function and the otherworldly aesthetic that is inherent in underwater vocalizations.
Additionally I addressed the issue of footstep audio dropping out and have begun some preliminary planning and testing for a complete overhaul on the vocal attenuations starting from the ground up. I will be continuing this over the coming months with the hope that it will make its way into update 5 and bring an improved experience to what the vocal calls bring to both gameplay and ambient immersion.
[h2]VisualTech48 - Environmental 3D Artist[/h2]
This month has been focused on making variants, and new buildings which would fill up the Dockyard main infrastructure, regarding Storage. More remains to be made, but it's going ahead with full blast, especially the larger storage facilities.
Main concept of a single storage building has been converted to 4 ingame variants, based on size and what they store, and we might make for each type of these building, into variants of how the interior is sorted out.
Keep in mind these are WIP images, lightning and exterior is not final. The process consists of a lot of technical difficulties that I’ve encountered, but have been all sorted out. It is just time consuming, and I’m taking a lot of time as well to make it as optimized as we can, as with the new advanced shader system (that makes exterior of buildings look unique, not only with damage, but color id and a leak/dirt system), we needed a way to heavily optimize them.
Eg. Massive Storage facility:
This came along with a heavy design of a system that would support it and it will surely advance even more with future buildings as we go. The first issue was tackling the shaders themselves, and making sure we can bake out a building and from a distance that no noticeable change would be seen visually, but would be performant wise.
And I have achieved that, as seen in the following images, from x materials (usually ranging from 4-8), we have at almost very close proximity, to get to 1, and that the vertex and triangle count is cut more than half.
Besides that I’ve been working heavily on adding crucial key structures that are simply made out of metal or variants that fill the dockyard. This month the Helipad has come to fruition:
And lastly every building that has been added and has gone to the finilization stage, has been tackled to a performant, yet good distance configuration for all of the meshes that are inside the mentioned buildings.
That is it for me this month, cheers!
[h2]Tapwing - 2D Artist[/h2]
It's time for the mid tier fisher of the isle.
With some of the gameplay ideas the team’s been working on, we took inspiration from jaguars and bears for this version of Baryonyx. Setting it up as a more ‘stand your ground’ type of creature ready to give attackers a swat they’ll remember. Fishing for the most part with some alternative sneak-attack hunting when the opportunity arises. It’s at home both in and out of the water, so you’ll wish to tread carefully by the riverside.
[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
That’s February down and we are making our way through Update 5. We’ve “laid” (teehee)sufficient groundwork on nesting, courting and the skin system. For courting you’ll be finding someone you can trust (hopefully) to go on the familial adventure of rearing young with you. Work together to find a safe space to construct your nest and begin laying eggs. Nesting will come with differing engagements based on the type of nest your species builds. There’s more than one way to build a nest and a few different types of nests to build as well as differing egg types, all based on species. Care for and defend your nest until your eggs are ready to hatch then invite your friends to experience just how good of a parent you are or aren’t. Their precious lives are squarely in your claws/hooves, so make wise decisions. Or don’t, and be bad at parenting, it’s your journey. We’ll be sharing some clips of how nesting works in the coming weeks so you can have a more well-rounded idea of how it functions
The skin system is also moving along quite nicely with pleasant results thus far. As we’ve mentioned previously, we are dedicated to allowing you the flexibility to express your creativity and create amazing combinations without sacrificing the visual fidelity of the game. Expect to be able to show off your individuality in a greater way than Legacy provided but still within the margins of acceptability. We are pleased with how things are shaping up so far and with a few rounds of trying to make the most hideous combinations imaginable, we’ll settle on what is a customization win for the game.
We’ll be showing off some of the work mentioned above as it becomes ready and include some sneak peeks at some ongoing content we’ve worked on in tandem so stay tuned.
Hey everyone, this month I spent the majority of my time on two things. Firstly, a small patch contains an enormous amount of bug fixes. Many of those bugs caused issues to various basic interaction mechanics such as eating, drinking, as well as inconsistencies in certain abilities. Then I’ve also been working on the Skin System which is slated to debut as part of Update #5, which is going great, but we’re still testing and deciding ways to grant players the most amount of customization options without causing unexpected results.
Lastly I’ve also dedicated some time to a Music Manager system, which should be integrated as part of the soon-to-be deployed as part of the small patch. Keep in mind that it will still be changed in the near future, so the system itself will improve and have different outcomes as we move forward in development.
[h2]dmIV - Programmer[/h2]
I’ve spent much of the month working on Update #5’s nesting mechanic. There will be at least two types in the update. Mound nests are easier to construct, but require more maintenance once you are incubating the eggs. Debris nests are constructed from materials you will have to find, but they keep the eggs warm for you. I feel like that ended up being a fun little mini game. I had various other tasks related to them like saving or setting up a UI indicator too.
Naturally we always have bugs to fix and balance changes to make, you’ll learn more about that in Hypno’s post somewhere further down the blog. I also ended up making some significant changes to the charge mechanic in the background. You should be able to hit your targets more reliably from now on.
[h2]Hypno - QA Lead[/h2]
Around the end of last month I had been working with some of QA to streamline our bug testing processes, more specifically how we approach our “adhoc” testing. For those unfamiliar with this process, it is the act of testing something without much planning to see if any defects have appeared with each build. Before the changes, we were doing more work than what is necessary, which resulted in the process taking longer than it should have. This issue has since been resolved as we now have an “intended behavior” section that each tester can simply mark whether the behavior ingame matches what we have on the sheet. Adhoc testing is now a much simpler process and has allowed us to cover a lot more ground on bugs, so hopefully the change should reflect in the quality of the upcoming patch.
The above is just a glimpse into the many sheets that we cover in QA, specifically how meat chunks can be interacted with. To cover from the left-most column to the right, we start with a query (e.g. what happens if I “Try to grab more than one meat chunk”?). We compare the results of the query ingame to the intended behavior on the sheet. If it’s working as intended, we mark the query green, if it has a defect then the query is marked red. We open a report on our internal issue tracker, link it to the sheet and then update the “Last Version Checked”. This process has to be repeated for every mechanic, for every species in the game and kept up-to-date as much as possible, due to changes/bug fixes causing unforeseen circumstances - even things that you would typically think are unrelated can break each other! Just because a mechanic works in one build doesn’t mean it will work as intended in the next.
Moving on from QA’s processes, I’ve been spending the rest of this month ensuring that the upcoming patch to EVRIMA will improve the gameplay experience while we pursue Update 5. Firstly, the balance changes:
- All plant locations have been redistributed and we’ve removed all instances of "All Land Biomes" as a plant location. Every plant now has specific areas (some are shared) that they can be located in. This should encourage herbivores to migrate more often and not be able to attain a perfect diet in the central grassland alone.
- Diet will now affect more statistics. Heals bleed, locked health, fractures and more much faster/slower with a good/bad diet.
- Food intake for almost all species has been increased. This means you can fill up on less food, which was especially an issue for characters such as the Carnotaurus, which would gain barely any hunger from eating its preferred diet.
- Carnotaurus mobility slightly improved when moving slower. Hits top speed faster. Vastly improved reliability for its charge attack, as mentioned in dmIV’s post.
- Pachycephalosaurus cannot turn as quickly whilst holding a ram attack but its juvenile moves much more quickly now.
- Tenontosaurus’ kick attack has been brought more in line with its tail slam. It applies bleed to opponents and hits faster.
- And much more that you’ll see in the patch notes!
Secondly, I’ve been working more closely with Jace on some essential map changes to further encourage players to move around more, using the data we gathered from Amarok’s heatmaps:
Commonly referred to as “Oasis” in the community has proven to be an issue throughout the public quality assurance testing and in evrima. This area seems to be a huge draw for players of all species due to it having almost every resource surrounding it. It was decided the best course of action was to remove the water and turn it entirely into a mud pool, ensuring players are distributed across the entirety of the map.
A new river has been added to the central grassland. This is the “buff” for Deinosuchus that I teased in the public Discord last week. It has allowed semi-aquatics to traverse with ease from the East/West sides of the map and opened up a lot of new space for them to ambush from.
Another area that we found problematic. Experienced players will know the community name for this river as “Shallows” due to its significant lack of deep water. It was decided that, due to it not having much space to ambush from and a new river being added, that it no longer had a purpose as a river. Almost all of it is now a dirt path that terrestrials should consider using to avoid being spotted in the grasslands when crossing the island.
A large portion of the North West of the map was completely made of jungle and not much else. According to our heatmaps, this area was barely visited by players. We’ve cleared a lot of the jungle out and moved some of the herbivore food out there to, once again, encourage players to distribute across the island more.
As always, please leave us feedback in our public Discord so that we can continue to address any issues and make the gameplay experience as fun as possible. Thanks for reading!
[h2]Wedge - Sound Designer[/h2]
This month I’ve mostly been focused on vocal designs in various forms. I started off with completing the courtship vocals for our current roster, some of which you have already heard. My attention is now focused onto the next vocal calls that will be making their way into the game. Firstly I have been cleaning, mixing as well as minor tweaks and additions where possible to the already existing vocal sets of Legacy creatures, bringing the fidelity up as much as possible whilst maintaining the sonic identity already established. Once complete I will be moving on to creating new supplementary sounds for these creatures to expand on their identity.
Secondly I have been designing the unique set of vocal calls that the Beipiaosaurus will emit when underwater. This allowed for some experimentation and deviation from the standard calls, introducing some new sources alongside ones already used and also having a bit more freedom to play with the processing used based on function and the otherworldly aesthetic that is inherent in underwater vocalizations.
Additionally I addressed the issue of footstep audio dropping out and have begun some preliminary planning and testing for a complete overhaul on the vocal attenuations starting from the ground up. I will be continuing this over the coming months with the hope that it will make its way into update 5 and bring an improved experience to what the vocal calls bring to both gameplay and ambient immersion.
[h2]VisualTech48 - Environmental 3D Artist[/h2]
This month has been focused on making variants, and new buildings which would fill up the Dockyard main infrastructure, regarding Storage. More remains to be made, but it's going ahead with full blast, especially the larger storage facilities.
Main concept of a single storage building has been converted to 4 ingame variants, based on size and what they store, and we might make for each type of these building, into variants of how the interior is sorted out.
Keep in mind these are WIP images, lightning and exterior is not final. The process consists of a lot of technical difficulties that I’ve encountered, but have been all sorted out. It is just time consuming, and I’m taking a lot of time as well to make it as optimized as we can, as with the new advanced shader system (that makes exterior of buildings look unique, not only with damage, but color id and a leak/dirt system), we needed a way to heavily optimize them.
Eg. Massive Storage facility:
This came along with a heavy design of a system that would support it and it will surely advance even more with future buildings as we go. The first issue was tackling the shaders themselves, and making sure we can bake out a building and from a distance that no noticeable change would be seen visually, but would be performant wise.
And I have achieved that, as seen in the following images, from x materials (usually ranging from 4-8), we have at almost very close proximity, to get to 1, and that the vertex and triangle count is cut more than half.
Besides that I’ve been working heavily on adding crucial key structures that are simply made out of metal or variants that fill the dockyard. This month the Helipad has come to fruition:
And lastly every building that has been added and has gone to the finilization stage, has been tackled to a performant, yet good distance configuration for all of the meshes that are inside the mentioned buildings.
That is it for me this month, cheers!
[h2]Tapwing - 2D Artist[/h2]
It's time for the mid tier fisher of the isle.
With some of the gameplay ideas the team’s been working on, we took inspiration from jaguars and bears for this version of Baryonyx. Setting it up as a more ‘stand your ground’ type of creature ready to give attackers a swat they’ll remember. Fishing for the most part with some alternative sneak-attack hunting when the opportunity arises. It’s at home both in and out of the water, so you’ll wish to tread carefully by the riverside.
[h2]KissenKitten - Producer[/h2]
That’s February down and we are making our way through Update 5. We’ve “laid” (teehee)sufficient groundwork on nesting, courting and the skin system. For courting you’ll be finding someone you can trust (hopefully) to go on the familial adventure of rearing young with you. Work together to find a safe space to construct your nest and begin laying eggs. Nesting will come with differing engagements based on the type of nest your species builds. There’s more than one way to build a nest and a few different types of nests to build as well as differing egg types, all based on species. Care for and defend your nest until your eggs are ready to hatch then invite your friends to experience just how good of a parent you are or aren’t. Their precious lives are squarely in your claws/hooves, so make wise decisions. Or don’t, and be bad at parenting, it’s your journey. We’ll be sharing some clips of how nesting works in the coming weeks so you can have a more well-rounded idea of how it functions
The skin system is also moving along quite nicely with pleasant results thus far. As we’ve mentioned previously, we are dedicated to allowing you the flexibility to express your creativity and create amazing combinations without sacrificing the visual fidelity of the game. Expect to be able to show off your individuality in a greater way than Legacy provided but still within the margins of acceptability. We are pleased with how things are shaping up so far and with a few rounds of trying to make the most hideous combinations imaginable, we’ll settle on what is a customization win for the game.
We’ll be showing off some of the work mentioned above as it becomes ready and include some sneak peeks at some ongoing content we’ve worked on in tandem so stay tuned.