WEEKLY UPDATE
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Decorations and vegetation changes
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Making of the wildlife
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Pre/post Floatlands buildings
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Mobs
Hey guys! We found some time to fully implement deer into the Floatlands environment. Vili did a fantastic job implementing a behaviour system (AI) for the critter so they react unpredictably in a procedurally generated world (e.g. deer can get angry/nervous if you stare at them for a long time!)
The “buzzard" is a basic craftable aircraft capable of traveling medium to short distances at slow speed. It provides some mobility so you can visit and explore floating islands at medium range. You can however upgrade the key components to improve the performance and add various utilities to the aircraft.
Buzzard finally comes to life, as it's been a couple of weeks since the first concept design and last week the model was created. This helicopter is meant to be as an accompanied aircraft for traveling medium to short distances at slow speed. It is relatively small and light, therefore we set a very responsive handling for it. However it becomes difficult to handle in a situation where you run out of gas – speed decreases to 50% and the whole thing starts shaking, urging you to emergency land and refill.
Last week we started animating the player's hands and weapons for the first person view. For the melee weapons we only had to animate the hands and the weapon slot, but the firearms have moving parts and have their own animations also.
Hammer play & pickaxe
The player and weapon animations are separate, but are then combined in Unity. This makes animating a bit slower but it makes it easier for us to add more weapons and animations later.
Revolver shoot & reload
Bolt action rifle shoot & reload
We have some more weapon animations to show you, continuing from last week. Out of existing concepts, 3 weapons needed to be animated: single-shot pistol, assault rifle and pump-action shotgun.
Assault rifle reload & melee
We have also decided to add a pump-action shotgun to the game, so Mito was given a task to sketch out a quick concept, then Andrej modeled it pretty accurately and he is now preparing animations for the game. Unfortunately we can't show you some examples yet, but here is the shotgun development process from concept to model to game implementation.
This effect plays on dead animals. We needed a good looking way to de-spawn animals from this world and this effect is quite right for it. Looks even better in nature.
Here you can see some icons for elements used in build mode. We also mixed it up with icons for resource materials that you will gather in the game (wood, crystals, fat…).
PROCEDURALLY GENERATED DUNGEONS
Dungeons will serve as a point in the gameplay cycle where you can stop exploring and surviving in the world just to challenge yourself in a procedurally generated fully-closed area full of enemy NPCs. You will be rewarded by rare loot at the end of a dungeon by encountering a final boss or doing a certain task. There will be a lot of dungeon types, for now we are sticking with cave-like dungeons.
To give you a preview this is how it works – algorithm generates a right tile in a right direction and it makes sure that every room is connected with a previous one so there are zero dead ends or unreachable rooms. This is how it looks inside with prototyping tiles and with work-in-progress real cave tiles.
RESOURCE GATHERING
We've rewamped the resource gathering system and implemented a better one which uses Vili's proximity sensors and new particle system. You can now mine different type of veins and chop down trees. Everything is then connected with an inventory system which also works flawlessly. The next thing about resource gathering is an implementation of crafting system, soon to come!
These are models with less detail and without all the fancy moving parts that you will only be able to see when you hold it in your hands and use it. These will be used as items in the world you can pick up.
The visuals of Floatlands world changed during development, consequently our previous build mode elements needed a revamp, so we were doing rework on the models. We did some optimization, but mostly focused on unifying the style with the rest of the game.
Floatlands has a custom item managment system, it uses a really simple file parsing mechanism that parses data from external files. This makes adding items or changing their description, crafting times, sprites, drop chances and other minor variables (smelt tiems, rarity,…) with ease. We are also going to use this model for modding purposes which is going to be added after the release of Floatlands.
The world of Floatlands will consist of Clusters. Each Cluster has its own set of islands and debris. Island sizes and their biomes depend on the Cluster seed which spawns and deforms every island in there. This technique is very efficient, because if we want to load a game, we simply use the seed that created the Cluster, then we apply the changes to the Cluster (certain trees were chopped down, metal veins were mined, building elements were placed, etc.)
Floatlands will have procedurally generated quests. A quest is a gameplay feature where you will be able to interact with some NPCs, learn about the world, do a task and get rewarded with items and/or experience points (not yet implemented). There will be 3 types of quests available; gather, location (go somewhere/explore) and kill quests. Quests will be triggered by talking to NPCs. These are friendly human characters that have a large role in quests and delivering a story.
We've been preparing various animations for the enemy robots, to make them work in any situation. We added run cycles, crouch aiming and made a damaged version of all animations, so we can blend between normal and damaged animations, depending on how much damage they have already taken.
Damaged assault robot walk
To give Floatlands some more depth we have decided to add human NPCs in the game. NPC's will be split into clans which will be scattered around the islands. You'll learn more about the clans and their backstory as you'll interact with them via quests.
The first clan will be more traditional, simple farmers who have shunned technology, because they blame it for the apocalyptic event that caused the world to break into floating islands. They live simple lives, rebuilding their settlements and farming the land for survival.
The “techies" will be a second clan you'll encounter in the game. “The farmers" banished them from their settlement because of their reckless nature and progressive way of thinking. They are innovative people that want to simplify their life with the aid of machines and technology. After the split they found shelter in old factories which they rebuild and used as a center of their future settlement. The shelters and other buildings are constructed mostly out of scrap metal and concrete they managed to find in the area.
To make the settlement seem alive there will be several NPCs walking around and doing various tasks, some of them will even have quests for you to complete. You'll be able to easily recognize them by their unique appearance. Instead of rustic and rugged clothes, they'll wear more neoteric clothes enhanced with various steel elements.
We also started researching ways to make random NPC characters, by dynamically blending different body shapes and facial features in combination with different outfits. This is made by making blend shapes which are then randomly blended inside the game engine or accessed and set individually.
We've focused primarly on optimizing and improving the floating islands. There is still work to do with adding new decorative nature elements such as tree stumps, tree trunks that are laying around the island and other eyecandy things. Here is an example of procedurally generated bunch of rocks with generated LOD levels for when being near or far with the camera/player (bear in mind the rocks behind the obvious changed one are static).
Until now, our scene/world was missing those little things that you don't pay attention to, but they make the game experience better. So this week we were preparing various particle effects – some smoke and fire particles and a few dusty wind effects for different biomes. We also intend to add fireflies which will brighten up the night scene a bit.
We also started working on smaller critters that will inhabit the game, starting with a rabbit. The critters are similar to the other animals so far, but will be smaller and have less detail.
Recently we updated our build mode elements, but they still lacked windows and doors constructables to make the buildings look complete. The previous week we implemented the missing elements and fixed some bugs. We also made it possible to interract with those, you can open and close them! Like all other elements, these can also be upgraded to higher tiers.
To further extend the world and add some variety, we will add new biomes. One of those will be a really dense and vast forest. To make everything seem diverse we had to come up with a list of unique assets to characterise the biome. Tall trees and lush foilage will populate these islands, and little sunlight will peak through the tree tops. Here's a quick concept sketch:
Furnace is a ‘machine’ that converts primitive materials, found in the world of Floatlands, to more uncommon ones. This conversion is defined by internal recipes and it takes time to produce. We managed to recreate a furnace model with revamped background functionality.
We’ve seen a performance drop whenever you wanted to drop a lot of items out of your inventory. To optimize this, we’ve created a world item stacking, this means that nearby items with the same ID get merged. To add sugar on top of it, we’ve managed to increase the size of a stack – the bigger the stack, the bigger a certain item is in the game:
single item; smaller stack; bigger stack
We have decided to revamp the electric system used in the game – you can have a look at our initial electricity implementation with generators HERE. Our new direction is to have cables and the whole system will be more dynamic as well. I was mostly designing & planning though, so not a lot of programming was done.
cables used for electricity
In preparation for adding humans to Floatlands we started preparing buildings for their villages. So far we made two barns, water tower, granary and a central firepit.
Villager buildings: barn 1, water tower, barn 2, granary