Writing and Spawners (Patreon)

I was mostly working on writing out quest and story lines.  Figuring out what characters I'll need to create and what extra systems will be needed for the different quests.   The two systems that will be needed before too much longer are lockpicking and a basic follower system.  I've seen a few tutorials about creating a lockpicking system similar to Skyrim and it didn't seem too difficult.  I think Skyrim's lockpicking was decent, it wasn't frustrating or annoying and it didn't block the player from working on higher level locks.  Unless anyone has suggestions for lockpicking systems from other games that I should check out?  

I was also working on the spawn systems a bit more.  You may have noticed that the guards warn people about being outside of town at night but then when night time rolls around nothing happens.  I'm working on changing that.  This initial test version will be almost a horde mode where there will be waves of enemies that attack the player.  The basics of the system are ready and now I need to adjust the AI and do a quick art pass on everything.  

Oh, one technical thing I ran into with the night spawners.  I had pictured all these enemies rising up out of swirling mist and so I started working on putting some volumetric fog materials together but everything I dropped into the map looked great during the day but turned flat black at night.  Turns out volumetric fog in UE4 only supports one directional light at a time and the day/night cycle uses two directional lights for the sun and moon.  I'm trying to figure out the next steps now.  The volumetric fog looks really cool but eats up framerate and I've run into a few dead ends like this with it.