Knight Lands Dev Blog — 19/08/2022
As you cautiously crouch through a dark forest, vines retract, and another Dev Blog appears!
This week, both our game development and art divisions achieved outstanding strides. We hope to demonstrate our openness and reliability to the community through these blogs. If you appreciate that, do help us by passing this along to another player.
For those of you pressed for time, see our brief video, which summarizes and depicts our work.
All content shown in this blog is subject to change
ART & DESIGN
As our spider mob set looks fantastic, we’re moving forward with lots of the 3D modeling you’ve seen in the past few blogs. For this edition, we’ve decided to update you all on the progress of other areas.
First, we have a new angle at our character classes, specifically our Mage and Shieldbreaker classes. It’s important to us that we encompass the game’s dark theme in these concepts but also show each character type’s magical elements and weight aspects. This will allow the player to identify what class they feel comfortable playing with easily.
Next, we have an early rendition of a town we’ve been working on. This will be used for marketing material and in the finished game. We want it to appear compact and busy for players but also have efficient routes to each of the crafting and social areas of the town. And it goes without saying, this will be one of many towns with various architecture depending on the wealth and resources of the area.
Lastly, for art, we have a terrifying but beautiful Sylvanite Ruler Concept. The decorative skulls and fiery glow make strides to amplify the darkness of this creature.
GAME DEVELOPMENT
An exciting week for the back end here at Silverblock Studios. Here are the notes with a brief explanation of why we’re developing in this way:
- Made a major decision with our client, converting it from ECS to OOP
The reason for this decision is based on efficiency. To keep this simple for the non-devs, ECS is technically better for memory management, but our talented team has over 30 years combined experience in OOP. This means we can reach similar levels of efficiency in a much faster time, speeding up development significantly.
- Finished rewriting our inter-process communication layer
This means servers can now talk to each other without worrying about how fast traffic is.
- Working on entity vision and entity synchronization
With this, entities can move, see, and interact with one another. We’ve also improved the creature AI with more states and intelligent actions.
- Working on a dynamic scripting engine
This will allow us to put parts of our code into scripts which then get compiled, if needed, into dlls and used whenever required; this approach makes it so we can change code and compile it while the server is running, which speeds up development time and we can fix bugs and implement features super fast. In addition to that, we don’t need to worry about compilations as the engine detects changes done automatically and compiles only the new changes.
We plan on using this engine for mob AI so each particular creature can have its own script and act like a boss, which is different from the regular mob AI.
We’re also doing some more work on:
- Pathfinding
- Collisions
- Movement implementation
These aspects are crucial to achieving the best results for an immersive and reactive gameplay experience for you all to thrive in.
That concludes this week’s dev blog. For further updates, be sure to check back in two weeks. As a game studio, we intend to be as honest and reliable as possible for all of you who are enthusiastic about our top-tier MMORPG.
See You in The Knight Lands⚔️,
The Knight Lands Team🏰
Knight Lands is a F2P, P&E MMORPG that aims to deliver creative gameplay and utility to the decentralized gaming space.
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