Dev Diary #9: Dice, Weapons, and Effects
Hi everyone! It’s been an intense week hard at work here at Toopan Games. We continue working on Criteria (don’t forget to check the first entry of the Criteria Course!), but in parallel, we are working on improving and/or expanding some features of the gaming module. We’ll go into more detail when all this is ready to be implemented in the next update, but we want to give you a small sneak peek at what will come next to Multiverse Designer.
The first thing we’ve worked on lately seems very simple, but it’s actually very important, as it’s one of the things you’ll do the most when playing: rolling dice! In a nutshell, we’re making our dice roll faster. We realized (and some of the feedback we received during the Next Fest pointed in this direction too) that it took too long for dice to finish rolling. Funny thing is that our dice rolls aren’t just for show, that is, we don’t produce a random number in the back and then show a dice rolling animation just for show: we’re actually simulating the physics of a dice rolling in order to get better randomness. Random number generator are never truly random, and use a numeric seed to produce their results, which can have problems further down the line: if you know the seed you can predict its results. To cut a long story short, we’ve improved the rolling simulation so it goes faster.
We’re also implementing new visuals for spell area effects. Like this!
Here it comes...
...and it goes boom!
And talking about areas, another thing we’re working on is trigger areas: basically, spaces in the map that trigger a specific effect when you step into them. Useful for traps, cinematic effects (like a wall crumbling in front of you or a roof collapsing right after you leave a room), reactive spells, and a long list of other cool things to t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶e̶r̶s̶ create interesting situations in your adventures.
Finally, we’re implementing weapon selection for almost all characters – until now, in the beta your character model had a default weapon and you couldn’t change its visuals: if they were armed with a sword but your character sheet said it was a warhammer, you could change the stats rule-wise, but visually it would still be a sword. To do this, we searched the assets in the game and extracted about 200 weapons and shields from several of them. Then we created a system where players can choose which weapon will be in each hand. These aren't necessarily medieval gear, as you can see in the pictures below...
And that’s all for today! As always, we invite you to join our community on Discord, wishlist Multiverse Designer on Steam, and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. See you in our next update!
PS: Friendly reminder, please redeem your Steam keys, and if you haven’t seen yours in your inbox, send us a DM through Kickstarter so we can send it to you. Have a nice day!
The first thing we’ve worked on lately seems very simple, but it’s actually very important, as it’s one of the things you’ll do the most when playing: rolling dice! In a nutshell, we’re making our dice roll faster. We realized (and some of the feedback we received during the Next Fest pointed in this direction too) that it took too long for dice to finish rolling. Funny thing is that our dice rolls aren’t just for show, that is, we don’t produce a random number in the back and then show a dice rolling animation just for show: we’re actually simulating the physics of a dice rolling in order to get better randomness. Random number generator are never truly random, and use a numeric seed to produce their results, which can have problems further down the line: if you know the seed you can predict its results. To cut a long story short, we’ve improved the rolling simulation so it goes faster.
We’re also implementing new visuals for spell area effects. Like this!
Here it comes...
...and it goes boom!
And talking about areas, another thing we’re working on is trigger areas: basically, spaces in the map that trigger a specific effect when you step into them. Useful for traps, cinematic effects (like a wall crumbling in front of you or a roof collapsing right after you leave a room), reactive spells, and a long list of other cool things to t̶o̶r̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶y̶e̶r̶s̶ create interesting situations in your adventures.
Finally, we’re implementing weapon selection for almost all characters – until now, in the beta your character model had a default weapon and you couldn’t change its visuals: if they were armed with a sword but your character sheet said it was a warhammer, you could change the stats rule-wise, but visually it would still be a sword. To do this, we searched the assets in the game and extracted about 200 weapons and shields from several of them. Then we created a system where players can choose which weapon will be in each hand. These aren't necessarily medieval gear, as you can see in the pictures below...
And that’s all for today! As always, we invite you to join our community on Discord, wishlist Multiverse Designer on Steam, and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. See you in our next update!
PS: Friendly reminder, please redeem your Steam keys, and if you haven’t seen yours in your inbox, send us a DM through Kickstarter so we can send it to you. Have a nice day!