Patreon Devlog #12 - July 2022

Hello Patrons!

Welcome to our July update!

Wow - just wow. 12 monthly updates.

A whole year has gone by since we started the journey with you guys.

We can’t put into words how much you helped us get the game to look as it looks, play as it plays and how we couldn’t have gotten here without all of you.

We went from this somewhat toony, somewhat realistic, but poorly made mess:

To this:

There’s still a lot to do, but we think we managed to improve the game a lot in that short year.

Today, we got some info for you regarding the upcoming test, as well as general updates we made - and boy did we make a lot of them.

This month was very busy, hence many more updates than usual. We’ll split some and release in-depth videos at a later time showcasing the features one by one, once they’re all finalized. What you’re about to see is implemented, but lacks polish, logic, or animations in most cases.

Let’s get right into the meat of it. There’s a lot to unpack, after all.

This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:

Avishy!

We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.

Reminder: Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.

We still have a few winners who skipped their turns, so please do let us know if you want to jump back into the queue and we’ll get right away to work on your picture. We already caught up with most of you last month, but if you change your mind about the picture, let us know :)

Recruitment Notice!

We’re still recruiting so if you guys happen to know someone capable, do PM Blacky on Discord ~

3D - modeling. Weapons are a big thing for us now, but also buildings and props.

2D - GUI artist. We want a proper, AAA HUD being worked on before we get to implementing it this year. We’re looking for something that shouts “I am an anime game. Yes.”

Game Design: We’re also looking for someone who’d like to take a stab at writing game documentation and planning out mechanics. This’ll involve learning a tiny bit of Unity and our framework on the side and we’re willing to provide teaching materials.

Dungeon: Temple of the East:

We’re nearly done prototyping our newest dungeon called Temple of the East. It’s a main storyline-related dungeon, which has you go through a sequence of puzzles (which we’ll fully add in once the layout is finished) and some slight platforming challenges.

The new dungeon allowed us to develop some logic to handle in-game puzzles, riddles, and various other machinery.

As an example, one of the rooms in the dungeon will have you stepping on floor tiles to activate them. After a specific pattern is activated, a door or handle might unlock.

Below you can find a sample video showcasing the puzzle mechanics.

Age of Aincrad: Dungeon Puzzle Showcase (July 2022) - YouTube

Vegetation & Weather Behavior:

We have written an interaction system bridge between the weather (which controls wind) and the vegetation (which sways in the wind). Before, it was animation based, but now our vegetation moves depending on the power of the wind blowing. Truly mind-blowing indeed.

Take a look. It currently works with the trees and bushes. We’ll be extending it to the grass and flowers soon as well. Should be done by next week even!

Age of Aincrad: Vegetation and Weather Behavior (June 2022) - YouTube

New Kinematics System:

Games tend to have this thing called IK, which is short for inverse kinematics. It’s what lets your character detect edges and slopes, as well as align feet on terrain properly. We’ve updated our system to a completely new one which also adjusts the body in real-time when going up and down slopes. Below you can take a look at how it works. It’s blazing fast and looks great, albeit some slight tweaks are needed - the legs bend a little too much still which we’re trying to tweak as we go, as well as the actual detection isn’t physics-based - meaning, it’s imperfect and the feet will not always be able to touch the ground.

With a bit of work though, we believe this can be tweaked to achieve perfect results over time.

Age of Aincrad: Footstep System Showcase (July 2022) - YouTube

Double Jump & Gliding System:

One of our programmers recently finished the base code for gliding and double jumping. Below is a sample of the current version.

Some things left to do with it now are replacing the placeholder animations, adding visual effects as well as making sure people on the entire server know you’re currently gliding (this is so far only client-side and we have not added info yet to the server-side about the second jump or gliding state). That issue basically means on your screen, someone who’s using the glide is actually just floating in the air, playing the animation of the initial jump.

Age of Aincrad: Double Jump and Gliding System Showcase (July 2022) - YouTube

GPS Quest Tracking System:

While we have progress on this front, it’s still far from presentation ready.

The quests and positions of tasks are being tracked and data gets fed from the server to the client, but we have no way to visualize this as of yet. We’re missing two things - a way to let you select the quest that you wish to track at a given time, as well as a visual display to pull you along or show you the path.

We hope to have those implemented in some capacity by the time it’s time for the demo.

Action-Mode Camera:

**drumroll**

We have a whole new camera system!

You can now toggle between “classic mode” and “action mode”. Classic mode is quite literally how most old MMOs control - think games like World of Warcraft. Right mouse button to view, etc. Action mode is very similar to how games like PSO2 or Black Desert navigate - your camera is locked to the mouse movement, so each turn you make with the mouse will also control the direction your player is facing and running to.

It can be simply toggled by a sweet key press - “X” by default.

A few things are left to do with the camera system. The mouse cursor occasionally bugs out in some cases (we’re fixing it) and the classic mode likes to stop working once in a while (we’re also on it). We will have the camera system finalized by the time the demo gets released. That’s the plan so far, at least.

Age of Aincrad: Action Mode Camera Showcase (July 2022) - YouTube

Lock-On System:

Part of the new camera system!

In the veins of games like Dark Souls, Elden Ring, or Bloodborne, we have now a lock-on functionality. We want the combat to end up being action-based, so having a fundamental feature like this was quite important to us. It quite literally works like its Dark Souls counterpart - it centers your camera in the middle of the screen while looking at the focus point of a given enemy.

Currently, there’s an issue with it - it locks your movement to the sides, letting you only walk forward and backward - a bug which we’ll get fixed very soon.

Age of Aincrad: Tab Targetting Showcase (July 2022) - YouTube

Hide UI:

We improved the existing UI hiding system! Before, disabling UI also disabled your controls. Right now, you can quite literally play blind without any sort of HUD, as all the keybinds work perfectly fine even when it’s disabled. A dynamic hide-UI mode is planned for the future, where the HUD is displayed in combat and in NPC proximity, leaving only the most important data on the screen (like your HP or a small minimap). Below is an exploration video with the UI disabled and everything working, gameplay-wise.

Age of Aincrad: Plains Exploration (Part I, July 2022) - YouTube

Music - Silirad Town:

Our composer has recently finished the overworld theme for the village and is currently working on new compositions. We’ve uploaded the most recent song he produced so you can take a listen.

Stream Silirad Town (July 2022) by Age of Aincrad | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

Underwater Improvements & Fish:

Building up from our last update, we took to the water and tweaked underwater vegetation and fish behavior yet again.

Visual underwater effects are much better now in local water bodies, but ocean effects are still superior. Sadly, those can not be carried into local areas like ponds or lakes. Nevertheless, we hope you like how it currently looks and feels.

We still have to add sound FX for when the player submerges themselves, as well as sounds for underwater ambiance & player motions.

Age of Aincrad: Underwater Improvements (June 2022) - YouTube

Slime Variants:

More slimes! Something everyone enjoys.

While the textures are temporary, we have variants in the game and they look pretty good already. Once the real textures for them are in, they’ll look even better.

Down the line, every slime will get its own move-set and nature-related effect. As an example, lava slimes will leave a trail of flames behind them.

Age of Aincrad: Slime Variants Showcase (July 2022 - The backwards hoppity hop is a bug) - YouTube

Animation System Rework Progress:

We recreated the animation system from the ground up compared to the one in the previous test from a few months ago. Other than being a lot simpler to work with and faster to execute, we also added a bunch of nifty visual flair and features to make it look and feel a lot better. We tackled it now rather than later due to the fact we started implementing the gliding system alongside double-jumps.

If you watched the videos above, you should have more or less of an idea how what it looks like so far!

Optimizations & Rendering:

The engine recently let us add sharpening and an "upscaler" called AMD FSR, and boy did we upscale. After running some tests we were able to increase the resolution by 1.5 while keeping the same framerate you’d usually get.

The new setting works with both Nvidia and AMD cards and is enabled, for the time being, only on the highest graphics settings. We’re planning to down-port it to lower graphic settings as well to let you toggle it on and off if you wish to do as such.

Grass Motion & Wind Highlights:

We added some magical shader code here and there and now our grass has received a beautiful highlight effect, synchronized with the way the wind blows. The effect is quite delicate, but a keen eye will be able to spot it. It simulates color variation on the grass by darkening areas of it, then moving them forward. It just looks great in our eyes.

You can see it in this video - the darker waves “move” across the grass fields like waves on the ocean surface.

Age of Aincrad: Grass Motion and Wind Highlights (July 2022) - YouTube

Prototype Tutorial Map:

We are implementing a tutorial map into the game that’ll teach you the basics of movement and motion. We’re going to tie the tutorial into the main storyline as a dream sequence a bit later. For now, we’re just working out the basics like the layout, pacing, and blocking it all out with sample objects. For the very first draft of the map, take a look at the video.

Age of Aincrad: Prototype Tutorial Map (July 2022) - YouTube

Vegetation Regrowth:

The grass, plants and everything related to it have been regrown with a new set of rules and scaling. This is probably not the last time we regenerate nature on the world map, but it’s definitely the last time before the upcoming demo. Here's another short exploration video so you can take a look at the current environment.

Age of Aincrad: Plains Exploration (Part II, July 2022) - YouTube

Upcoming Patreon Test:

As mentioned last month, the Patreon test is still on track, but we’re waiting on a few things. Here are a few details you should be aware of:

1. We want to finish the new dungeon, start to finish, and implement the main quest to go alongside it.
2. The demo will mainly consist of exploration, the dungeon, the new puzzle systems, and the main quest. Everything past that you can consider turned off and disabled. Things like balance, crafting, or other miscellaneous things like fishing are not the focus of the upcoming test.

Now as for what we’re waiting for:

1. We want to finish **all** of the new features mentioned in this update by the time the update drops and fix the bugs popping up alongside said new features.
2. There is an issue with shadows popping like crazy when you move on Floor One - an engine update is necessary to get that fixed, but the engine devs are taking their sweet time.
3. The weather system needs a full reinstall once it’s finalized in its second version. We’re currently using 1.0 and 2.0 is coming out soon - but there’s no hard deadline on it so we’re just hoping it’s out as soon as humanly possible.
4. Due to all the aforementioned, if we can **NOT** guarantee a finished build with all features next month, we’ll be releasing a build in an “as is” state by the 20th of next month latest. This will be undergoing a vote by our Patrons though. We can make the emergency build, or if the majority of you prefer such, we’ll polish it up for as long as necessary till our original maximum August deadline. We’ll run a vote on Discord & here on Patreon on top of it to ask everyone's opinion.

Endword:

Thanks for reading and thank you for the support this past year. Again, without you, none of this would be feasible in as fast of a time frame as it’s currently going.

The update was quite lengthy and we’re going to revisit most of the updates mentioned today next month, as we go towards finalizing each and every one of them.

As mentioned in the last update post, our deadline for the Patreon test in August and we'll have rather no issues hitting said deadline. In the meantime, we'd like to ask you for a little bit more patience. 

We believe it will be worth it!

Thank you once again, and see you next month!