Dev Log #4: Village Life
Kebari Fortress Redesign
To start off, I’ve gone over and added another layer of paint to the villages in order to make the environment more enticing. I added more foliage, rocks, and twigs to scatter the grounds. I placed boxes and barrels along the alleyways to make them feel more cramped. I added various types of light sources to make nooks feel cozy and for the setting to pop at night.
Real Estate
The competitive industry of real estate is coming to the island of Infinium. With enough coin, you can have your very own cozy cottage to hang your bow. Or perhaps you may not need a place to stay, you could then rent your home to tenants and earn passive income. The choice is yours as it is your property, after all.
The idea behind this system is inspired by Fable 2 and it’s housing market. That feature was always one of the coolest in any RPG and I would love to go further with it. Perhaps one day you will be able to buy any and every building in the game.
In-Game Trading Card Game
Inspired by games like The Witcher 3 and the Yakuza series, I felt as though an in-world mini game that was good enough to be its own standalone game would add massive value to the entire project as a whole. I decided a trading card game would be the most fun for me as I grew up with an insatiable passion for Yu-Gi-Oh!
Going forward, I’d love to implement a betting system, card collecting, and possibly player life points. I want there to be characters in this universe that take this card game way too seriously and devout their entire lives to it similar to the characters in card game animes.
In the first iteration of my card game, there are already dozens of unique cards with 4 different decks to choose from. The layout is much like gwent except with only two lanes instead of three. There’s melee and there’s range. Points are earned by either playing cards, dealing damage, or destroying your opponent’s cards. Some cards like god cards or healer cards will be worth additional points due to their value to the player who played them. The bigger the benefit, the more risk involved with certain cards.
Take a look at this early test from a few months ago!
Shadows
Now that the project is comfortably settled into the new URP lightning system, it was time to finally update the shadows as well. There are four different quality settings in the menu to choose from which all have carefully curated render settings in order to increase performance on different machines while keeping graphical consistency.
Comparing these two images, you can see the absolutely massive difference between the new sharper shadows in contrast to the original low quality ones. The reason the old shadows look like blobs is because they were just essentially large pixels with an aggressive soft filter on them. With this update, even the lowest graphics setting will have better shadows than before.
URP can optimize shadow rendering with a technology known as cascades. Shadow cascades split the camera's view into regions with different shadow map resolutions. This makes the shadows near the camera look sharp and realistic, while saving performance for distant shadows. This allows really detailed shadows close to the camera while still rendering shadows extremely far away on mountains and trees for a breathtaking and realistic view.Improved AI
One thing that’s always bothered me was how the NPCs will simply walk through a door like ghosts. It had always felt so emersion breaking, so I figured it was worth the time and effort it took to add a snippet of code to allow them to interact with the doors rather than acting like specters. The way I achieved this was by adding a script to the intractable doors that performs a check to see if any NPCs are attempting to pass through it. When an NPC is detected, the door will simply open for them as if they had opened it. While a simple addition, I felt as though it was a worthwhile change that increases the depth of the game and shows that the NPCs are constantly improving as development continues.
More Cutscenes
In the last dev log, I made a short intro cutscene. I ended up liking this so much, I’ve now made several more for players to encounter at various points in their journey. On top of this, I’ve made every cutscene skippable by pressing the space bar. The part I most enjoy about the cutscenes however is that they are in-game meaning you can see your own character. Players are still in control during these events which can open the scene up for some goofy antics which I love. Below is a video showcasing some of the early versions of these new cutscenes. Unfortunately, however, these were captured on an base model MacBook Air so the framerate is barely pushing 30fps compared to the 144 you’re usually used to on my RTX 3080. However, this is a testament to the hard work I’ve spent optimizing the game. There is also no audio and weird compression artifacts due to OBS refusing to play nicely with MacOS.*
*Also worth noting: This was also recorded on 1080p medium but iMovie wouldn’t allow me to push past 720p. Needless to say, this will certainly look better by the time you get you hands on it.
Fishing
I couldn’t even imagine an RPG without some form of fishing. Now, sprawling across Infinium, you will find various water ripples that may be used to gather fish with a fishing pole tool equipped. These fish can then be used to craft food that can provide benefits like fire resistance or healing or sold to shops for coin. There are many different fish to catch as I realized there doesn’t need to be a 3D model for every fish, just an item image. This caused me to then get absolutely hog wild and start inventing weird and random fish for this universe. Like the naturally citrus-tasting orange peel fish or the ever elusive silver fish made of solid silver metal. You can sit around for hours discovering new species of fish with varying rarities to help you along your quest. In fact, the first time I tested this on-stream, I had caught the rarest fish in the game instantly making me rich.
Full change list:
Added:
Full card game implemented in the world
Real Estate opportunities
New quests
New items
Several new cutscenes
Fishing system
Cooking system with a skill tree
AI door logic
Added an ending with a boss battle
Implemented Unity Rich Text into the dialogue system
Fixed:
Grass/Water shader
TCG hard crash
Moose sound effects
Battle scene friendly fire
Short LODs
Shadow render quality
Camera depth issues
Particle VFX performance hits
Various other quality of life improvements
