Morningstar Update April 2023

April this year has been fairly productive! 

A bunch of new OST tracks have been made to help establish the signature music of the game, and the Morningstar World Editor has been shaping up nicely. 

We have the ability to save and load discrete map fragments now for use in our future Proc-gen/Hand-painted hybrid approach, and there are mipmaps now that allow for smooth zooming from close up, seeing individual blades of grass, to far back, getting an eagle eye view of the world. 

There are still a lot of quirks to work out, especially at resolutions other than 1920x1080 or 16:9, but the framework is there to solve those later on.

This month also saw us develop the final art template for tiling roofs, now that Curtis has wrapped up work on the rule tiles and rendering for that system. There are still some sorting concerns with the system, especially with long weapons like Spears that cross multiple tiles, but we'll get to that as we make progress with Depth Sorting as a whole, which is a consistent challenge with isometric 2d games.

Curtis is still encountering issues with the Texture2DArray that drives our dynamic texture loading as we change chunks as well, but getting somewhere with it. 

Rotating doodads, their collision boxes, interaction spots, and the ability to edit these properties in Symbol is now working as intended, and Curtis is working on getting the utilities to control them in the editor for unification with the game's location indexes, depth sorting, statefulness of damage & construction, etc. 

We have the new flora in that same project to merge, with all their growth stages too.

A test of the flora shader we'll be using to add wind effects...

The goal for May is to get all those essential systems in play in one unified project, and stretch into June with the game's Character Editor, Character Controller, and begin pathfinding & AI in June-July. 

June - July we'll also be developing on the Combat Arena, which if we're lucky and all goes to plan, in August we'll have a playable build of just combat in the arena. 

James and I will be spending August-November refining combat while Curtis and Kent invest in the longer term goals of the main overworld and proc-gen of landscapes. 

By December we'd like to have a very robust vertical slice of the game, with all the major art done for the big 4 factions, the combat arena tests for Melee and Ranged combat, and the open world demo ready roll into 2024.

As you can tell from the gif at the top, James has been working on the aiming system, with a new handy "laser" system to show when your raycast is being interrupted by obstacles in the way. I've also added muzzle flashes to these.

We've begun planning for various particle impacts and such, which will be shader based primarily with some sprites & flip books. 

For the OST, I have some VSTs I'd like to add to my library. Abbey Road One is currently 60% off, and that orchestra library is calling my name. The ability to transition between notes seamlessly is going to be incredibly powerful for trumpets, french horns, and strings, which we make heavy use of in our soundscape. 

https://www.spitfireaudio.com/abbey-road-one-the-collection

There is also the Asgard sampler, which I'd like to remix and add effects to in order to deliver some intense, alien, otherworldly vibes, that are still natural.

https://danheimmusic.com/product/asgard-sampler-vst-mac-nordic-samples-by-danheim/

There will probably be some very strange tracks mixed in with the ambient and orchestral vibes, somewhere between Breath of the Wild and The Banner Saga, but dark and sombre like Total Annihilation & Guild Wars Prophecies. 

It's been slowly shaping up for vertical slice, after which we can think about hiring a composer for the last leg of development when we've had time to really grind through our milestones and identify every possible mood and transition. Wouldn't want to hire someone to compose and then find ourselves needing last minute revisions, so we'll keep going with my own compositions until we are absolutely sure of our exact needs.

My time is cheap after all. :p A pro composer will not be.

Sometime in the next 6 months I will also be needing to record combat audio.

I met https://www.fightironwood.com/ the IRONWOOD HISTORICAL SWORDSMANSHIP CLUB in a local park while taking my toddler out for a play date a few weeks ago, and struck up a conversation. One of the things we need are the various sword clangs and spear against shield sounds that can play, and their gear is perfect for it. 

I have yet to touch base again after that meeting since progress hasn't called for a comprehensive list yet. But I have all the audio gear required to pull this off already, we just need a nice, quiet sound stage to work in, doing foley for the various noises. Which will be fun, albeit demanding. 

There will be thousands of sounds in a game like this one, and each one will take ten minutes to over an hour to capture and clean up, format, export, and test in game. 

But -- we're getting there, slowly but surely.