Rise of Dagon Development Update October 25, 2014

This week I  worked on some tasks that help bring things together in a bit of polish and some various steps towards getting the core game play one step further towards being implemented.

One of the polishing steps was to work on the way the player moves, including the smooth turning to the left and right which really enhances the feel of navigating through the dungeon as you move and looks really nice.

One of the steps moving closer to core game play is I have put in a test monster spawner that will spawn 3 skeletons in any level that I create in random empty spots in the dungeon.

The point of this is I want to test out their ability to move throughout the dungeon, and then test their ability to see the player if they are in 'line of sight' and then furthermore seek the player out (navigate to them) if they can indeed see them.


I also have been working for several weeks on attempting to create character portraits.  I have used  Art Rage 4, Adobe Photoshop, and finally I started using Mudbox and I think with Mudbox I am finally getting close to satisfactory results.

First I have a Dwarf who is looking pretty solid (but not finished of course). You'll notice he is missing any kind of clothes and armor but his face, beard, and color tones are all fairly decent. I would like a slightly more polished look in the end but this is a really nice effort at this point!

Next  I have also been working on an Elf who is not as far along as the Dwarf but this sort of shows how the carving phase looks before I start putting on hair and painting the model more. It's a little hard to tell because the dwarf has a beard but the elf has higher cheek bones, a more pointed chin, a thinner nose and of course the pointed ears are easy to spot!

 He does look a bit creepy with no hair but I will be working on that soon!

 With the continued use of Mudbox I have been getting better at it and have started to try and use it to take models from Silo 3D and start figuring out a workflow and pipeline for asset creation.  This Dungeon Door took me about two evenings of work to get to the state you see it in here.  I would definitely like it to have more detail but again its such a nice quality level as is that I'm really  happy to be able to hit this type of quality with the tools I have. It makes me feel really optimistic about the look and feel of the game that I will be able to create!

The changelist is a little light this week mainly because it was a split week between art and code.

Changelist:
- created a test method for spawning 3 enemies in random places in the currently loaded level
- refactored some movement code from MoveActor into PlayerMovement to fix some movement bugs
- found another bug in movement code that I wasn't aware of previously and fixed it (after moving in to a wall sometimes you could not move again)
- created new methods to apply SLERP to player turning LEFT/RIGHT
- created new monster interface class IMonsterMove to handle the AI for monster movement

And that's all for this week I hope you enjoyed reading, see you next week!