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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Market screen

Long time ago, before even starting blogs, I've already had a fully working market screen. Since then a lot happened - new icon system, general purpose UI components, some UI concept changes, migration from xml's to sqlite database, so I had to rebuild it. This new version is cooler both inside and outside, the code is more organized and the UI has more decent look and some new useful features.

The main idea of the market is that various traders and their offers are unlocked through the game and fills the market to certain (upgradable) limit. The offers are limited by time and as they expired or fulfilled the market will replace them with new ones. There's a lot of offers, for both buying and selling various goods, you can buy the resources you need or sell excesses, or even find some blueprints and items obtainable only from the market offer.

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Deep in the woods

Deep in the woods there are few ogres sitting around a campfire and eating meat. Quite a peaceful scene, but wait until our dwarf arrives to find out that these ogres are guilty of destroying some of his blueprints. I first posted about this cutscene almost two years ago, but it's finished only now. At first I was distracted by something else and then there was always other urgent or interesting tasks preventing me from finishing this one. Funny how some small tasks can be lost in time and found again during development cycle.

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Stats panel

And I thought that preview window is not informative enough for the equipment screen, so now it's also has tank parameters panel to show you all important stats together. How much damage you deal per second, how well your base is defended against attacks, how fast the tank will move in attack mode - everything can be found here. I've also done some integrations with forge screen to correctly rebuild the preview and stats as player upgrades, reforges or scraps equipped items.

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Equipment screen

Funny thing - sometimes you have some very basic parts in your game only in form of early prototype for a really long time. For instance - this equipment screen existed like that since the first year of development - no proper UI graphics, preview window was ugly and broken; and since implementation of the new inventory system this screen wasn't even working at all. Without it I was forced to switch tank parts through save editing. But it ends now, as I finally made it look and work as it supposed to.

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