I am unfortunately forced to delay the new build by a few days due to some PC troubles. These past few weeks the engine has been crashing on me every 20 minutes, and I suspect something about my setup is to blame. I’ll try to have things fixed as soon as possible so I can get that build out to you all!
I don’t want to leave you empty handed, so in the meantime, here’s some art I got commissioned to serve as the new socials avatar.
Art by VY.VENGISH
I’m loving the style and I hope you are too. If you want to check out the artist’s other work, you can find them here~
How Far Along Are We?
Most of the dungeon tiles (rooms) have now been cleaned up. I’ve added new dorm hallway tiles, new doors, and new stairways. I’ve also added a huge throne room tile which will eventually act as the boss chamber. As a “goal / end room” has been in high demand, for the time being, I will have the throne room act as the end room and include a teleporter which will send you back to the start and generate a new dungeon.
Please excuse the lack of lighting. I will touch on that in a moment...
The backend item framework underwent a hefty refactor to make item creation easier. Item interactions should also be a touch more responsive now. Following this little detour, I’ve added some new loot items including several arka crystal types, an arka core, gold bars, keys (which currently don’t have a use yet, but will in the future). There are also piles of gold coins and stacks of coins which aren’t technically inventory items, but can be interacted with to take and add to your coin purse.
Crystal Arkavite Items
I hadn’t planned on doing this, but I stumbled into developing item volumes. These are just boxes of different sizes which I can place around the map, and they will spawn items or clusters of items. I developed this little system to make shelf clutter more random and randomise the loot on desks.
Arkavite - Item Volume System Applied To Shelves
Previously, we had a system where there were say 10 prefabricated shelving units with fixed loot and clutter. The system would just pick one of the possible shelving units from this set at random. While the loot might have differed between all 10, if 2 identical shelving unit just happened to appear next to one another, it would look very weird. Now, thanks to loot volumes, we can randomize each individual row of a shelving unit. The chance of a duplicate shelving unit appearing is now much less likely, especially if I use smaller item volumes, or nest smaller item volumes within larger ones. This is far more scalable than trying to build hundreds of prefabricated shelving units.
What’s Left
The prison zone (along with a couple new prison tiles) still needs to be cleaned up and most of the dungeon needs to be relit. The new weapons I spoke of previously are going in today, along with more bar types. We have gold bars, but I want other materials for the future crafting system.
Controls page -- Come the new build you should at least be able to view the current bindings. I’ll leave rebinding keys to the combat update. I've decided torch held animations will also be left to the combat update. Save slots for character builds are progressing, but not as fast as I'd like. I won't let that hold up the update since we're running behind schedule, so 50:50 it makes it in.
Apologies once again for the delay. I hope to get this resolved quickly and be back with you soon. Friday by the very latest.
