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[Kayzaks]

Hey Guys!

I've been working on a Strategy RPG called Spellwrath.

In Spellwrath, the player takes command of an army consisting of knights and their loyal companions, to battle for control of the world of Eyja.

Between fighting enemies in turn-based combat and leveling units, the player will be constructing castles, forging mighty weapons, journeying on heroic quests and organizing his champions!

I update my Twitter @Spellwrath with "live" progress of the Game, if you're interested.


The current Devlog Video!





The Game uses a custom made Engine, which does real-time ray-tracing combined with traditional rasterization. I've been working on it since the end of 2014 and plan to finish it by the end of 2017.

Currently, I'm working on the Combat System. Here's a current look:



Apart from Combat, the Player can also construct his castle and also enter buildings in order to organize & upgrade units:

[Kayzaks]

The Combat System is slowly taking Shape! (At least from a Programming stand-point)

Still fine tuning alot of the effects, positioning, labeling and coloring.

[Jasmine]

Holy poop, this looks awesome! Reminds me of Front Mission games.

Will it be campaigned based, or will there be a story to progress events along, like Final Fantasy Tactics?

[Kayzaks]

Thanks!
The Game will be driven by a main Story Arc, but the Player can choose how he progresses, as he would in a Campaign. The story will be mainly told in in-Game Cut-Scenes, comparable to the numbered Final Fantasy Games. The Campaign itself (hinted at by the Minimap in the lower right corner in the screenshots) however would be comparable to something like Civilizations.

[remka]

I'm a sucker for shallow DOF, and these look gorgeous.
Wondering if this wouldn't affect the gameplay (ie. you cannot really see what's in the background)?

[Kayzaks]

Thanks!
Currently, the DOF will only have a minor effect on Gameplay For now it's mostly cosmetic, but I am still concidering incorporating a mechanic that uses the DOF to some extent.

[Kayzaks]

I've been working on some Health and Mana bars, as well as tying all the Combat Systems together Slowly, there is actual Combat coming to the Game, not just building buildings.


Also, here's the IndieDB Link

[stemconcepts]

This looks promising O_O

I like the way the pixel art sits on the 3D cube architecture

[Eldraev]

This looks great! Definitely looking forward to more updates.
Do you have a pixel artist on board or do you make it yourself? (Just asking because I like following all people that are involved in a project)

[Kayzaks]

There are currently two Artists that do some part-time work on the Project:

Thomas Fröse (He made the Dragon/Wyvern - http://t-free.deviantart.com/) and Kacper Wozniak (Working on a Logo for the Game https://twitter.com/ThKasparrr)

 

[ashen]

It's good to see more strategy/rpg style games here, it's looking great too.   

I see that you mention the engine uses ray-tracing, my first impression from the screen shots was a voxel based engine.  Your engine must be very well optimized to do ray-tracing in real time, very impressive. 

Or do you mean ray-casting which is a lot less intensive, i.e. Wolfenstein / Doom?  Either way, I hope you really make something of this, keep it up.
 

[Kayzaks]

I do single-bounce Ray-Tracing. So it's pretty much a ray-trace to the Voxels and single ray-traces towards the light sources / world for the soft shadows / reflections.   But yeah, it's very similar to ray-casting (i.e. zero-bounces)

To gain real-time speed, I actually mix in a lot of tricks from Rasterization to gain all the other subtle effects, which would be too intensive for real-time Ray-Tracing. For example, I do screen space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) instead of casting hundreds of rays per pixel.

[ashen]

Ah, thanks for the extra info.  I've really only dabbled with ray-casting myself where it was just hitting edges/walls inside a simple grid.  I know the basic concepts of ray tracing but I've never done much on the lighting and reflections side. 

Interesting about the SSAO, I guess that means you're using shaders too. I really should play around more with shaders. Currently I get by with just classic vertex colour/alpha for most of the "cool" effects I use.  The library I use (LibGdx) provides default shaders but I haven't bothered to extend or customize them in any way.

[xix]

This is gorgeous. Will be following.

[Kayzaks]

Thanks xix!


Ashen:

If you're interested, here's a rough breakdown of how the World in my Game is rendered:

1. I Ray-Trace the entire Voxel World. This includes the entire Landscape + Buildings, as well as all Soft-Shadows and even the Shadows for the Sprites - though Sprites themselves are not ray-traced. (OpenCL)

2. The ray-traced Landscape + Buildings + Shadows are drawn to a Texture + a lot of different Depth Information. (OpenCL)

3. That Texture is rendered to the Screen, as well as all Sprites + Hex Grid + Health Bars are rendered (OpenGL)

4. I apply Post-Processing Effects (OpenGL)

5. The GUI is drawn on top of everything (OpenGL)


A very hard part of this was to blend Ray-Tracing (using OpenCL) and Rasterization (using OpenGL), due to how the Camera is calculated, the Depth Buffer, and so on... I actually have a hard-coded value in there, that I tweaked until Sprites and the Landscape lined up perfectly (2.161 or something).

[Kayzaks]

Just a small update, the Game finally has a real Logo for the Main Menu, made by @ThKasparrr!

[Kayzaks]

Ernesto Irawan (https://www.artstation.com/artist/ernestoirawan) is currently working on new Character Portraits for the Game!




And some major tweaks to the UI have been made to fit with the new Portraits.

[Jasmine]

Ho man, am I getting excited for this game~

Kudos to your artists! They are doing a super job!

[Kayzaks]

Thanks!

After all in-Game Sprites are being done using the DB-32 Palette, I've decided to do all Voxels in the same Style. Interestingly, this created a darker tone, which is cool.

[Kayzaks]

I've finally updated the Website to look... well.. less shitty would be the best description. Still not perfect, but for now good enough.

Also, some much needed improvements to the Indoor Scenes have been made.

They are now scaled to the Sprites and in my new favorite palette, DB 32.