Game Dev Diary — Nov. 29, 2021 — Jason Tennent
It’s rather hard to believe it’s already been two weeks since the last Dev Blog. Time flies when your eye-balls deep in the work. Our period of optimisation continues. We have new features already implemented and some that are currently being developed.
This post will go over those updates across our design, programming, and art for the game.
Design:
- Keeping the documentation plate spinning
- Alterations and refinements to the newly implemented Frag Grenade
- Bug testing and iteration
- Playtest sessions in foundational multiplayer instances
We have a fun new toy to play around with, the Frag Grenade. We’ve been testing this new feature around and refining it in. It’s fairly decent but we’re yet to thoroughly test it in a multiplayer setting which will be the true test.
Making changes and refinements in the Editor version is all well and good but until it’s stress-tested in a play scenario we never really know how it feels to use and have it used against you.
Programming:
- Animation Smoothing
- Frag Grenade Implementation
- CI Development for faster ‘cooked’ builds
- Starting on Spear weapon development
- Implemented First-Person arms
One of our programmers has spent a lot of time in the past weeks figuring out solutions to smoothen out the animation and make sure hand and feet placement are exactly where we want them.
This is the animation for our ‘Hop’. It’s a faster version of the mantle performed when a ledge is around waist height.
This has been slowed down for the purposes of viewing but look how smooth this is!
It may not look like much, but that’s pretty hot. Hand and feet placements are particularly tricky and may even still need work.
‘CI’ stands for Continuous Integration. We’ve finally managed to implement it into our project, which means we are able to package the project into executables to play on the servers much faster saving chunks of time each week.
What this means for the project is being able to test, play and fix issues that only occur in client + server multiplayer sessions. Because yes, the environment in which you test also affects what issues may or may not occur.
Art:
- Modelling and texturing the frag grenade
- Starting initial modelling of a Spear weapon
- Finalised custom First-Person arms
- Smooth some existing animations
- Started animation for transitions between various player states
Now our new Frag Grenade feature needs a Frag Grenade model to go along with it. We’re sticking with the mod-shop feel for the art direction just now and I think this achieves that while maintaining an easily recognisable silhouette and colour.
Enabling the player to be able to make those split-second decisions and have the information relayed to them immediately. Right now the studs around the grenade are fixed but we plan to later make up an animation for them where they flare out when the player pulls the pin, could be a nice touch.
Our animator has now begun work on developing the various animations for the various states and stances the player can be in. For example, crouched or Wounded (downed but not out).
With each new step the game slowly comes together, we’ve still got a monumental way to go but getting stock assets out and our own assets implemented makes a world of difference to the games feel.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see you around,
Jason Tennent, Design Director.
If you’d like to join the development conversation, learn more about our project, or join the community, I’d like to welcome you to our Discord here.
