#krsnik

Kresnik and Kudlak from Slavic folklore.

Another week another update!

This week the blockout continued with the building of the largest city on the planet, sort of like a Castle Town style ‘hub’ on the surface where you deal with the various locals. Not currently present is the temple palace, where the various noble NPCs live and administrate their people.

This will be a lot further down the line but I hope that by combining the density of architecture with a larger number of townsfolk I can avoid the Castle Town problem of there not being a whole lot of people around in their major population center as I am not working with N64 data restrictions.

The next step is to work on getting more nature modeled (you can see my literal block out trees there) so that I can branch outward from this corner of the first region, working on the surrounding forests and smaller villages/houses, as well as establishing locations for the first region’s three temples. Region 1 is meant to serve as a first act, so things are going to be a bit easier for the player just to sort of warm them up to exploring the world.

P.S.: Yes.

You can climb it.

Discord and Patreon still empty so this may end up being the big update point for a while until those pick up a bit, hopefully soon.

Not as exciting an update this week, as it’s mostly been blockout for characters and the environment of the Muromets, the player’s home hub. Now that most of this is present I’ll probably start moving on to the game world and get the teleporting and outpost building sorted. Open worlds can have a tendency to get kind of bloated so I want to make sure each region is pleasant to explore and travel across.

Also just want to get back to surface stuff since the mechanics are more relevant to the actual surface world than the safe zone of the ship. Especially looking forward to building the alien city because old cities are fun to hop around and explore.

Inktober 2018 - Day 30

a krsnik taking a break from fighting evil.

Grass!

This week was working on trees and natural landscape elements, along with doing some early stage optimizations to make sure all this grass and trees doesn’t utterly demolish the framerate on whatever hardware I end up shipping this thing to.

I also made a bird. Since quadrupedal animals in Unreal are... difficult, I thought it would be a nice solution that blends in well with the setting if the aliens of this world rode big birds like ostriches as a horse alternative. In addition to ostrich racing, this will also be the guinea pig (guinea hen? just a guinea??) for my planned animal AI system down the line.

Generally speaking, I find the common two-state animals that graze and then run or attack when a player approaches to be a really shallow approach to wildlife. Since part of the goal of this game is to make a world that feels more like a setting than an obstacle, I want to make the animals more complex and react to the player like animals instead of enemies/resources. But that will come at a later date.

For now the next stage is to work on the ‘starting area’, to give the player a sword, introduce them to early game mechanics, and demonstrate some of the setting fundamentals of exploration and curiosity.

Also slowly getting some people on Discord. Hop on over there if you want to hang out and learn more about the project!

Weekly KRSNIK update! Maybe this will become a regular thing, who knows.

Been focused on implementing the core player mechanics, which includes getting the 2 vehicles of the game modeled and implemented. Right now most of the implementation is locomotion based but eventually the tank will be properly functional.

Probably going to do a bit of level blockout stuff soon, since the character mechanics have been going by pretty quickly. Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll have mechanics to a point where I can fully focus on getting the map planned out and built.

I’ve also started up a Discord server for the development where you can ask questions and give suggestions and other stuff that’s easier to do on a dedicated Discord than through Tumblr. It’s pretty much empty right now but hopefully it will pick up soon as the development gets rolling further! Link at bottom.