Visuals, Visuals & even more Visuals

Shader & Environment overhauls

One of the big worries we had, as also talked about in our Guild Architect Pre-mortem, was a lack of progress on the visual front. Especially since we wanted to get carried by the visuals more this time, going for that anime-aesthethic, it was really important to us to get this implemented as fast as possible. 

I'm happy to report that we've been making some amazing progress with that already. We had decided to go with the Quibli shader, which offers a lot in terms of foliage and skyboxing already, along with those anime outlines. 

One thing to note is that this isn't merged into our master branch yet, so the below screenshots don't have this lucious shader applied to them yet.

More props

Apart from the surroundings, our guild itself is also getting some upgrades, such as new walls, floors and doors, getting rid of the generic Synty placeholders. This also allows us to really double down on the very specific aesthethic we're going for. 

Animations

We also only had T-posing characters so far, but that meant our guild didn't really feel that lively. The goal is that all of the adventurers the player interacts with, sending them out on quests, training them,... are physically present in the guild as well, doing stuff. 

There's still a bit of jank that needs to be ironed out however before we can scale this further, as the more characters can interact with eachother, the more likely they are to freeze up and die.

Progress Grab Bag

Some smaller features/additions we implemented over the past week:

- Our Adventurer NPCs are now smarter, coming into the guild as solo adventurers, and trying to join/form parties through our GAIA system. This isn't that visual yet, so expect a more in-depth explenation regarding this in the next week(s).

What's Next?

This week was a bit slower on the programming side, as Thomas is currently on vacation for a week. However, we're planning to get our core quest system near-completion by next week. 

On the visual front, in the coming days we should be able to near finalize our environment already, after which our character/environment artist will look into the modular creation of our various adventurers, so they can be randomized and all look unique/differently. 

As for props, we're going to be focusing on the core outline of the guild, so things like more doors, windows, walls, and staircases, before moving on to some of the smaller props that the player will be able to put down in the world. 

Lastly, we're starting to work on getting some rough concepts for our key promo art, so we'll start looking for a comission for that in the coming week as well.