New stuff and plans

Hi! It's been a while. Summer vacation's over so I had to come back to work, meaning progress have slowed down quite a bit. I'm still able to put an hour or two here and there, so lets go over the latest features that have made their way into Project Goblin:

Cloudy skybox

Can't have a nice adventure without a nice looking sky! I wanted something that reminded me of the old PC games like Quake or Hexen II, so I went with an infinite scrolling plane full of clouds.

Made a shader for it that slaps two noise textures and tweaks their UVs a little bit to give the impression of layering. Combining that with a color gradient for the clouds lets me create all kinds of clouds, as shown below:

Feel free to check them in movement on this tweet I made some days ago. Movement is quite sped up there, it'll be way slower in the game.

Plan is to combine those clouds with a nice panorama texture for the background, which right now is just a color gradient.

Options menu and UI button guide

Been also working on a settings menu. Visually it still needs some work, but codewise it's working nicely. Settings can be changed on the fly and the effect is noticeable without needing to restart the game. Players will be able to tweak many things aside from the usual video and audio settings, like the language, style of the UI (full, reduced which lacks the UI button guide of the corner, and none), the magnitude of some gameplay related effects and the controls.

Speaking of the UI button guide,  I've implemented that hoping it'll help new players learn to play the game. It's context sensitive, meaning the actions displayed change based on what you are doing. There's also a reduced version which only displays the currect "use" action, like "open", "talk", etc.

I'm also planning to add a photo mode, which will be accessible from this menu.

And more!

Some more features I've been working on:

• Rumble! When playing with gamepad, it'll vibrate when hitting stuff, blocking, being hit or interacting with floor buttons or wall levers. It's also reactive to explosions and other effects, and the vibration intensity depends on the distance with the emitter.
• Improved collision boxes for player and enemies. Specially noticeable when the enemies hit the wall, as they react better to that.
• Stamina/oxygen bar turns orange when there's less than 30% left. It's a nice visual cue to let the player know that he's running out.

What's next?

There's not much left to do before I'm able to focus of building content for the demo. One of them is adding sound and music, for which I have some ideas already. Would love to try some ambient tracks for exploration, maybe dungeon synth or something more subtle.

Aside from that, I want to review the "game over" animation, which kinda sucks right now, plus adding gathering spots for the player to get materials from kinda like in Monster Hunter but permanent: basically, chests that look like gathering spots. I'm going with this approach because as a player I wouldn't like to  open a chest only to find a bunch of herbs inside.

I also want to clean up the player controller, review and polish a few animations I'm not 100% happy with and finally give the main character a face with some expressions. And finally, and the one that will mean the most amount of work, I want to refactor the enemy AI code. The current one is mostly fine, but there are some parts I'm not quite happy about specially when it comes to their navigation code, plus it'll be a chance to fix some edge cases while also polishing some of the jank.

Once all that is done I'll be able to focus on adding more enemies and making an actual level for the demo! Very excited for that, got a clear idea of how I want to make and can't wait to make it happen.

Oh and as a bonus for going through all this, here some art someone made some time ago! I love the face of the goblin here.

Thanks for reading and see you on the next one!