After a small break the Lunar Rooster team is excited to be back in the studio! Its been a while since our last devlog and we’ve got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline for Sky Noon.
Refining Our Style
We got some great feedback from a panel of industry veterans about refining our art style to fit our narrative and be more unique. This has been really helpful and we have started playing around with our own “cloud punk” style for our weapons and environments.
Environments
From the get go of Sky Noon development we had talked about using the art style to tell the story of how the Floating Frontier is “floating”. The idea is that the western cartels had taken their lands to the skies with advanced tech so they could harvest clouds for water to control it as a resource. Our artists are running with the “cloud punk” theme and we’ve got some initial concepts for environment assets that will better explain the floating islands. While the tech is supposed to be far beyond its time, we are trying to avoid sci-fi or modern appearances, the idea being that the tech was built out of the resources that were available at the time, making it look more rustic
Weapons
Some of the other feedback we got was that the act of propelling enemies with weapons, rather than dealing damage was not that well communicated through the art style. Keeping our existing two weapons from vertical slice, we have started concepting and modeling new machine pistols and shotguns that clearly illustrate the pushing of enemies. We have taken inspiration from wind and brass instruments and have some cool steam/cloud particle effects planned to play on the fire and reload animations.
Gameplay
Upgrade Complete
We’ve just finished upgrading our project into Unreal Engine 4.12 and a bunch of our existing systems have been further optimized to work over the network. We found out just how bad our existing RPC calls were for the weapons and grappling hook and have made significant changes using UE4’s timer systems on the server rather than doing things in the tick which happens every frame. As a result the clients are running at a much smoother rate. In the 4.11 build there was a lot of classes that had been left as blueprints from the original prototype which have now been implemented in c++ where we have seen fit.
Grappling Hook
The grappling hook has been given some much needed tweaks. We are trying to find the perfect balance between allowing players to swing around the map and getting them to where they want to be quickly, while remaining intuitive to use. We are hoping to have this locked down in the second week of our alpha sprint.
Matchmaking
Work has begun on a very basic match making system that will find sessions through Steam and join the “best” session based on your ping to the server. There is still a lot of further implementation and testing to be done on this. The hope is that it will match make players based on skill level as well as ping.
FFA Tidy Up
The free-for-all game mode has been polished up and the game timer is now implemented and when the time runs out the game can detect a draw which will use our new “Dueling” mechanics, coming soon. We are also looking at changing the way the Super Crate spawns to better balance the map flow. Awaiting some play tests, this should be the last touch up on the game mode for a while, fingers crossed.
Coming Soon…
Clamber
We are beginning work on the ability to clamber up ledges if you are close enough to the top of a surface in front of the character. This clamber will also be used to better refine what happens at the end of the grappling hook when you hit a wall.
Dueling
A dueling game mode is in the works that will be playable as a stand alone game mode as well as the game decider for a draw at the end of a free-for-all session. In the duel, players will spawn in a minimalist map with a grappling hook and a shotgun in a sudden death stand off to knock the enemy off first.
More
- “Mine Cart” game mode
- Teleport ability
- Particle effects
- Custom controls
- Custom Lobby stats
From the Artists
Alex
This week I was tasked with revamping the shotgun in accordance with our new art direction. This meant taking the existing design and retrofitting the pipe and wind instrument elements. This time round I really want to implement some of the aspects discussed in this amazing website (http://piratportfolio.com/fpp_eng/). I have been working with a first person camera set up in the scene to quickly gauge what works well in the first person perspective. Its has been hard to get work done with all the interruptions with moving to commercial production.
Logan
Based on the feedback we received from our accelerator presentation we have decided to revamp the art style a little in order to differentiate it from similar titles. I spent this week reworking the machine pistol design, starting with some paintovers and messing around with the current model in Maya. A major component of the redesign is to do with air pressure and steam so we decided to base components off of instruments (trumpets etc) and engines. It has been a nice change of pace working on hard surface assets after spending most of my time on organics during the previous term.
Nathan
We received praise for the art direction but unfortunately heard unanimous feedback that it looked too similar to other multiplayer first person shooters. The goal is to ensure that upon seeing a screenshot or video of Sky Noon it will be immediately obvious that this is a unique and separate product. We feel that if we differentiate ourselves enough in model design, texture and communication of theme we can achieve this goal. My job so far has been to look at different ways to modify or add on to the environment.
I spent some of this week doing paintovers of the environment we already have, adding technology to justify how the islands are floating. The undersides would be decorated with pipes and turbines spewing out steam, adding a bit more complexity and breaking up the monotony of the rocks that the entire environment is made of. It’s important to be careful that they aren’t too frequent or intrusive, as additional pieces jutting out of islands increase the likelihood of becoming trapped or stopped while grappling up the islands. Aesthetically I am trying to avoid sci fi or modern appearances by making pieces out of wood and rusted metal panels. Somewhat makeshift and flimsy made out of what was available.
From the Programmers
Chris
I spent the majority of this first week cleaning up the Free-For-All game mode, and putting functions/variables in places that make more sense. This needed to be done to streamline our networking code and structure, but also served to further study Unreal networking (a side of the project that I haven’t had as great of an understanding of as I’d like). I also made an effort to better comment my code for my team, which is a habit I want to get into going forward.
Craig
One of the biggest issues we had with Vertical Slice was the rough implementation of networking code, So I’ve spent a great deal of time managing what we had and refactoring it into the 4.12 project I created for future development on Sky Noon. In addition to this, I’ve done a lot of code management in general, basically tidying up what was already done and making it as efficient as possible starting Alpha.
Henry
While Craig has been changing the project over to 4.12 I have been working on a basic matchmaking system that will take advantage of UE4’s online subsystem. At the moment the algorithm is just searching for all sessions with ping under 100, ranking the sessions based on ping and attempting to join the first one available. As the UI is not yet implemented in the new 4.12 build, we have not yet been able to test the efficiency of the matchmaking so this will be done early next week.