Elrond Mafia — September Dev Update
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We recently revealed the first gameplay trailer of our Alpha TPS/FPS Game, so here are some news & more details about this part of “Project Red”. Also, second batch Mint is coming next Friday (10.14.2022).
The team has been working hard on several development points to release our game in November, here is our update:
PROJECT RED
In the last Monthly Dev update we revealed the first maps of our Alpha, and some game animations. We have been working hard over the last month on the FPS / TPS part. We already revealed a lot of things about the game with the trailer, but we want to take a look at all the details of the development.
TPS / FPS
Two different vision modes (TPS / FPS) have been worked on by the team. Leaning is possible in both modes, details are added to make the experience even more impressive (whistling bullets, bouncing, out of breath) as well as the focus, tremors and motion blur following the action. We put a lot of efforts into the camera’s responsives and regarding the character’s movements to create a full experience. The feeling is different if you take a bullet, shoot or aim to add a level of difficulty, and to balance both teams. It is possible to alternate between tps/fps, discretion and precision. Whatever your playing style is, we designed everything to balance the different types of behavior.
Weapons
We worked on the weapon’s system and reworked the reloading, positioning and textures to bring a total immersion into the alpha. Here are different weapons playable on the alpha (not complete):
To make the alpha realistic and competitive, the team has worked on the recoil of the weapons. This allows to add difficulty as well as to balance according to the choice of the weapon. This recoil will not be randomly generated to avoid luck, each weapon has a different unique shooting pattern the team has calculated the range of the weapon, the damage as well as the rate of fire so that each weapon can be useful in the fight. We also change the handling according to the weight of the weapon, it adds a dose of realism and comes even more balanced (example: the SMG is less heavy than the assault rifle).
Shoot particles
When building a FPS/TPS game you mainly think about the character movement and the shoot itself. However one thing that really makes it compelling is all the particles and the sound. Let’s discover how we worked all around it.
So first of all we needed to pass in review every material we had in each scene to work on particles when it got hit. Thinking about how a material would blow by getting hit is a whole process. We quickly started to draw some small sketches to prototype every material before jumping into the code. When the drawings were done we brought the animation / textures to life by adding them into the game. To test it out, we had to plug the bullet collider with the particle systems. Then, we had our firing particles, but we still had to improve them, add some randomness to it so it doesn’t look boring. On top of that we needed a few animations for the weapons when shooting. We simply blended in a smoke particle with the gun muzzle flash and we finally had a fully functional shooting system (visually for now).
Sound Design
Shoot particles never come without a great sound design. After dealing with all the particle systems, we had to add various sounds. Several propositions were made for each hit and weapon shoot and within the team we voted for the most appropriate one. Once the sound design was live in the game, we obviously had to make sure the global sound ambiance is homogeneous. The last details were to manage the sound attenuation linked to the character distance and linked to the particle animation randomness with the sound to make it real as well. Finally we had a fully working particle system/sound design live in the game!
3D Characters
As you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work on single character development on Unreal Engine 5. We’ve been re-working on our character’s skeletal mesh, edges, and faces. This will allow us to precisely modify each area of the body to create other unique characters in the future. In order to make a game accessible to everyone, we need to develop characters of good quality, high enough to be aesthetically pleasing, and low enough to be bearable by a common computer. We are working on different LOD.
So we first went for a more low poly, a much smaller number of polygons to favour the character’s movements. But we want to put more details on skin & clothes textures! As you know, last month we had many problems with in-game animation. We decided to rework most of the movements to build bug-free animations. We had to remake our skin weight map to fix some texture bugs. When we finally succeeded in achieving all these points, we decided to develop new intervention group characters. Remember, a few months earlier, through a poster, we announced a conflict between the Mafia and Special Operation Group. Here we are, our first 6 characters will be fully operational and ready to be tested in our Alpha. (Skin Customization with NFTs will be added later of course).
New map
Through this Special Operations Group, we are trying to build a real visual identity around the Mafia while keeping our own storytelling. The team was very proud to have been able to make 3 different maps for PvP 1V1, 2V2 and 3V3. However, we are convinced that the addition of a 4th map will allow players to discover new PvP sensations, and to build a real identity in this game. Here is a preview of our latest map
WHAT’S NEXT?
Second Mint
As you know our team is fully focused on the second mint this next Friday (14th October) at 18:00 UTC. Holders & WL members will get a discount on the mint price! (Snapshot 13.10.2022)
Then our plan is to release the Legendary Collection that should come after the mint!
Project RED ALPHA Development
We still need to work on a few things like, weapon balancing, rework on a new HUD, finish a few details on our game mode etc. Then we will set up our servers, and make sure everything works perfectly. So we can release our pre-alpha to Legendary Mobsters & DAO Mobsters! Then we will release the Alpha to all of our mobsters. More details soon.
The team will keep working hard on the game to deliver at time. We had some plans to shine with Elrond during “X Day” at Paris the 3–4 November, but the price and the booth format of X Days is really limited compared to what we had in mind. As always you can be sure that we will keep delivering regularly for our amazing community!
#AllForTheClan 🩸
