Hello again! It’s been longer that usual, but we’re back in business. :)

The Venuki





A new monster! While the fighting animations haven’t been added yet, I plan on making them short distance enemies, with a grapple attack (shooting their head out) to bring enemies within attacking distance.

Facing the Music

Ardenfall will soon have faces! Currently we are in the modeling stage for the faces, and figuring out how it will integrate into our pipeline. We’re also learning how to model faces in the first place!







Perks Galore

We’ve also dug deep into the perk tree for the game! Nearly all of the perks have been concepted, which is a huge step alongside implementing new systems that allow for easy perk implementation and scripting. The perk tree is vast and complex, so implementing them will be a long journey… balancing will be another large task.

A New Animation System

We’ve had a major step forward in the new animation system! Before, we were using the normal Unity Controller, where all animation logic was packed into a massive file. This often results in “spaghetti”:

A revolting example. And oh, it can get much worse than this.

My previous solution was to use some automation, which made things much cleaner… but it also heavily restricted how weapons could be used. When I say restricted, I mean restricted: each weapon could only have a idle, walk, sheath, unsheath, aim, and attack animation. That’s it. And the weapon could only control the upper half of the body. (Which meant swinging heavy objects looked quite odd, since in real life we use our legs a lot when balancing weight)

With the new system however, nearly all of these issues are resolved. This is thanks to a wonderful addon called Animancer. This beautiful and affordable tool allows mixing of separate controllers, and also mixing animations or whatever you wish during runtime.

This has allowed individual weapons having individual animation logic and animation controller assets – in other words, each weapon type can have entirely different features without resulting in ugly spaghetti logic, keeping everything modular and wonderful.

TLDR

New animation system, will let us do a lot more with weapon attacks and such!

A New Rig

One major change I’ve been planning for over a year is replacing the old character and rig. This is a major change, since it means redoing all body meshes, clothing, animations, and more. One step towards this goal is redoing the rig in blender.

The rig alongside the rig UI

The old rig was built using an addon called Rigify, an awesome auto rigging tool. However I was unhappy with how it functioned, mainly because it did a lot of hidden “stuff” behind the scenes. So instead I decided to build my own. It of course is nothing compared to rigify, but it allows us to add whatever features we need easily.

That’s it for now

And that’s all we have at the moment. Sadly not too much excitement, but hopefully you still enjoyed reading! Be sure to join the discord / add us on twitter if you’re interested in following the development of the project!