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[Kassoon]

Looks like this is coming along really well! It was cool looking at all the dev log entries and seeing how far it's come in a year. Seems to me like you have a great vision and should keep pursuing that.

Also, I love whatever shader or color scheme you're using at 1:29 in the last video you posted.

Thanks! It's a long lonely road but I keep trucking on.


Finally got water reflections working and looking nice

[Kassoon]

Hi! I've been posting weekly updates on my site at https://www.kassoon.com/rogue-legend-2/devlogs but I forgot to post on tig 

Gave myself a note to not forget anymore. Anyway, here's a new trailer that overviews some of the stuff that's been added:

[Kassoon]

Ragdolls now calculate impact force while falling or being pushed. That means you or anyone else that has a tumble down a cliff will end up much more bruised and battered


There's a new subsurface scattering shader for characters which should greatly improve the look of skin. This calculates a fast realtime translucency, by allowing a certain amount of light to "pass through" the model and light the other side with a certain amount of distortion based on the thickness and properties of the material.
Skin is semitransparent which makes it glow and glisten in light, so we need a shader to reflect this. It's why a lot of old games have characters that look like dolls.


There's a whole new tier of research to unlock for weapons, armor, tools, and buildings. You'll need to start venturing further from home to get all the necessary components, but the glider, airboard, and astral recall should make that easier.


Arrows will now stick out of stuff when they hit terrain instead of falling.

[Kassoon]

Working on combat improvements and more enemy types. In order to make enemies easier/harder I need to adjust their attack animations, wind-ups, and various combat timings. Since I don't really have the budget for lots of custom animations I need to juice my existing ones. The gif above is showcasing my procedural wind-up timings, though it really just looks like I'm teasing the grek. I can set a wind-up value and it adjusts certain parts of the animation to make it slower and more obvious, while not taking away from the speed of the actual swing




A player suggested that villagers should have their own crops, since they could be growing their own food. I took it a step further and made it so they'd tend to the gardens as well. Planting, water, and harvesting the crops as they grow. I already have a needs, schedule, and interactions system so it was fairly easy to hook in.

[Kassoon]

Happy Thanksgiving! The Villagers are planning a little dinner get-together for the holiday. Are you coming?




Sun rays have had their look improved, along with some tweaks to sunrise and sunset to make it more marvelous to behold.




Christmas lights have been added to town to make things a bit more festive during winter.




I added a color picker to the appearance customizer so you have greater control and more options for whatever your style happens to be.




A new enemy has been added plus some tweaks to combat timings and movement to get it feeling better. Noticed after recording this he's holding the shield super wrong, so I'll fix that.

[Kassoon]

I added ruins today, which can be found out in the world. These initial ruin designs were made by ToadTod, so big thanks to her! If you like to build stuff in voxels and want to help out, get in contact with me. The big limiter on stuff like more ruins, enemy camps, and towns is how long they take to make despite being really easy to make. Like an hour of me making a house is an hour that could have been spent putting in a new feature or fixing a bug. I work with a priority queue, so while "more enemy camp variety" is on there, it's below "furniture sometimes falls through the ground" or "more insects to catch." Anyway, ruins are a cool thing to find while exploring and help fill out the world. I tried to make them rare enough that they're fun to investigate. They also contain items to scavenge and complete all the essential gameplay elements for the survival playstyle where you can live entirely off the land as a nomad, exploring the world without doing much crafting, building, or farming. I also added biome coloring to the new enemy, since they start showing once you leave newbie island they'll be showing up in all sorts of biomes so I figured they should be colored based on whatever biome they're found in.

[Kassoon]

I've added diagonal blocks! This has been a long time coming and not the last block type I plan on adding, but is quite time consuming to do. For every new block type I want to add, I need to add it to every single block tileset which requires very exact coordinate requirements in each one, plus I need to model every possible combination. Right now there are 12 unique tilesets, and the diagonals had 12 possible combinations, for a total of 144 models I needed to build pixel-perfect meshes and UVs for so they'd all fit together properly. In the early days I used fewer models and just rotated them as necessary, but that caused UV and alignment issues.




The benefit though is we can have much more interesting geometry and shapes for terrain, with fewer right angles and boxes. Some tilesets are a straight diagonal while others opt for a more rounded shape. I've added diagonals as a step to the world gen in order to further smooth out the caves.




I changed the default starter biome to include more mountains, since I figured it would make the starter area a bit more picturesque and less boring. I think I was right.

[Kassoon]

Kind of a hectic week so there wasn't time for a midweek mini-update. I juust got this month's trailer done (currently rendering/uploading) but it's too late to post it now so I'll post it tomorrow! I think it's a lot better than the last one. Also some big new features but I'll include those with the trailer.

[Kassoon]

New trailer! I think this one is a lot better than the last one, but there's still stuff I could probably improve on. Let me know what you think.





Some quick patch notes for the new update too
* Added half-blocks. Not all blocks are supported yet, but a bunch are
* Added a new musical track
* Added big signs to shops
* Added clocks to some shops
* Ambient sounds change when game is paused or when indoors
* Added cave ambiance

[Zireael]

The game looks really great - except the characters, they look nice but something ticks me off. Can't put my finger on it, though. Might just be the style, sorry.

[Kassoon]

I think their faces look weird and some have dodgy proportions. Currently doing a pass to fix up some of the base shapes of the heads and bodies, as well as putting in customization sliders to fine-tune the faces, like this:






It's been on my mind though throughout the entire development. Might have to completely scrap and do something else, it's been one of the most time-consuming things.

[Kassoon]

There are 4 additional tiers of fishing rods (Bronze -> Diamond) with improved stats and mods you can add to augment your fishing ability.

You can craft and add different kinds of bait using insects you catch at the first tier of fishing rod. Once you get a silver fishing rod you can start crafting different kinds of tackle to help you catch different kinds of fish in different environments. Reflectors, different hooks, spinners, etc.



To match your improved arsenal of fishing tools, the fish themselves have adapted and now come out at different times and have different stats and abilities to evade getting caught. Experiment with different rods and lures to catch every biome's unique fish.

Once you're a master angler, then you may be ready for the mythological fish. Namazu, a giant catfish said to cause earthquakes. Abtu, said to be the gatekeeper of the abyss and creator of darkness. Abaia, a giant eel said to cause huge waves with its powerful tail. Pisces, the many-minded guardian of all fish.

Once you've caught those fish, you'll need to fillet them and make sushi. Which you can do... IN YOUR BRAND NEW KITCHEN!





Collect seaweed from the ocean and grow rice to make delicious sushi. Rice can be bought from garden shop and grown in the summer. Rice is a special plant that can be grown while submerged in water, keeping it nicely hydrated at all times.



While you're out hunting insects for bait or to collect, you'll come across a new one: grasshoppers.



Also some new changes with placing ramps that should make it easier to place ceiling slopes, and some scrollwheel changes. Check out the patch notes for everything!

[Kassoon]

A bunch of new insects have been added to find and catch! About 15 new ground-crawlies, swim-crawlies, and air-crawlies are out in the world, so dust off that bug net. Some insects only appear at certain times or in certain biomes, so you'll really need to scour the world to complete your collection.



Really like crab? Lobster? Crayfish? Don't like swimming? Well too ba- then you need a Crab Cage. A curiously crafted curio to cleverly catch coy crustaceans in coastal climates for your crockpot.



Gameplay work has begun on what's probably the most requested feature: relationships. Up til now it's been mostly behind-the-scenes stuff like a robust cutscene engine and the ability to have and track unique characters with their own schedules and personalities. So watch your social faux pas, people are paying attention to them now. One of the best ways to get to know someone is to spend some time together, which you can now request. If they have the free time (and don't hate your guts), you'll be able to go and do a variety of activities based on how close you are. At the end of your time together you can also give them a gift, so make sure to give them something they'll like!

In other games with relationships they always felt like an item dump to me where you're just burying them in flowers until they love you, which is not the most stable foundation for a lasting marriage. I wanted to de-emphasise the gift-giving (while still making it an option) and focus more on getting to know them in more realistic and engaging ways. Hanging out is the beginning of that system, which I'll be revealing more as I work on it. There's a lot to do!

[Kassoon]

Holidays are over, hope yours were sufficiently festive. I added a bunch more furniture to craft and buy and decorate with. There's all sorts of new tables and chairs, as well as colorful sofas, armchairs, cushioned desk chairs, nightstands, and a barrel in case you want to open a chintzy restaurant.



There are a couple of quality of life improvements like making the little "hop" up non-sloped blocks flow a bit better, and a new search box for the crafting window to let you filter through the results. Just start typing in a name, like "bed" and suddenly you'll see all the beds. This should make it easier to find what you're looking for in what is now over 900 items available to make in the game.



Also a small update: One of the characters is undergoing finalizing tweaks and should be showable soon, at which point I'll probably do another poll and if feedback is positive we'll proceed to retopo. Probably won't put them into the game until they're both done since it'd be kinda weird to have a realistically proportioned character next to gremlins.

[Kassoon]

First off, if you prefer voting in a poll there's one right here: https://www.kassoon.com/content/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=583


Thank you to everyone that gave feedback on the character appearance. We're pretty much operating in the dark here, so critical feedback is crucial to keep us on track and ensure we're making the kind of game you want to play. When you're looking at a character or feature or anything every day you kind of become blind to its flaws so I'm always incredibly grateful to anyone that takes the time to offer an outside perspective. You're not being mean! You're actually being very generous and helpful.

Anyway, the general feedback on the old character designs is they were stuck in the uncanny valley between cartoony and realistic. While there were a lot of people in both camp realism and camp cartoony, realism seemed more popular and I tended to agree. As the quality of the engine and lighting improved, having very cartoonish characters next to detailed assets looked off and inconsistent.

My hope is to get more realistically proportioned characters while still retaining their own aesthetic. To that end the clothing will also be changing along with the models, getting rid of some of the more generic t-shirts/jeans and only having the more intricate steampunk costumes to fit into the world's aesthetic.

Anyway, all that is still being worked on. What I DO have to show and receive feedback on is the completed woman model, untextured. I figure there's no reason to continue work on the rigging, animating, texturing, costume design, and male model if we've completely missed the mark at this point. So these are untextured pictures.


Please note: This is the default appearance without any adjustments. You'll be able to customize things like shape of the face, body size, weight, etc. You won't be losing any body types, you'll be gaining more.










FAQ:

Q: She's got moon ears?
A: Yes

[Kassoon]

Quite a few people have downloaded the demo, and while most haven't given feedback, enough have to make me realize the controls don't feel great and the tutorial needs to go into more detail, so I've been working on those.

I've worked on "controls" before and I know that it takes a long time to get it feeling just right, so this might be a couple weeks. I also know it works best for me if I do it all with a gamepad, so I've been working on fleshing out all the gamepad controls. I've managed to get everything but menu navigation working with the gamepad and feeling pretty good. I've adjusted acceleration, air control, and the feel of movement in general.

I think there are too many buttons and forms of compound interactions, so I've been trying to simplify everything down to just a couple buttons. Again, a gamepad helps with this since there's limited buttons. So now, most everything can be done with the attack button, and there's only one attack button rather than 2. I haven't found all the corner cases yet, but the basic idea is you swing whatever you have in your hand slot (or have selected) and it affects the world in some way. For instance you can now swing your hammer around to break blocks, or swing a hoe to till, or swing seeds to plant. This is easiest to see if you're playing with a gamepad, and I'll be changing keyboard and mouse afterward to simplify them as well.

I've also been working on feel. I've realized some things certainly don't feel great when controlling the character so I've been making some big tweaks. Some things you'll probably notice: It no longer costs stamina to jump, you can place and remove blocks anywhere, even in town. Trying to break blocks in town takes much longer though. You can now break blocks and knock down trees with anything, using the right tool is still faster though. The default controls have also been changed, but it won't reset yours if they've already been set up.


Patch Notes

* Attacking with a tool or other usable item will use it on the spot in front of you. So you can now swing a hammer to break a block, hoe to till grass, drill, etc by just attacking
* You can now place and remove blocks in unowned chunks, it's just much slower
* It no longer costs stamina to jump
* Changed default keybinds for gamepads
* Removed left attack keybind
* Swinging non-weapons is faster and/or based on the speed of the item
* Hitting a tree with anything will always do damage instead of just shaking it
* Made it easier to place blocks/items with gamepad. While controlling with a gamepad the placement ghost will now just be in front of you, and you can swing to place it
* Rock shovels and rock axes are no longer restricted on what they can break, they're just slower about it
* You will now "hop up" when climbing more often when it's possible
* You will now accelerate/decelerate a bit when moving
* Reduced the frequency in which players will whine, "I pressed jump!"
* You now start with a rock shovel
* You can now alt+mousewheel to force the actionbar to scroll past a placeable object you can rotate (like when placing a bed)
* Adjusted ground and air acceleration. You have less acceleration while in the air
* Using dpad or mousewheel to scroll through actionbar items will no longer skip empty spots
* Can now properly place things with gamepad
* Improved detection of interaction
* Performance improvements

Bug Fixes
* Interact text will only pop up if you're close enough to actually interact
* Can now zoom in/out even with a window open
* Fixed some cases where actionbar scrolling wouldn't work
* Interact tooltip will now point out when you don't own that
* Fixed lighting glitch when moving between indoors/outdoors

[Kassoon]

Work continues on controls and playability as well as some larger long-term features that aren't ready for primetime yet like storyline and metrics.

The "hand slots" on the actionbar are now gone, you equip items to use by selecting them, and will be bare-handed without anything selected. It added pointless complexity where the only benefits were handedness (which is now gone, but may return later as something you toggle in options) and torches/shields, which have now been moved to the equipment window. I consider a reduction in complexity where the only loss is cosmetic (that can be implemented an easier way) to be a pretty good trade-off.

The tutorial has also been revamped, going into greater detail about the controls and how you interact with the game's various systems. Inventory management should be easier, especially with the tooltip now being more prominent. It should also be easier to research things and find recipes to craft. The Shipping Box is also no longer a farmer-only perk, so no more running into town to unload your junk.

Controls-wise there's a lot more options. You can actually rebind mouse actions like clicking or camera panning to anything you like. Additionally, mouse clicks can be bound to any action, so if you really LOVE crafting you can bind your craft window on left click! Really though, these changes should make the game more accessible to those with disabilities or requirements for alternative control schemes.

All that should help make the game smoother and easier to play for everyone. If there's anything about RL2 that you find difficult or confusing, let me know! I'll likely fix it. You can contact me on the forums or at [email protected]

[Kassoon]

Multiplayer should be functional enough for now, or at least functional enough for beta and testing. In addition to "just making it work" I've also added bans and mods for servers. In your Data/StreamingAssets/ folder you'll find a bans.txt which is a list of users that are no longer welcome on your server, and mods.txt which is a list of users that are super-welcome and can use console commands. I'll be adding /who, /makemod, /removemod, /kick, and /ban commands either today or tomorrow to make it easier to use.



For multiplayer options there is LAN, which should auto-detect when someone on your network is playing and let you join. There's direct connect to IP for private servers with friends, and there's public servers which show up on the Server List when you first click on Multiplayer. To get your server to show up there you'll need to click on Create Game and make sure "Display on Server List" is checked. Dedicated servers (a server without a player) is not currently supported, but will be during beta after I've gotten some testing and feedback.

Which means we are in the polish, bugfixes, and playtesting period before I release the game to more backers. I'll be going over my playtest data and making tweaks and changes for general playability, particularly towards the first hour. If you have any critical feedback that should make it in before wider release, now is the time to give it!

[Kassoon]

This week was mainly spent on performance optimizations. I've gotten to around 60 fps in town and 90 fps in the wilderness, so pretty good overall! There will be another performance bump when the new character models are in, which are progressing steadily. We're currently doing finishing touches on the base outfit, after which will be implementation and customization. Depending on how the timing goes there may be a period where there's only one gender.

I've also been going over playtest and feedback data and making changes. Trying to find spots where new players get stuck and generally smoothing out the experience as you find your feet. If there's anything you found particularly confusing or annoying during your first time, let me know!

Once these bits of polish and feedback are done, and the new character models are in, we'll be moving on to beta at which point content updates will resume. Look forward to it!

[Kassoon]

I've been working on color grading and HDR. What's that? Color grading is when you apply a filter to an image to change the colors, typically to bring out certain colors and make a scene more vibrant. It can also be used to desaturate an image or create a specific look. Films use it a lot to convey a genre, like how all horror movies have a certain look. Like this:



The old look of the game tended to be very vibrant, but also washed out a lot of the colors. Here's a common scene you may find yourself in, standing on top of a random roof:



Bright and happy, but you lose a lot of detail. It also tended to make the geometry and structures cartoony. While that was the original intent, feedback and testing has revealed that to be unpopular. Also, I want to bring back some of that detail lost. Here's the new color grading:



Brings out more of the blacks, more realistic lighting, and greater detail on structures especially at a distance. Here's also the scene with no post-processing at all:



It was also important to tune the lighting, as some surfaces would get washed out and lose all detail when there was strong lighting on them. HDR is used to increase the range of lighting that can be represented in a picture, increasing the detail of lighting across a surface. Then, since most displays can't handle that range, it's tonemapped to compress the new colors into a visible range. This brings out the detail in heavily lit surfaces.



The lighting on the shack to the left looks much more realistic. Warm, but not bleached.

I've also been working on art and removing placeholders. You can see a new building in the background of that above picture, and I'll be working on replacing all the buildings in town with stuff more like that and less like the building to its left.