New this week

This week nothing too eventful happened so this devlog will be fairly short. I worked on some tiles and I’ve made some adjustments to my core design tenants.

Tiles

Adjustments to design

Is the last devlog I made the statement that under no circumstances should you be able to see through a tiles door from another doorway. I’m changing that to only apply to rooms that lock the player in. For example the starting room, which is a non-combative room, has no reason for the player to not be able to skip through it. If I choose to create any other rooms which are non-combative in nature I’ll probably forgo the no skipping rule. The reason for this is that it makes design very restrictive and makes every room feel small.

Main topic

This week I created 3 room tiles, 2 for a 1×1 and 1 for a 2×1. These served as a proof of concept for other room shapes. Although all the rooms appear on a tile grid there’s nothing saying all the rooms have to be square. I’ve added the scaffolding to combat zones in all the prefab templates I’m using and all the tiles are prefabs variants so they can inherit all the tedious set of combat zones and door/sealed walls. Of the total 4 tiles created a navmesh has also been baked and is functional. Though links and jumps are currently absent. A feature explored in specifically in the cylindrical tile is having additional objects and detailed attached to the walls. This worked as expected which allows me to have more detail rich walls where a doorway isn’t present without conflicting with the version where the doorway is present.

The starting room greybox features a cylindrical design and the 2×1 design features a lowered floor. Below is a slideshow of the tiles.

A problem that exclusively affects greyboxing is that probuilder is not very good at making domed shapes. This means everywhere a domed shape is wanted in a greybox it either looks awkward or is replaced with a solid cylinder. This doesn’t really affect development because all probuilder shapes will need to be replaced with appropriate models because of the limitations with Ayfel’s prefab lighmapping.

What’s Next

First things first is I’m going to make a 2×2 room so at least all my default room shapes have something filling them. Next, I’m going to grab a placeholder model with animations. There’s something up with my state machines, I feel like they aren’t going to work the way I want them too. I have a feeling the way I handled strafing isn’t going to translate to animations well and I need to experiment with blend trees which might break everything. For that I need an animated model. If that goes smoothly (which it probably won’t) I’ll start working on my most basic enemy NPC, the barrel kin.