August has come and gone in a blur and with it, a new devlog is due! This month was a mix of optimization, world expansion, reworking some combat systems, adding new enemies, adding alternate starting locations and adding the game’s first boss… the Rat King! A very productive month indeed!
Eastern Temple
The Eastern Temple is a new highly stylized area featuring a rich Japanese inspired temple and village, a deep valley with many waterfalls and a unique boss arena set in a zen-like garden. The videos below can do most of the talking 🙂
Tranquil view of the Falls below the temple.
Fly-through tour of the early stages of the temple.
Road to the Temple Boss Arena.
Chickens!
Alternate Starting Locations
Another major addition this month was allowing the player to choose alternate starting locations. For now you can choose from one of three starting locations: Eventide Pass (tutorial area), The Docks or the The Eastern Temple. Currently nothing changes except where you start from when choosing a starting location. Eventually, I want to have the world change and morph to where the player starts from. Say if you start in the Eastern Temple then the Temple Town is a peaceful village with NPCs. But if you start in the Docks, then the Temple Town may be overrun with raiders and it will convert that area into a dungeon. The possibilities for a system like this are endless.
Book Based Menu System
The new book-based menu system has been the primary focus of July and has taken a tremendous amount of work to get to a working state. I am so excited about this feature as it really gives Holomento a unique flair!
Enemy Reworks (Detection System)
I tried a few experimental changes with enemies this month but only one really stuck. When running throughout the world, enemies now need to detect you to attack instead of instantly attacking as soon as you are nearby. This gives you a chance to attempt to be a bit sneaky. I may add crouching to assist in the sneaking process.
Rats
The Holomento Discord has its fair share of memes. One of them has been a consistent request to get rats into the game. This month I’m happy to say that rat enemies were added (despite being in an unbalanced state). Overall I think the rats are on their way to becoming a solid “cannon fodder” type enemy.
Rat King
What good are rats without a king? (probably fine to be honest, but I wanted to make one anyways).
Holomento’s first boss comes in the form of a giant rat with a huge crown. This was my first attempt at making a boss ever. It is unpolished and rather unbalanced, but for an early Alpha build, I believe the Rat King is good fun to fight.
In addition to making the first boss, I added all of the necessary supporting elements for the boss arena such as boss doors and progress saving when a boss is defeated. The bosses also drop chests upon their expiration.
Optimizations and Other Features
One large change made this month that doesn’t show well in a video was the addition of level streaming and loading zones to help improve performance across the game. The tradeoff with these loading zones is that they are boring areas you must walk through to load certain parts of the map. The benefits however, far outweigh the drawbacks. Level streaming allows the world to be much more easily expanded, improves FPS dramatically in-game and in-editor and reduces loading times for the game to boot. Another small but convenient feature of level streaming is that the background of the title screen can be dynamic with randomly selected levels throughout the game. This will be used to showcase your progress as you upgrade and repair the world.
Another small but important change was smoothing out the transition between different atmospheres/weather. This system still has a ways to go but is coming along nicely.
Finally, another small but impactful improvement to NPCs is the addition of an animation system. This system allows animations to be changed on a line-by-line basis. Now to just get the NPCs to look like something other than green Michelin men!
Wrap-Up
Alright, that’s all for this month. Don’t forget the Holomento Alpha is live so updates will be frequently posted to the Steam Community page. This Dev Log will continue but does not guarantee the latest information. If you would like to keep up with the latest updates on the project I invite you to follow progress via the links below:
- Steam –Â https://store.steampowered.com/app/721700/Holomento/
- Twitter –Â https://twitter.com/HolomentoGame
- Discord –Â http://discord.gg/FbaQ8zJ
- Subreddit –Â https://www.reddit.com/r/Holomento/
- Youtube –Â https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCS7TjrKTM42sWjoVxuSRBeg
- Twitch –Â https://www.twitch.tv/sheenweedy
- Website –Â https://holomento.com/
See you all next month!
Sean