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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ballista 3D

I guess I've been stubborn about this change long enough. As many of you have already noticed, the guns of Wilfred's tank are drawn in a different perspective from the rest of the parts. It was impossible to keep the same persprctive as they couldn't be rotated correctly that way - guns would raise and lower the barrel instead of turning around. But now everything will change.

Behold my new, fully 3D ballista! Enough of ugly perspective mixing - now everything is displayed and rotated as it should. And it still fits existing visual style.

So, how did I came to this? I was drawing a new base with a slot for long-planned, but still not implemented big guns, and I suddenly realized a few things: the size of the new slot breaks the perception of perspective much more than in the case of regular guns; I still can hardly imagine how should I draw the catapult planned for this slot in the existing perspective; and that I can’t do the intended way of attaching one to another within two dimensions in any perspective. All together, this was a sufficient reason to finally go learn how to create 3D models.

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Skills screen

Although work on the skill tree is still in progress, skills UI panel is ready. Actually, it was ready long time ago, and now I just improved it with my latest UI components like layered icons and general-purpose selectors, changed a bit elements layout and visual design and added couple of features such as tree scaling and skill params display. One of such features is sync between skill action, description and params: if a skill gives 10% to something, the description and params will also show 10%. And when I need to change it to 15% - description changes as well. This way I reduce my chances to screw up with skill descriptions in future.

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Poisoning skills

Waiting for news? Well, I've been busy this month and have done quite a lot - finished with migration to database, rebuilded skills editor with my OOP layer over Unity editor GUI, made some progress with skills screen of the game and the skill tree itself. That's the thing I actually want to show today - a couple of skills from Ugylk's skill branch and a new effect they cause. Poison arrows is a buff-type active skill, making every projectile inflict poison on enemies. And Poison flask is a grenade-type skill, which causes a poison cloud to appear and affect enemies passing through it. The new effect, as you see, is poisoning, inflicting toxic damage over time. It can be helpful on early stages of the game, but there are enemies immune to it. You can poison an orc, but something like zombie or skeleton will be more puzzled than damaged by such skills.

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Traders cutscenes

Finished with two more cutscenes. Both are about unlocking traders on the market. And both provide some choices which could lead to higher prices with this trader or not unlocking trader at all - I like to give players some opportunities for failure. While making cutscenes I still continue to add new features to cutscene system itself, even though I thought I already had all I need. This time it was a pack of new commands for such tasks as unlocking blueprints or changing amount of player's resources, and an ability for command to delay its execution until some other command is finished.

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Scavenger behaviour

Goblin scavenger has special behaviour in battle. Instead of running into the fight he appears from heavily overgrown sides of the battle field, walks into the scene and then runs away, frightened by Wilfred's war machine. Acting like this he's not a threat, he's opportunity. You can shoot the goblin before he succeed with his escape and get a lot of gold, wood, stone or whatever else he carried in his bag. I've tried to make this one more visible with bright orange color of his rags, but if that's not enough - there is a skill to add a special visual effect to all mobs and objects with high loot amount. This effect is enabled in attached video fragment.

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Goblins scavengers

Suddenly here come another two goblins, strayed from their tribe. These are scavengers. The left one you'll meet from time to time in battles, carrying a lot of treasures in his bag, and the right one is market trader offering some good deals about scraps and blueprints. I had them in mind for quite a long time actually, but as they weren't important for demo, I found a time to deal with them only now.

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