Hello everyone, my name is Nosmer. I am developing an RPG where you will be able to immerse yourself in the world of Ferrum while developing your character and exploring the game world. In this game, you will take on a character that is no better than anyone else. There will be no heroic struggles or epic quests, no damsels in distress or epic adventures, just you against the dangers of the world. You will be able to develop your character through the branching class system, where you will have to achieve some sort of feat to develop your class further.

Ive been developing this game for quite some time in Unity engine, starting in February, 2021. During that year i've been accustoming myself to the gamedev in general and the engine. While doing so, i've been working on lots of game features, like menus, inventory system, stat system, combat sysem , AI and others. Also, I was using blender to learn how to make your own models and textures. Thats right, I'm not using any pre-built assets from Unity store, everything in this game is going to be made by me. Exept sounds and music perhaps, that part looks very complicated and it probably is going to take a decade to learn.

First thing that i've done was the codebase. Here is what i've coded so far:

- general game flow, like starting the game/exiting the game

- menus behaviour logic

- general graphics options, like changing texture quality, screen resolution, and other basic graphics QoL

- a way for a player to control the character and camera, mouse and keyboard

- character inventory and equipment system and a way for a character to interact with the world

-character stat system, with six main stats and eight secondary stats

- character combat, you will be able to use melee and ranged attacks depending on the weapon you use, as well as magic with the help of spell tomes

- some basic AI, that can distinguish friend from foe and can decide that you are not a friend anymore if you try to attack it too much

- character classes, that are applied both to player and NPCs

- ability system, with three types of abilities - instant, castable and channeled

- a crafting system, nothing fancy - just cooking, alchemy and some scrolls scribing perhaps

As i'm wrighting this post, I am in the process of preparing the assets for the game:

- Models, which I make with Blender, for characters, their equipment, and all the stuff that will inhabit the game world, along with trees, rocks, buildings and whatnot

- Textures for said models

- Interface textures, gotta make the thing you will look at for most of the time as interesting and pretty as I can

- Animations for everything i've made in blender

- Special effects for spells and abilities, and maybe some characters

- Sounds and music, gotta make the resulting world as lively and immersive as I can

With all preparations complete, I will start creating the game world:

- First thing created will be a village with a forest surrounding it. The village is going to be a starting place for your character with all the info you will need to comfortably play the game. It wont be a small village by any way, im planning on making it quite big, with the player being able to enter any building. The forest around the village will have simple enemies wandering around for you to level up and small locations to clear - maybe it will be a small cave with some wolves, maybe a clear field with some ingredients for the player to pick for crafting, maybe a bandit camp that will put your skills to a test, maybe something else.

- After that done, I will expand the forest part of the game, adding a deep forest biome with more dangerous enemies and bigger rewards. It will probably have some villages smaller than the first one with neutral NPCs for the player to interact. There probably will be a river or two, and deep forest is going to connect with the mountains which the player will be able to explore a bit. Also, there will be some small dungeons, or microdungeons, as I call them, for the player to explore. Now, dont let the name fool you, there will be more that two rooms to explore, probably up to ten rooms for one micro-dungeon.

- Then I will start working on the third part of the game, that will have a mountain peaks biome, and something I call megadungeons. Have you ever read Blame! manga? Well, megadungeons will be sorta inspired by this manga. The will go very deep beneath the mountains, and are going to be a biome on its own, with different enemies, challenges and even neutral NPCs living there in their own settlements. This part of the game development is going to take the most time, I believe, but once I finish it, it is going to mark a completion of the entire game! (Or maybe just the base game?)

Now, this is the initial plan for my game. There is no demo available at the moment, since I'm only creating assets, but once I'm done with creating the village with a forest around it, I'm going to release it for free for you people to see. I am very interested in your feedback, so please dont hesitate to call me out on something you do or dont like. How often should I make development updates? Should I open a donation box? Is there something you would like to know about the game that i didnt mention? Questions like this will help me a lot.

With all that said, cheers!

Hello everyone, not much time have passed and I have another update for you, this time a bit smaller than the previous one.

This update is also a little bit special, because I'm going to tell you about a very important part of the game world - mana crystals. You can find them almost everywhere - from green forests to dark caves, from mountaintops to the deep seas. They are considered a valuable resource by most of the races that inhabit the world, and thus there is a constant competition over the deposits of the said crystal.

Here are Order crystals, widely used by Humans and Dwarves for their reinforcing quality:

Nature crystals, favored by Goblin Shamans:

Fire crystals, revered among the members of the Fire Order, a religious organisation inside the human kingdom, for their unique quality of improving one's vitality, among other things of course:

Frost crystals, sought after by the Undead for the preserving quality, which helps them to keep their bodies from deteriorating:

Arcane crystals, extremely rare, used extensively by Wizards and Shamans:

And finally Chaos Crystals, nobody really figured out the use for them as they tend to be very volatile, but the Human Wizards theoretize that they might constitute the very foundation of the universe:

And that will be it. Not much in the sense of models, but still a very important bit of the game's universe.

With that said, cheers!

Another two weeks, another progress update. Finished working on my very first map for one of the world biomes - the Light Forest.

Everything here was placed manually, no scripts, no procedural generation, everything is done by hand. Added some custom wind effect for the tree tops, you will see it once I manage to learn how to make videos ;-)

This map is not the entire forest, but just a small piece of it. I plan on making four, maybe five more tiles like this one for the light forest, then three, maybe four for the river banks and after thats done I will begin work on the village assets.

The player will be given a choice to walk through the woods by themselves, or through a world map. Either way, there will be all sorts of events happening in the game world in the future. Wild animals, poachers, bandits, friendly npcs like local rangers or an expedition of the Fire Order, or maybe an abandoned camp - I have a lot of ideas on what you might meet in your journey.

And that will be it for now. If you have any questions, dont hesitate to ask me in the comments. 

With all that said, cheers!

Hello everyone, long time no see. Sorry for a late update, had some problems irl that set me back a little, but I am back and ready to rumble. Had a bit of a paradigm shift about how a map should look, so I made some changes and now it is a bit different. Apart from that, I have two new maps to show you today.

You probably recognize this part of the forest, now with a bit of a new look:

And this is a new, second map.

Areas with sparse growing trees are going to be traversible, while areas with denser forestation will be off-limits.

Third map, looks quite nice if you ask me, might add more bushes later.

And that will be it for today. Next time I have something special in mind, not just some maps, but something to add to the atmosphere of the game. Don't hesitate to leave a comment on what you think about this update, I look forward to reading it. With all that said, cheers!

Hello everyone, this time I have a small announcement to make:

I am going to change my update scedule and start releasing updates on a weekly basis. The updates may become smaller in size, but I'm shure that it will help me to focus on my work better and make more progress than before.

With that out of the way, I present to you another forest map with a new feature that from now on is going to appear on all maps - clouds.

Here you can see some clouds that run through the grass. The clouds are fully dynamic, flowing freely from one side of the map to another.

This map is a bit more spacious than the previous maps.

I am also planning on making a weather system that will control the behaviour of the clouds, wind, and such. 

And that will be it for this update. I think I should make one more map for a plain forest like this one, and then start making maps with features - like a road, a river, got plenty of ideas in my head.

With all that said, cheers, and see you in a week!

Hello everyone, today is saturday, which means its time for another update. In this week I finished two things: a new map and a fix for some serious visual bug.

The new map is a bit different from the others - its a bit more spacious, and I think its going to be perfect for mass fights with a lot of characters.

As to demonstrate the visual bug I have fixed, here are some screenshots of the old maps, the difference is on the edges - subtle, but quite important. Also, since this is the last generic map, it hink it would be nice to compile them all in one post here before I set off to make maps with features.

First map:

Second map:

Third map:

Fourth map:

And thats about it, five maps in total. What do you think? Have you noticed the visual changes? Maybe I should spend more time making generic maps like these? Let me know in the comments.

With all that said, cheers!

Hello everyone, this week is going to be a short work in progress update.

I have started working on the assets that will constitute the buildings of the game. Here you can see some parts that I can assemble into a decent-looking village shack - floor, some walls, straw roof, an oven, etc.

And here are some miscelaneous models - a well, a bed, etc.

As you can see, not everything is perfect - there are some glitches on the barrel, as well as the bed. I am going to fix them, and return in a week with more new assets.

With all that said, ceers! Dont forget to leave a comment, good or bad - I am eagerly awaiting for your feedback regardless.

Hello everyone, its time for another progress update.

This week I fixed the visual bug, which turned out to be an issue with the shadows. Added some new items - chests, some benches and tables, etc.

Expanded the village shack toolkit a bit too, here most of the work was dedicated to making it easy to assemble the parts into a building.

And this is all for the update. I think I will  need one, maybe two more weeks on this part of the project before moving on.

With all that said, cheers!

Hello everyone, this week's update will be very brief.

I ran into some real life complications and as a result only managed to add some more parts for the shack toolkit, and changed up the visual a bit. So here is a picture of a new visual, let me know in the comments if you like it or if you prefer the old look.

With that said, cheers! Next week's update will be much more eventful!

Hello everyone, in this update I will have a small announcement along with some new models to show.

I have decided to switch back to a two-week update scedule, maybe even make it a three-week or monthly. Two reasons:

1. Its too stressfull. I have to think about new models and if they will be enoughto make a fun update in such a short amnount of time, I cant really focus on either of those and they end up feeling underwhelming as the result. I'd rather spend a few weeks developing everything in-depth rather than rush it, giving you piecemeal updates that dont really show anything exciting.
2. It reveals too much. I figured, if I keep doing this, I end up with a situation when the demo for my game is ready, but there is absolutely zero mystery or intrigue of what you are going to see, since I've shown absolutely everything in these small updates.

So, in the next updates I will focus on making scenic pictures that will aim towards showing you the atmosphere and a general feel of the game. With that and a reminder that everything you see here is still work in progress, behold the screenshots.

Here, (left to right) in the top row you can see a cupboard and a simple shelf. On the second row there are: an oil drum, a milk drum, a flat barrel with some trash in it along with a similar barrel with a closed lid. On the bottom row there is a lamp post along with two lanterns, one with a wall mount and one on the floor followed by a candle, a stew pot and two excavation buckets.

And here is a toolkit for making a simple fence, around a hunting shack perhaps?

And last but not least, a tent with two types of campfires. Left one has a tripod with a pot for making food, while the right one is pretty simple. Also, a sleeping bag, gotta have to work a bit more on that one.

With all that said, cheers! See you in the next update!

Hello everyone, a long time have passed and its time for another update.

First things first - a new forest map. This is going to be a specific location, called "Ranger's shack", a place where Rangers of the kingdom can rest and recover from their endless task of keeping the land clean from poachers and bandits.

"Ranger" is going to be a ranged class for a player, as well as some NPCs. You will be able to meet other Rangers in a place like this, trade with them, and maybe even learn a new skill or two. There will be multiple shacks like this across the forest, to give the player more freedom in where they want to go.

This leads us to a feature that I have been preparing most of my time - interiors. The interiors in buildings like this shack will be accessible without any loading screens - just come and go as you please. This is how interiors are going to look like :

The interiors feature is fully finished, along with the shack toolkit. As you can see there are a few new models complete, with more on the way. The door is functional too, opening and closing as you pass and staying closed if its locked and you dont have a key.

With all that said, cheers! Next update wont take as long as this one, and that is a promise.

Hello everyone, in this update you will see the result of my workflow overhaul.

Before the overhaul, thanks to the unique way I handled my assets, I had to place every object on the map individually. Before, it took a lot of time, up to a week, and effort to make a single map. And, the maps themselves didnt actually fit in a videogame - they were more like vistas, pretty to look at, but absolutely impossible to place any type of gameplay on them. With a few tweaks - and thanks to the prefab feature of the unity engine - I managed to reduce the time required to make a map to two days tops. Thanks to that, I managed to overhaul my old maps, not only changing how they look, but also making room for the gameplay.

This was one of my worst maps - the plain from the 2022-10-08 update, now much less boring.

And here is a more recent Ranger Shack map.

Overall, now there are more places on the map where gameplay can take place - be it a fight or just some resources appearing. I may have to work a bit more on the balance of places to look at and places fit for gameplay, but overall I feel like this is a right direction to take.

With all that said, cheers and see you in the next update!

Hello everyone, this update will be a bit on a shorter side.

You see, what I've managed to complete during the last three weeks was a complete and total overhaul of all maps that I made so far. They all have been viewed, reviewed and remade to fit better for the gameplay that I have in mind.

Also I have added a new model - or rather, a set of models, cliffsides, that I will use to separate different parts of the map. As you can see, this is somewhat a modular set of models (can this be considered a pun? if yes, then sorry) that I can fit together however I want to create an interesting and varied landscape.

With all that, cheers! Next update - river maps! Dont forget to leave a comment, i'll make shure to answer them all!

Funny and distinctive combination of semi-realistic and hand drawn styles.

Hello everyone, in this update, as promised, I will show you some of the river maps that I made.

In the beginning, there will be only one river running along the border of the map, conveniently blocking off the map from the eastern side.

I'm also planning on adding a mechanic where you will be able to set up a camp in some predetermined places to rest and craft consumables for the journey ahead.

I've made a few maps to represent the river bank already, but I feel that I have to spend a bit more time on them, to polish them a bit, both in visual and gameplay sense.

With all that said, cheers! Dont forget to leave a comment if you feel like it!

Hello everyone, quite some time have passed and its time for another update.

Things are coming along swimmingly, however making a distinct and convincing shoreline have proven to be trickier than I thought. I've made some progress in fleshing it out of course, but it still feels like something is missing here...

On the bright side, I've added a few more maps to the game world, like this second version of a river camp.

Or this version of a Ranger's shack. I've also tweaked the color palette for the treated wood, which you can see on the roof here. Let me know what you think about it!

Overall, it feels like I need some sort of new inspiration to make more substantial progress (the shoreline particularily), so the next update might come out delayed.  With all that said - cheers, and see you next update!

Due to ongoing health concerns next update will be postponed untill said concerns are resolved.

Hello everyone, just letting you know that I'm back and working on the next update. Stay tuned!

Hello everyone, its been quite a while wasnt it? In this update I'm going to talk about some basics in map making.

You see, previously I was making the map while looking at it from quite a distance - you can notice it in previous updates by how many trees there are in the picture.

However, what I completely forgot is that the player wont be looking at the map the same way I do - in fact, the camera distance is going to be much shorter, and the player will have a completely different perspective. And so, I realised that I will have to make the map from the player's view, something that I have neglected so far. It's going to look like this:

The camera is much closer compared to what I previously had. I've made a few maps with this new paradyme, if you may, in mind:

It takes a bit longer to make a full map now, but the result is far more pleasant to the eye and much closer(no pun intended) to what I consider a perfect result. So, for now I'll have to go back to the older maps to remake them (again, but I think its totally worth it) in order for them to fit this new paradyme. Feels like every time I find a new and better way to make a location I just have to update older maps, a good feeling actually.

With all that said, cheers! And see you in the next update.

Hello everyone, its time for a progress update.

The work is coming along swimmingly, I'm updating the old maps with my new ideas, and I'd love to say that I'm satisfied with the results. The river looks so much better now:

And the campsites got a refreshing new look:

Overall, the work is still in progress, since there is quite a lot of new stuff that I have to add on each old map. Sometimes it feels like I'm making an entirely new map on the bones of the old one.

I'm not shure about the roads though - whether should I keep the old look or this one:

With all that said, cheers! Next time I might show something completely new, not just reworks of old stuff.

Hello everyone, today is the day I show you something entirely new.

With the maps rework done, I have begun developing a new set of models with a certain theme. Can you guess what it is?

Why Its castle ruins of course! I'm planning on creating a whole lot of assets for this - all kinds of walls, intact and not, piles of rubble, wall torches, you name it.

And, of course, towers. Towers seem to pose the biggest challenge for me now - not only I have to make assets for all kinds of variations for them, which is a lot, I also need to extend the interior system to accomodate the multiple floors inside. I'm also going to add a round tower type in the game - so that doubles the amount of work I have to do.

Not all ruins are going to be completely abandoned - after all, even a single wall can provide adequate protection to some. You will be able to meet just about anyone in there - wild animals, poachers, rangers, maybe even a friendly expedition working on revealing the history of the place.

On a side note, I'm working on the world map - I have decided that its going to be node based map.

With all that said, cheers! And see you in the next update.