Fairy skills

In the meantime, work on the skill tree continues. For now I'm finishing May's skill branch for the first chapter of the game. Among the others, it includes the Freeze skill which I've shown before, a couple of buff active skills, some passive skills to improve various parameters and something special - the Knowledge is power skill adds a number of stupid and obvious fairy's statements to the set of loading screen tips, which however give a small buffs for the entire battle to the stats they mention.

Another thing of interest is the Enchanted Arrows skill - it woks similar to the Ugylk's projectile modifying skill, but instead of poisoning enemies, it adds bonus ice damage to projectiles, as well as a small chance to freeze the enemy. This time I put more efforts in visual effects on projectiles. And it took some extra work to impement applying effects not only on projectiles, but on areas of effect they spawn too.

1675167600

Retractable spikes

Recently, I promised to add a couple more tank parts to the game, and now one of them is ready - retractable spikes. It's a reforge of regular spikes, causing significantly more damage to enemies. Another important difference from regular spikes is that retractable spikes consume energy to work in proportion to their number on the tank - which depends on the size of its chassis.

And I should probably mention some details of this parts type, since it seems that I've never done this before. Bumper-type parts are attached to the forepart of the tank and play an important role in its protection - they deal damage to enemies in range, grants bonuses to total tank health and armor. They also reduce damage from collisions with objects in attack mode.

1673180400

Blueprints screen

The last element of the progression screen - blueprints tab - is ready. There you can check the dwarf's mission of gathering back his blueprints progress, get a couple of clues about their location and content, and reassemble some of them from scraps. Same with the skills tab, to this moment its UI has already been working, and now I've just unified some of its elements with the rest of the UI. Also I've arranged the blueprints in some sort of tree. Right now it already contains blueprints of almost all the parts that will be available in the forest location, at the moment their amount is 17. Soon I will add a couple more, and the rest will appear later, as part of working on the following locations.

1671625200

Backyard rework

Surely almost no one remembers already that in addition to the forest location there is a training location - the backyard of the dwarf's dwelling. It happened because when I started to publish posts about the game, the location was almost complete, and there was nothing to add. And after, with the implementation of shadows and some other features, its completeness was seriously affected, and a lot of things was in need of rework. Which is what I've been doing lately. And now - here it is, extended and looped for the attack mode, with shadows, standalone decorations, new grass and some other changes.

1670160254

Goblin girl Rika

Not much to show from the past weeks, but here is another minor story character. Her name is Rika, and she represents female part of the goblin tribe, enslaved by the cyclops. Once freed from slavery, she will provide some nice offers of common resources in the market. And maybe a couple of funny moments of interactions with other goblins in the team, if there is any.

1665231600

Onager in action

Onager in action. Unlike other guns, it throws projectiles by parabolic trajectory and the projectile hits directly at the point it was sent to, damaging all enemies in a certain area. In addition, survivors are also stunned and unable to do anything for a while. Being a large gun also means high damage, significant energy consumption and low fire rate.

The game currently offers two control schemes for the large guns - a gun and a skill. In first scheme, the onager works like any other gun - it constantly consumes energy and shoots while fire button is pressed. With the second option it activates on pressing skill button, the energy for the shot is consumed immediately, and the rest is going similar to Ugylk's grenade throwing.

And as always, creating seemingly a single entity, in addition to the model and icon, also demanded some new sounds, a new AOE variant with specific effects, and a bunch of code to implement the desired behavior.

1660738800

Onager

Onager asset is ready to battle, although battlefield is not yet ready to take it. Designing a gun in 3D from the beginning is new experience for me, and of course it was accompanied with some mistakes and sudden findings, which had to be handled by some workarounds. In result the onager became longer than I expected, obtained a few more beams in the base and a black hole to hide its lack of insides, and I had to dive into shaders to create dynamic outlines for particular parts. Now it's time for the most interesting part - to make this huge thing work in the game as intended.

1659097200

Upgraded guns

Now reinforced ballista and bombthrower are also remade in 3D. And the reinforced wooden chassis is adapted for their new appearence. And there was a little more to do than I expected with the last thing, as the old arrangement of gun slots resulted gun intersection at certain rotation angles. So I had to move gun slots closer to the sides of the chassis and adjust the stonethrower and bombthrower positions relative to the slot connector. Thus, the transfer of existing guns to the third dimension is completed, and I can start working on the first large gun, and it's going to be quite a job.

1657542000

Large wooden chassis

Finally managed to continue work on new tank chassis. It's not very different from reinforced wooden chassis, it also able to carry an engine and single battery, although one common gun slot replaced with big gun slot. But now there is a place for some dwarf's junk. Should provide some visual coziness, I think. And it seems I should find more distinct names for such parts, all these "reinforced large wooden chassis" are very clumsy, uninformative and don't fit into UI.

1656246000

Stonethrower 3D

Following the ballista, the stonethrower also moves into three dimensions. It was slightly more difficult, mainly because of the gears and rough surface of rock pile. But now I've got a little more understanding with Blender, and it will be easier to start implementing the first gun existing in 3D from the beginning. There are still some minor issues with lighting, but I'll think about them some other time.

1654158171