Knight Lands Dev Blog —28/10/2022
Exhausted from a battle in the dark forest, you finally approach a chest. The seams glow a bright purple. As you open it, coins and gems burst out of it and onto the floor. You see a book at the bottom of the chest. As you pick it up, the cover shimmers. It reads, “Dev Blog”.
As the team continues to work tirelessly, we have some incredible updates to show you today. Knight Lands is a Dark-Fantasy Sandbox MMORPG that will quickly rise to prominence in the MMO and cryptocurrency markets.
All content shown in this blog is subject to change
ART & DESIGN
We have some groundbreaking Concepts and 3D Models to show you here today as our team is hard at work fleshing out the game and building a high-fidelity cinematic trailer.
Here’s the latest exploration of our Sylvanite Sprout mob. As you can see, it has armor to show basic tribal intelligence and a wider waist to emphasize the hobbit-like proportions.
Here’s one of the final refinements of our character classes. It’s important to us to define the variety of armor and playstyles so that players can recognize the class in-game. However, leaning into the game genre with dark colors and weapon styles will cement the game’s aesthetics.
Here’s a sneak preview of our Banished creature. The movement of this creature will be fluid like a snake. However, being a creature that inhabits a forest, we need to focus on creating high details in the model to keep it looking solid rather than feeling reptilian. We have many animations ready for this mob, but you’ll have to wait for the trailer shortly to see how terrifying this monster really is.
GAME DEVELOPMENT
With lots of work going into making the game run as efficiently as possible, I’ve asked the devs to shed some light on their processes when creating the game’s back end.
What is the most important work you’re doing right now?
“Most of our recent work on the client has been around getting the client to simulate abilities and projectiles in sync with the server so we can work towards a smoother network experience for large server populations.”
Are there any major pivots you’ve made when creating the back end?
“While the client is built in Unity, the server is written C# 10.0 using the latest .NET 6.0, without using any Unity libraries for pathfinding, physics/collisions, etc. We use this approach as using Unity on the server side would add massive overhead and instability compared to using a C# server which runs on the latest .NET .”
How’s the ability system coming along in conjunction with the servers?
“While we have been developing an ability system that allows game designers to create complex interactions within Unity, we need these abilities’ functionality to be fully dictated on the server as efficiently as possible. For the most part, this is fine as we have developed the ability system with server authentication in mind. However, our recent work has revolved around performing collision checks and interactions for projectiles and entities.”
How does this differ from a single-player game and what are the optimization challenges surrounding that?
“Typically in a single-player game, you can add colliders to game objects and listen for collisions from Unity’s physics simulation. However, for an MMORPG, the concept of GameObjects and colliders will have to be made from scratch for our server. We’re developing our own physics simulation (for collision detections primarily). Using the single-player approach would work differently as there is no real-time server side to worry about. To tackle this, we are using a separate physics library from what unity uses (subject to further testing), and mainly relying on 2D physics interactions instead of 3D.”
Will it negatively change the gameplay at all using this back-end technique?
“Not at all, because it’s on the back end. Players will not lose any of the 3d immersion of the game. Due to the style of our gameplay, using 3D collisions adds unnecessary overhead which would limit the capacity of our servers (e.g. you can aim front/back/right/left, but not up/down like an FPS). While we will be using 2D calculations, we will still have 3D collisions with accurate colliders by effectively extruding colliders vertically for height checks when necessary, instead of simulating 3D shapes and limiting our server capacity. "
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 the high-quality game we’re making.
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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