Hi everyone, it’s been a while so in this post I want to give you a summary of the things that I’ve been working on for the past months.
The Hub
One of the biggest new additions was the central hub world. I've always loved central hub worlds in games where you can spend time between action packed missions. The goal was to create a calm, futuristic looking apartment from where you can access a number of different features like a message terminal, a weapon upgrade station or a map from where you can start new missions.
For those of you interested in the more technical aspects, the hub level uses baked lightmaps for global illumination, has 470 different objects and around 500k polygons (including the player character). For reflections I had to only use reflection probes (Screen space reflections unfortunately produced too much flickering and artifacts).
Animations & Movement
The second big feature were character animations that were obviously still missing in the first video of the game. All the animations in the game are hand-animated in blender using the Rigify rig with some custom controls for the bow and arrow and exported to Godot, where they are controlled using (quite complex) animation trees and animation blend spaces.
While playing the game I noticed that movement was quite “grounded”, so I started experimenting with some additions to the movement set and ended up with jump pads that can be placed in levels that allow the player to jump much further and higher than normal. I think this will enable me to create more interesting and more vertical levels in the future.
What’s next?
I’m currently working on implementing more core features of the game. So far, the quest system (which allows me to easily create quest trees to tell the narrative) and inventory system are already done. I’m also currently designing the UI elements so that I can save time by implementing the final UI Components in Godot instead of working with dummy elements and then having to redo everything once the design is ready.
That’s all for now, if you have any questions feel free to write a comment below.
