December Development on Underworld Ascendant
On the development side, we've been focused on fine tuning tools to ensure we can easily test out a lot of features at once. For example, Tim Stellmach added a command-line to extinguish all fires in a scene so we can easily tell what things will look like to the player who goes wild with water arrows. (The command is "smokeybear".) This will help us check the design of our layouts for stealthy players and make sure that they can still "see" certain areas (or give us ideas on what we can hide in the darkness...)
What is this?! A huge pile of... apples?
...and of course, fine tuning goes hand in hand with creating lots of accidental bugs.
One of our favorite examples of this was discovering that if players plucked something from the environment, such as a simple apple, it would result in an infinite amount of that object in the player's inventory. It was fun to traverse the Abyss with infinite distracting projectiles that also doubled as food, but we quickly patched it out.
Another bug we had fun with was crates would damage anything that touched them. We had recently tweaked the crates so that they would damage people if a crate was dropped on them. However, the crates became "over-sensitive," and suddenly, the levels became an obstacle course filled with wooden landmines. The Abyss had never been more dangerous!
Animation has also been a big feature these past few weeks as we've been constantly bullying our test dummies to see how they will react in different situations. We want them to react in a multitude of ways, whether it's "chase you for a while and then give up to return to their regular post," or "keep their distance because they know you have a sword and can avoid you from the higher ground." Recently, skeletons have been sliding across the ground to chase players instead of running because they've discovered it's the optimal way to catch up. While it's hilarious and slightly intimidating, it'll be patched out after the holidays.
On Joe's side, he's been locked away this month working on fleshing out the bestiary, lore, and writing out Cabirus' script for Stephen Russell's VO work. Backers who pledged at the EXPLORER tier or above ($50+) will be able to see (and hear!) clips of Stephen Russell working behind the scenes in the "Making of Underworld Ascendant" backer reward, and perhaps we'll be able to share something in the near future...
We've had a lot of meetings coordinating with artists, musicians, and other designers to work on Underworld Ascendant, which has been very exciting. One of whom we can now proudly announce...
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