Hey everyone, welcome to Drink Drunk’s blog with your host for this week, Sax Panther here. I suppose you’re wondering what we’ve been up to recently, so I’ll just jump right into things with something that we haven’t talked about much yet- sound effects!

This past week, Infestient has gotten his hands dirty with foley art, alongside the newest member of our team, the infamous Welshman himself, BestMelvynEU! You might know Melvyn from his many videos relevant to the Dawngate community, most recently shining a light on AetherForged as well as other Dawngate revival projects.

SFX are obviously one of the most important aspects of development that help bring a game to life. Infestient and Melvyn are creating some great sounds and you’ll get to hear a few of them today. See if you can try to guess what the sound is for before reading further!

Those were, in order of appearance, tower notifications (this lets you know when you’re being targeted by the tower), the salt mine ambience, and lastly, the sound of the Leech, our central buff creature. Sound effects for Nibra, the UI, and some other miscellaneous items are coming along nicely but not quite ready to be shared with the world just yet.

Over in the art department we’ve been doing more practice and concepts. While our programmer Mox has been continuing to plug away at the minion AI, and more recently, the tower AI, Duncan worked on figuring out what the minions might look like. Out of a few concept sculpts in ZBrush, this variation was the one we liked the most.

I tested out some efficient, low-poly methods of creating plants and foliage for our map in 3DS Max. If you look closely you’ll notice that all the leaves are merely flat planes. Making leaves in this manner is not only easier for our artists to create but also easier for your GPU to render, and with a proper bit of polish you won’t even notice the difference in game.

That’s all for now, catch you next week!