NIGHTFALL DEVBLOG #5

(Sorry for the delay! The DevBlog did not save so this is my second time writing this entire thing out again. Second time is the charm, am I right? ❤️ )

Introduction

Hey friends! It's good to be back! It's been a busy time for all of us over here at Venatus between celebrating Thanksgiving and now... finals. As you know, almost half of our team are currently college students, so that means that that these past two weeks/next two weeks are very stressful for us as we wrap up with our classes and final exams. We're looking forward to being done with these classes so we can get back to pouring our time into Nightfall instead of these boring tests! With Winter Break on the horizon, we'll have a lot more free time to spend putting content into Nightfall again. However, please keep in mind that both Christmas and New Year's take place over Winter Break and we'll be spending some time with our family and loved ones. Please be patient with us while we take some time off over the holidays!

Just because it's been a busy three weeks doesn't mean we haven't worked on Nightfall! We've added a new programmer and artist to our team. You can say hi to both Andrew and John over on Discord who will be working on shaders and game art respectively. Our artists have been working non-stop creating new models, textures, and other goodies for Nightfall. Our programming team buckled down and worked on rewriting and optimizing a lot of under the hood features including an entire rework to collisions. In more generic terms, we've rewritten how the player interacts with non-full blocks like slabs, slopes, and stairs. This also fixes things like the block highlight appearing around the entire block instead of just the grass. This was a lot of work and its hard to represent just how much energy went into something like this as it doesn't seem like that big of a feature, but trust us, a lot of the work our programmers did needed to be done.

You may have also noticed that the GameDev website where we host our blogs recently updated. It has a whole new look now which means our blogs will be even sexier! However, this does mean that the formatting on our old blogs got messed up a bit. We've gone back and fixed everything we saw that changed but that doesn't mean we didn't miss anything. If you find something out of place in our old blog posts, feel free to let us know via Discord or the comments below! There's still some things we're learning about the redesign, hence having to write this blog for the second time as it did not auto-save our last one. Negativity aside, we'll be taking full advantage of all of the new features but that does come with a bit of a learning curve. Let us know what you think of the new blog style/format!

That's enough rambling for now! The good news is that we'll have plenty of time to add features over Winter Break and it is almost upon us. Our goal for December-January is to work on a lot of the features you guys have been anticipating the most; our dynamic trees, better AI and combat, the underground, and the base progression system. These are features we've dubbed, "Alpha Priority" and are things we want to get done before we announce any sort of release date for an Alpha version. However, we're getting closer and closer to that goal each day, and we're excited to share this blog post with you so you can catch up with what we've been working on! Enjoy!

Creatures

Arachnids

Our creepy crawly friends are scrambling their way into Nightfall. In the image above, you can see two new Nightfall creatures, the Spider and the Spider Mother. In today's blog post, we'll be telling you more about both of these creatures and their role in the world of Nightfall. These eight legged buggers are just the beginning of some of the opposition you may face in game.

Spiders

So spiders? What's special about these new creatures? Spiders are a hostile creature the player may have to deal with in Nightfall. While they may appear large in the big render above, these spiders are about the size of a single full-block. Check out this image of an old build from DevBlog #4 to get a better idea of scale. Unlike most creatures, Spiders in Nightfall will be able to both climb and jump. However, these spiders won't just walk up to a wall and float up the side. Spiders will climb as they would naturally in real life and their body will turn vertical if they are on a vertical surface. Similarly, we're planning to allow spiders to hang from the underside of a horizontal surface as well. This would mean that spiders could climb around your builds in order to reach you. Theoretically, this also sets us up to allow spiders to hang on the ceilings of caves, waiting to ambush a player. Spiders will spawn on the surface of the world, underground, and in Spider Nests. Alone, a single spider will not be to difficult a foe to dispatch. It is good to be cautious, however, as a nest of spiders may not be as easy to get rid of.

Spider Mother

Our Patreon supporters may notice that the name of this creature is no longer the Spider Queen. We've renamed this creature to the Spider Mother and have reserved its previous name for something a bit more sinister... but that's for another blog post. The Spider Mother is a creature that will occasionally spawn on the surface or underground with groups of the smaller Spider. It will also spawn more commonly in Spider Nests. This enemy is a bit more formidable than your average spider and will come with unique behavior and attacks to show for itself. This includes the ability to lay fast-hatching spider eggs which will break open and unleash more baby spiders to join the fight against you. It is good to quickly put this creature down before it can amass a small army. Similarly to its babies, the Spider Mother is able to climb walls, both horizontally and vertically, and hang upside down. Imagine building a skyscraper and looking to your left to see this smiling face hanging next to you... yeah, that's gonna be fun. That's mostly it for spiders at the time being but we'll share more, including information about Spider Nests in the future!

The spiders are also the first example of Mob Variance/Class in Nightfall. We'll talk a bit more about that later on in this blog post but first...

Ducks and Frogs

Introducing the first ever Nightfall passive creatures... Ducks and Frogs! These models are in a very early state but even now they look adorable and we couldn't help but show them off. They are also a great way to explain variance, which we will talk about shortly. Ducks and Frogs are both creatures that will exist throughout the world of Nightfall. These are their approved "first-stage" models as they head into the touch-up and texturing process. Nightfall models start like this and then go onto our texturing artists who modify them slightly and give them their exterior textures that make them look the way that you normally see our creatures. This is an important process that almost all of our creatures go through and every step of it is important. That is why it is important to remember these models are in their first stage and things like the frog's body, as an example, may change to something like a single cube. Both of these creatures are something you'll see very soon in-game and we are excited for them to be among the ranks of our first peaceful mobs. Stay tuned on our Twitter as we will be sharing the textured version of these models there as soon as they are ready!

And for those of you who are concerned, don't worry! We didn't discriminate against Toads! You'll see their model and texture soon enough!

Mob Variance

What is Mob Variance? We've mentioned this a few times while talking about our creatures, so it's important to define it. Mob Variance comes in two different ways. First, you'll see this in Mob Class. An example of Mob Class would be something like the Arachnids. While these are mostly spider-like creatures, their behavior and model may change to give you different creatures like the Spider Mother versus the regular Spider. Multiple of enemies in Nightfall will take a route like this. As another example, you'll see a larger brute-like variant of the Undead creature that may sometimes spawn with the Undead. We'll use this feature to make nightly spawning vary slightly each time and even to create AI that works together to try to eliminate the player.

The second type of mob variance is in the texture itself. What this means is that you'll be able to find Ducks and Frogs (along with other creatures) that generally do the same thing, but look different. This allows us to create variety just like in real life. As an example, this would mean something like seeing brown, green, and tan frogs in game, even though its the same creature. We also plan to use a strategy like this with our baby creatures. What this means is you won't just see a smaller adult Duck model to represent a baby duck. You'll see a slightly changed model with a new Duckling texture to make that baby standout as a baby. This even opens up the possibility for us to explore things like genetics. We're currently playing around with having genetics play a role in the way a creature is textured. An example of this is a brown frog and a green frog mating and only being able to give birth to a brown, green, or mixed frog and not a blue frog as none of the parents had a blue gene. These are all things that a variance system lets us accomplish and something we plan to include in Nightfall.

What's Next for Mobs?

As for this blog post, that's about it for creatures. We're striving to make our creatures unique. We want to create a living, breathing environment that the player is only a small part of. Currently, we're playing with features like mating, hunting, creating nests/homes, and interaction with the environment for our creatures. This is their world too and we want it to feel like it. This is something we'll continue to work on and talk more about in the future. For now, check out this work in progress GIF of one more type of creature, the Goblins. What type of Goblin do you think this is? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

*Ignore the glitched barrel on his back ;)

Storage

Basic Chest

We've shown off a few images of our basic chest on Twitter, but in this blog post we'll be going more in depth about this starter storage unit. Nightfall's basic chest has twenty slots for storage and is a great early-game storage unit. This craftable vessel can hold your items for cheap and while it may not have the most space, you'll be able to make things with more room later on.

The model for our basic chest is gorgeous and James has really begun to develop a more distinct style for Nightfall. If you recall our storage concepts from DevBlog #3, we are working on many ways to show off your items and store your loot and the basic chest is just the beginning of that. Although, just because this chest is simple does not mean we didn't put some extra Nightfall love into it!

This brand new basic chest UI is what you'll see when you go to open it. As usual, we've made lots of careful design choices here. You may notice the rough piece of paper attached to the top of the chest. This is not just for show. You'll be able to write on this paper to help you when organizing your chests. This is effectively a labeling system, although we're sure people will find other ways to use it as well! We know this is something a lot of you will make good use of and are excited to incorporate it into a lot of Nightfall's player storage. These labels will help you stay organized and keep track of whether a chest is for farming supplies, valuables, or just miscellaneous crap.

Hopefully some of you have caught on by now that we make purposeful choices when designing our UI for Nightfall. So, if you're paying REALLY close attention, you may have noticed that the latch at the top of the basic chest UI has a keyhole. This is there for a reason! We're working on a system to allow players to lock their chests to prevent other people from opening them. This could be especially useful in a PvP setting. We're still fleshing out this system but we can use a similar method with other storage units and doors to allow the player to lock those as well. This can even be used in our dungeons or underground to require players to kill a certain creature or complete a puzzle to get a key to unlock the chest. The locked chests might have better loot than a storage unit you find unlocked. The basic chest is the first of many of our storage concepts to be added to the game and we'll be showing off actual gameplay footage of this chest in a coming post!

Block Colliders

As mentioned in the introduction, Jacob did a lot of work totally rewriting our collision system. On the surface, this may not seem like all that much, but this was a really big thing that had to be done and it finally is. True kudos go to Jacob here so make sure you give him some love on Discord. Collisions function so much better and you no longer glitch through the world or teleport off your 1x1 tower when building straight up. While the functionality for slabs, slopes, and stairs having their correct collisions (hitboxes) is there, we'll be showing those off in a later post. For now, here is an example of how the block highlighting was effected by this. We've brightened the highlight for purposes of demonstrating how it has changed.

In the older versions of the game, the highlight would have been in the shape of a full block regardless of the shape of the model/texture. This left ugly looking boxes around grass, flowers, mushrooms -- really anything that was not a full block. That is finally gone and we're excited to continue improving the new collision system.

Rocks, Pebbles, and Mushrooms

Some of you may have seen me make these on stream, but we now have rocks and mushrooms of different size, shape, and color to go along with our already existing pebbles. We're waiting to add the bulk of these into the game until we've finished the block variance feature we are currently working on. This will allow us to have multiple models/textures for one block to make the world feel much less cut and paste. This means that we don't have a ton of exciting screenshots to show off for these, but we'll be sharing a lot of images/GIFs of these super soon once we finish off that feature.

*Block Highlight brightened for testing purposes

However, you can see that both of these things look great in game and have been implemented with a single model for now. Size and rotation variation is already working and you can see that demonstrated here, especially with the rocks.

Mushrooms

Before we move on, there's a few more things to touch on with Mushrooms. In the world of Nightfall you'll be able to find many different kinds of plant-life, mushrooms included. You'll be able to eat all mushrooms (of the ones we're currently working on) but not all of them will be good for you. Some might make you sick or make you trip balls. Who knows until you give it a taste and find out! That's the only way to learn... unless you Google it, I guess. ;) You'll also be able to use mushrooms as ingredients for food or even for some other things later down the line. We have a lot of plans for cool mushrooms. Here's a quick, fun mock-up of what some glowing mushrooms might look like. (Note: They will not be rounded like we made them here when we add them in-game. This was just a quick glow test.)

Item Drops

We've begun to experiment with our item drops. We're still toying with how exactly we want items like Plant Fiber to look when dropped. We may switch over to a more 3D model for these items but we do not hate the way that the 2D item drops look. Regardless, we'll almost definitely give them a bit more thickness and a highlight to make it easier to see where they are on the ground. Here is a video of how they look dropping.

*Break animation not yet set to the new colliders. Clearly. ;)

Items like tools, blocks, and other inherently 3D items will still drop in three dimensions and despite their 2D counterparts.

Fluid Improvements

Viscosity, Swimming, and Fog

Woah, woah, don't get too excited! We're still not totally done with fluid physics, but things are starting to look a little bit better! We haven't changed much with the edges and water still doesn't flow, but everything else has been implemented in an Alpha form. Our new shader developer, Andrew, will be making a lot of this look better in the future! We'll be moving away from the low-poly water and into something a lot nicer soon.

You can actually swim now, there is no more dolphin hopping in and out of the water like a crazy person. This was something we were excited to implement because for awhile there you could get stuck underwater. Now you can rise in and out with ease.

It's hard to explain how nice this is without anyone but the team having experienced what it was like not being able to swim and getting stuck in the sand. This is nowhere near what the final product of swimming will be like, but it is a great start and an awesome Alpha version.

Music

We've got another great piece of the Nightfall OST by Jay up on our YouTube channel right now! Go check it out and please send Jay some love over Discord! He's done such a great job on all of these pieces and we can't wait to continue sharing them with you. He is an incredibly talented composer and deserves the hype!

Crafting Bench Rework

Real quick and simple update, but we've reworked the look of our crafting bench to be more in line with the other elements of Nightfall like the basic chest. Overall, it fits the more semi-block vibe of some of the models a bit better than it did before.

Dev Spotlight

Shelby

Meet Shelby! Shelby is another very talented member of the Venatus Team. He is a lead programmer on the team and currently focused on PvP and inventory systems as well as all of the Multiplayer code. Shelby is working on the server system and allowing you to host your own worlds. He has been using unity in his free time for around five years, and three of those years have been in JavaScript (Unityscript), and the more recent two have been in C#. He has worked on many projects, from boring hobby projects to high ranking Ludum Dare games. When not working on Nightfall, Shelby streams and plays competitive CSGO and is an AWPer for his team at UMN. If he could add one thing to Nightfall, it would be a "Plasma Light Machine Gun" because it, "sounds like a hoot".

We ❤️ you Shelby!

Development Streams (Twitch)

Some of you may have caught our previous development streams on Twitch. You can check out the channel here. We're planning on doing a lot more of these Development streams in the future so you can watch us model, program, draw, and create the world of Nightfall. We'll do lots of Q+A sessions where we answer your questions about the game, and in the future we hope to do streams of actual gameplay showcasing new features or updates. We might even do streams where we play with the community some day! Here's hoping! If you're interested in watching these streams, go ahead over to our twitch by clicking this link and give us a follow so you're notified when we go live!

Discord, Patreon, and Social Media

Discord

Use the link above to head on over to our Discord. This is the absolute BEST way to communicate with myself, any of the Developers, and the community. We have dedicated areas for you to suggest features, give feedback, learn more, and most importantly - ASK QUESTIONS (and get an answer too!) This is the easiest way of supporting us and is totally free! We are so happy to see so many of you already taking advantage of this by joining, talking to each other, suggesting features, and grilling us with questions! It's been great!

**I know I mention Discord in every blog post, but seriously, this is a great place to get to know us better! You can earn in-game profile tags, suggest features directly, and we do different things throughout the week for you to participate in like Feedback Friday with more to come in the future! You're missing out if you haven't hopped in yet! ❤️

YouTube

We have a brand new YouTube channel! You'll be able to check out parts of Nightfall's soundtrack on there! We've also got some cool tutorials and DevBlogs headed your way in the future!

Click the link above to head over and subscribe so you don't miss future video Devlogs and other cool things like music taken from the soundtrack of Nightfall.

Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/vgnightfall

While we don't require it by any means, Patreon is a great way to support us directly. You can pledge to monetarily support us monthly here. We do have various tiers of support that each provide unique rewards like special roles on our Discord server, access to even more direct communication with Developers, and of course, eventual early access to the game to help us test. One of the tiers even lets you work with us directly to add a creature to the game! You'll also get bonus development content and an even closer peek into our development process directly through Patreon and Discord when you subscribe! We've already posted a lot of extra content on our Patreon!

Thank you to our current Patreon supporters:

Patreon - Nedac16

Patreon+ - BOWSER0897

If you don't like Patreon, you can also choose to support us directly with one-time payments through PayPal.

Thank you to "clone chris" over on Discord for supporting us this way!

You can do that by clicking here.

Twitter

https://twitter.com/venatus_games

Our Twitter is a great way to keep track of weekly updates to Nightfall! We post screenshots, GIFs, videos, art, job positions, and more! Twitter is free to use and an awesome way to stay up to date with all of the Nightfall news! Head on over to the link above and give us a follow to learn more!

(Closing)

And Night is Upon Us!

And that's it for now folks! Thanks for tuning in to another one of these blog posts. We enjoy keeping you in the loop with our development process and hope you enjoy reading up on everything new in Nightfall. Each day that passes brings us closer to an Alpha state of the game faster than we ever thought we'd be at. We appreciate all 200+ of you on Discord who give us feedback, suggestions, and your love, and could not ask for a better community! We are looking forward to playing Nightfall as much as you are and can't wait to share more information with you soon. We're really starting to discover what makes Nightfall's nights and enemy creatures so terrifying and we're looking forward to sharing more about some possible hints at a story with you soon. There is SO much coming and you'll have to come back to see just how much there is. So believe me when I say -- we're just getting started. Night is falling so we better find a place to hide!

Humbly,

Jack and the Venatus Team