Welcome back to another devlog! Today is a major day, as the first level has been complete!

A quick update on the development process for those who want one. We have recently moved! For many years we have been working remotely across the United States, which always causes issues and delays in production. Just recently we have moved and now we're working together locally, which is increasing our stability on our servers, the productivity of asset and program creations, and creativity flow. The last few months have been us trying to pack and move our lives to a new location, which meant we had to shut down our computers, including the server, until we finish with the move. We are just about set up again, so development can resume like normal once everything is back up and running.

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The first level has been completed! We're still doing some minor touch ups, but that's going to be natural as we play the game and test stuff out. Enjoy some of these pictures (lighting has yet to be built, so take this with a grain of salt)

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Recently we have been looking at weapons in the game, and how to give players a variety of choices when it comes to character building. Our biggest inspiration comes from DND, which allows players to all make unique characters, or min-max if they choose.

As our own way of letting players design unique character builds, we've implemented different weapon manufactures into the game. Every weapon type will now have a few different companies who produce the weapon. Every company has it's benefits and blemishes. Some will increase strength stats, while others will decrease health. One may be expensive and lower quality, but of a unique design, while another may be cheap and higher quality, but a bland design. You can pick and choose your preferred company, gameplay, and style as you play the game.

This has already been implemented into the game, with more models and art being added slowly over time.

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We've begun work on the second map for the game! Here's a couple examples for now, as we want to reveal more once it's complete.

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We've made a few weapons for the player as well as bosses that will be in the game. You'll be able to get an idea of the first map possibly from the design of them.

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We've finalized the crystal designs. After a lot of changes to the map and design of the first level, we've run into issues with crystals being clear and the way UE5 renders overlays and volumetric fog with clear materials. Instead of fighting it with a system that inherently creates more lag, we decided to brain storm some ways to have the crystals look good.

(sorry for the gif quality, Game Jolt has really bad requirements for file sizes)

We opted to go with a particle effect on them, which has minimal performance impact and easily optimizable. Each crystal has the proper color, and we're pretty excited about the outcome.

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Anghoul has been updated again with some more design elements. Nothing major for the players to mess with just yet, but the world is coming together.

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We've implemented the "Battle Tower" system into the game! These can be found around the world and different levels of the game. Each tower will have a design unique to the location, different mobs, and specialized loot. Be careful when entering, as mobs are stronger in the tower than their outside world counterparts.

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During this big push, we got the 5 starting races modeled! We're still working with all their animations, but we gave them some quick little animations for display purposes.

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We've completed the foundation for the melee combat. Before it was in all technicality complete, but it wasn't properly set up for custom animations. Now the whole system is set up to work with any and all future animations, as one big plug and play system. Unfortunately due to Game Jolt's file size requirements being stuck in 2004, an SD gif at 15 FPS is too powerful of a future technology to put onto a post. Once Game Jolt learns to update their file size capacity, we can post some gifs of it.

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• All armor is now equippable and affects stats.

• A ton of new environmental and decoration models

• Fixed racial stat generation

• Weapons now have unique attack speeds

• Attacking now takes stamina

• Armor protection has been fully implemented

• Started foundation work for the next map

• Added various VFX to the game

• More SFX to the game

• Boss(es) of the first level animated and in the game

• Blacksmith NPC model implemented

• Shop NPC model implemented

• Tavern NPC model implemented

• Optimized VFX systems

• Optimized loading between levels

• Updated footstep SFX to prevent auditory looping

• 3 new spells added to the game

• Updated skills and spells slot selection menu