Rise of Dagon : Nov 29th 2014

As promised after a week break I have returned with an update.

I was hoping to have been moved the previous week but unfortunately the place I was going to was not ready yet. So that is still at some point in the future for me.

One of the big things that happened was the Unity 5 beta 14 release.  I updated to this release and it made a gigantic difference on the look of the levels to the point where everything looked like it was made out of super-shiny metal!

So I had to refactor a lot of the shader settings and found that they had swapped the default Unity 5 material from 'specular' model to 'metallic' model.

I believe they also massively ramped up the specular levels of everything in general. So you'll find that the screenshots look different due to tweaks I made; however I can't say this is the final look & feel because I expect things to change again as the beta isn't over yet!

Unity 5 Beta aside I've been focusing on some polishing to the core game loop.

The core game loop is in .. in case I hadn't said that before!

So the core game loop being in is great but it was missing a little bit of polish that made some of those things not so easy to see to the player.  For instance if a player had died, the only way for you to know that previously was the red health bar looked 'empty'  , which it could also look pretty darn empty if you had only 1 health left for example.

So I now have a skull replace the player portrait when they are dead to let you actually know that particular character is dead.

Also there are now damage blood splashes on the character portraits, with the amount of damage you have received

Over the next week I plan to add more polishing bits as I mentioned above that provide feedback about what is going on to the player and improve the game play in general.

So now I'm going to be tightening the core game play loop and try to get game play to that really tight and fun spot that it needs to be at.  This is a really exciting point to be at for the project, but there's still lots of work to do that is not part of the core game loop.

So for the past two weeks we have the changelist:

• first pass character portraits added to GUI
• animated damage splash on character portraits
• animated damage number indicator on character portraits
• monsters now face player when attacking at all angles
• migrated from legacy animation to mechanim system
• added monster attack animations
• added monster death animations
• added monster miss animations
• end game condition for party death added
• skull portrait for dead character condition added
• end game condition for party victory added
• first pass end game menu added

Thanks for reading, see you next week.