Darfall News

Hello everyone and welcome to our 5th Darfall update. It's me Lukas and today we have something interesting to cover.

We hope you enjoyed the last AI Update, where we explained the workings behind our unit "brains".

Since our last update, we have been hard at work on fixing bugs and adding quality of life improvements, as well as some new features.

One of those features are legendary item powers. Legendary items drop very, very rarely and thus have a huge glow you just cannot miss. This was heavily inspired by Diablo, those of you who played know this :)

You can see the huge orange legendary glow compared to other item types: epic (purple), rare (green) and common (white).



Finding a legendary item boosts your hero power significantly and can decide whether you survive the next night or not.

[h2]Moon Robe[/h2]

One of these legendary items is the Moon Robe of Defence. It’s used primarily by caster heroes (such as our Archmage) and also gives a huge boost to healing and ability damage.



As the description states, it has a chance to activate a protective barrier around your hero that absorbs all incoming damage for several seconds.



[h2]Phantom Mask[/h2]

Next one is another legendary with an interesting power, a Phantom Mask, which has a chance to fear an enemy, making him unable to move or attack.



As you can see, the enemy skeleton archer has a fear icon over its head, as it was feared by the hero's Phantom Mask



[h2]Other Legendaries[/h2]

Here are some other examples of legendary power items you may come across when defeating powerful enemies.









[h2]How to Get Them?[/h2]

All of the legendary items have a very low chance to drop, but they only drop from the most powerful foes you can find roaming the map, such as Orc Warchief from the orc camps, or the Undead Warlord protecting its graveyard.

(Angry Orc Warchief)


(Undead Warlord)


It will not be easy to defeat these enemies, but once you do, the rewards can be great, giving you a huge help surviving more nights.

We hope you liked this dev blog and are eager to find these items on your own and use their powers to your full advantage.

If you have any thoughts to share, please don't hesitate to share them in our Discord.

See you in the next blog post!
Martin and Lukas from beyond the darkness of Darfall.

Hello everyone and welcome back :)

It's me Lukas and today I will talk about how the AI (Artificial Intelligence) works in Darfall and what we use in the background to drive it.

At the very early stages of the development, the AI for our units was quite simple, like moving to a position, or attacking a target. I wrote this behavior in pure code with my own implementation, but it turned out to be super messy and unreadable quite fast. Even such a simple AI behaviors takes A LOT of code to write.

Later on I tried to research what other tool I could use for our AI. I came across Behavior Designer, the most popular AI asset on the Unity asset store. In the Behavior Designer, you put nodes on a visual graph and depending on how you place and connect your nodes, it will create AI logic you desire.



Here is a very simple node example, showing how the AI waits for some time, then picks a random position and walks towards it.



You could probably deduct what these nodes do even if I did not explain the logic behind them. This is why having a visual tree such as Behavior Designer helps immensely during the AI development and navigating its different parts.



The following tree shows a small example part of the woodcutter AI. The nodes are evaluated from left to right, where left nodes have the highest priority and always try to execute first.



1. Do we have any resource to carry?
- If yes, carry it to storage
- If not, continue to the next node segment 2.

2. Have we found any resource to gather?
- If yes, move towards it and gather it
- If not, continue to the next segment 3.

3. Wander around aimlessly until the worker faints out from exhaustion :D



Here is another example, a full tree that represents the AI behind the player warrior units:



You can see how complex this can get very quickly even with a such visual tool :)
Now you can imagine how hard would it be to write all this AI logic in pure code, without any visual tree representation.

The AI is usually the most challenging feat to handle during any game development. I had to rewrite the entire AI in Darfall for several times already, using different approaches or plugins, such as NodeCanvas.

I'm happy how it turned out and that Behavior Designer trees were a good choice, reducing future bugs, or making it much easier to implement new AI logic like possible boss fighting mechanics.

See you in the next dev blog post.

All the best,
Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games

The third annual event celebrating the Czech and Slovak games starts this week (Nov 14th - Nov 21st). Just like last year, the unique Czech & Slovak Games Week event will take place on the occasion of the national holiday of November 17th.

We're proud to present to you that Darfall will be part of the Czech & Slovak Games Week.

Hello everyone and welcome back :)

It's me Lukas and today I will talk about how the map is generated in Darfall.

Since maps in Darfall are procedurally generated, we needed a versatile system that would allow us to modify any part of the map generation, like which trees are placed into the forests, what areas will our forests cover, or what units and structures are generated into which parts of the map.

This system is fully "scriptable", this means that Martin, our artist, can modify any part of the map generation without me needing to touch the code.

[h2]Grassland Map[/h2]

Let's start with few steps of how the Grassland map is generated. First, an empty body of water is placed onto the map



Next, the terrain tiles are generated, with mountains and bodies of water. Both use perlin noise to make them look natural.



Then resources like trees and iron veins are placed into the map. Trees are also generated using perlin noise, which gives the tree clusters more natural look.



Finally, enemy camps are placed into valid locations, like orc camps or undead zones



[h2]Camps[/h2]

Any enemy "point of interest" location is called a camp. These are also procedurally generated. We have a simple system that allows us to quickly populate these camps with props and loot in the Unity editor without touching the code.

Some simple examples of orc camp can be seen here:



All these tools allow us to create quite an impressive locations, like undead zones which create an atmosphere of dangerous corrupted lands



Above were just quick examples of the processes we currently have in its initial stages. In the future, we plan to generate entire villages, forts or encampments for different races, that will be present across different map biomes.

I hope you liked this quick sneak peak of how Darfall is generating its map :)

See you in the next dev blog post!

All the best,
Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games

Hello everyone and welcome back :)

Today, we want to show you the work we have done on the Main Menu in the past weeks. It was not the only improvement to the game, far from it, but it's something visually interesting we can show you.

As we are moving closer to the testing phase and giving the game to other people, the menu is the first thing player sees when they start it up.

Our old menu was not changed for more than a year, it was full of empty screens and placeholders, since it was not a high priority during the development.

Bellow you can see how was the main menu screen looking before



and now the reworked menu page



Following is the old page where player could choose which survival map to play



and the new version with additional info and improve art



next we have the load game menu, which was a complete mess :)



now its a clean and dedicated screen with all your save files



and lastly, we have a loading screen, which was really just an empty screen with simple status text



and we transformed it into a more informative page, giving you a loading progress bar, as well as cycling game tips, which can give you more hints and info about the game as you wait for your new world to generate



Martin, our artist, did an amazing job on designing the UI and we are really satisfied on how it turned out. There are still improvements we want to make to the menu in the future, as having a 3D animated scene from the game.

We hope you liked this new visual update!

See you in the next dev blog post, where we will talk about how the AI works in the game.

All the best,
Martin and Lukas from Play Square Games