Developer Notes p.5

In overview, this last period of work hasnt gone as smoothly as I would like. A hiccup with a meta-data corruption led to me losing a week or so of work as the project would crash on opening. There has still been significant progress however! So much so that I am considering creating a prototype/beta to take to a testing group in Perth by the name of Playup Perth.
The Changes:

• UI Spell Menu now creates extra slots if too many spells are fed in
  
• Spells are now classed in the same system as Skills, making them more efficient and less .... spaghetti
  
• Created some tools for ingame movement and rotation, nothing big here.
  
• Updated the 'Enemy Alert' material. Its now a small red orb that shines like a sun. Color to be determined further.
  
• Added to the animation system. Instead of each ability specifying an animation, they now choose an anim type and index. If index = 0, the animation will revert to the default.
  
• Added a range check to the players attack both at the point of start, and the point of casting.
  
• Added a function that equips items to the player! I am yet to link it to the inventory system, but at this point that is now easier.
  
• Abilities can now hit multiple targets, if that is their type. Types include: SingleTarget, AreaOfEffect, TargetsWithinRangeOfTarget, TargetPlusClosestTarget.
  
• Found and integrated more player skin types. Types now include Light, Dark, Werewolf, Zombie, Lizard. These have also been added to NPC's
  
• Created a project to work on the 3D mesh morphing of a dragon. The Dragon was originally a large part of the story, and if I can, I would like to keep it there. This will depend on it viability however.
  
• A LOT of light adjustments! The Farm now looks a lot better, and I am now working on either creating separate settings for each level, or creating a dynamic lighting system. Both are work, with the former being easier and the latter being more rewarding
  
• Work has begun on two new scenes; 'The Trial Caverns' and 'The Hub World'.
  
  • The Trial Caverns marks the conclusion of the tutorial stage, with the player using their skills to pass a series of .... trials. Think lots of dark caverns with dripping water and moss, offset by a bunch of awesomely emissive crystals.
    
  • The hub world is a purely prototype area. It allows the player to access any part of the game from a single area.  Useful for testing. Lots of fog, and mountainous terrain with portals to areas. Unintended side affect of this is that it actually looks fairly good, so I may end up using a duplicate of it as my Main Menu.
    
• Aforementioned work on Fog and Portals went well. Portals use a bunch of awesome math (that I didnt make, so no credit here) that turns a 2D Texture taken from a reflection probe into a shader that changes the material of an object, based on how you look at it. The result is feeling as if you are looking into another world through the surface of the object.
  

There we have it. Theres some cool things happening that I'm excited to see through here, and I hope you are too!

Have fun,
Peter Carey