Arbiter - Monthly Recap - July 2021 (Patreon)

THE CRYSTALS MASON—WHAT DO THEY MEAN!?!?

Ahem, hello! How are you? Oh really? No kidding?! I'm doing all right, thank you. I have an update to show you. Would you like to see? Come hither...

I spent the first bit of the month working on destructible objects (specifically crystals). These will be scattered around the map and will reward you with Spirits that can be used as currency to purchase new abilities! They'll also restore a bit of your Energy (mana, basically) as well. 

Since I already had destructible objects more or less implemented with the grass, adding the functionality for the crystals wasn't too hard. I also spent a decent amount of time making a pretty (?) crystal shader for the light and dark variants. The big trick though was the targeting...

I hate myself, you see. That's because I wasn't satisfied just being able to run around and hit the crystals, no. I wanted them to be fully targetable objects that you could lock onto and combo, because why not. The lock-on system was only designed for characters, however, so I had to effectively rewrite the entire thing to make it work with any sort of spiritual entity (objects, enemies, etc.), and now it does! Ultimately I think it was worth it as there's nothing quite as fun as beating up inanimate objects that can't fight back.

You can check out some of those sweet, sweet, crystal combos here. 

On top of all that, I also wanted to make sure the crystals properly interacted with the Phase system. For those that don't know, this basically means that Light and Dark attacks deal increased damage to the opposite colour, but less damage to the same colour. That basically means that it's a hell of a lot easier to break a crystal by attacking it with the opposite colour, just like the enemies!

But since the crystals can interact with enemies, this logic had to be applied to collateral damage too. Thankfully the game already handles a lot of this stuff automatically, so I just had to make sure the right triggers were firing with the destructible objects. With that, you can now hit enemies into crystals and based on the phase of the enemy vs the phase of the crystal, it'll quite literally "hit different." 

You can see the collateral damage in action here! 

After wrapping on the crystals, I made a few more terrain textures and then moved over to clouds. I've dabbled with more advanced cloud solutions in the past, but oftentimes they can be pretty expensive and not necessarily worth the effort for a more linear game like Arbiter. 

With that, I decided to take it easy and made a simple noise shader that blends with the skybox and receives a bit of environmental lighting. I'm actually really happy with the result given how cheap it is, and while the nerd in me with volumetric parallax ray traced clouds... I'm good.

After that stuff, I decided to review my schedule for the rest of the year. I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made level-design wise, but I don't think it's actually conducive to finishing the game per se. That said, I had to learn this stuff eventually so I'm glad I took the time to do it. 

With that, however, I'm going to be switching gears a bit and focusing on some other stuff before pivoting back to level design. I'm going to be doing some minor enemy reworks for about a month and then I'm going to create the remaining stage/traversal mechanics for the rest of the levels. After that, I'm going to just block out every single level in the game so that I can get a better approximation of everything I'll need. Again, while I'm happy with the progress I've made this year, I've been spending all of this time on my environmental pipeline and I'm ready to get back to actually making real progress.

In a similar vein, I've started more seriously talking to publishers and the like in the past month or so. I think regardless of where I'm at personally, eventually I'm going to need some additional funding for stuff like voice acting, audio engineering, localization, and more. Most of it's endgame stuff thankfully, so I'm not in a rush or anything, but it'd be nice to have a little more financial security on that front. I'll be sure to be transparent about all that when the time comes so you all know where your money's going.

Speaking of which, I'm planning to do some behind the scenes posts! These will be only for Patrons, and will delve a little deeper into some of the systems/mechanics/art I'm making for the game. I don't really have a fixed schedule planned, but I'll try to do them as often as possible! Or at least whenever I have something worthwhile to show, hah.

Anyways, that about does it for this month! It's actually been a pretty crazy few weeks but I feel pretty good about everything. My entire environmental art pipeline is pretty much good to go for the remaining levels, and I feel really good about the progress I can make this year with the new schedule. 

Lastly I just want to thank everyone for your continued support! ! I really can't stress how grateful I am for your contributions here. It's done a lot to help secure me financially throughout the game's development, but it's also just personally reassuring to see how many of you want to see the game succeed. It's been especially helpful during the environmental art phase as it's gone from being my weakest skill to feeling confident that I can finish the remaining levels without much worry. I think by the end of the year it's going to really start feeling like a fleshed out game, and I honestly can't wait. 

Cheers,
Jordy