Dev Update #5 - The Castle Whitebox

[p]Hiya! Popping in just to give some updates on what we've been working on! As I mentioned in the last update post, what we're working on now is a very large revamp to the main playspace of Wizard Boy. This is essentially some mixture of taking pieces from the existing castle, making new pieces, and, as you might be able to see from the screenshots, adding a full exterior![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]What you're looking at here is called a whitebox - essentially a flat-colored layout that represents the final ideation of an area that allows you to move things around quickly and not get too deep into any area before you're sure it will work out. Evan has done a basic whitebox for a large part of the new castle design and is currently in the process of filling in some missing sections with rooms and doing more detailed work on sections we feel 100% confident are ready to continue production.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]If you haven't done a design like this before, it's a little hard to explain how complicated it is. Bringing the actual environment together technically is tough from an optimization perspective, but concepting what that environment should be and how it all relates to each other to make it both function in gameplay and look good from the inside and outside is really, really tough. On that front, we feel like we're finally on the downhill, and Evan has even started to re-texture and light some of the rooms that are new to this design.[/p][p][/p][p](Keen-eyed players \[Zepto] might recognize this hallway. It's coming back as part of the new interior.)[/p][p][/p][p]This is going to continue to be a long process into next year, but the current goal is to get what we want to call a "functional whitebox" put together that we can actually play and test with some of the Discord members as the next step in the process, so if you're chomping for something new to play it won't be as long to wait as for the full castle to be finished. Will let you know when we have that together.[/p][p][/p][p]I forgot to mention this when originally posting. Cody the prop guy has made like a ton of props and he just keeps posting them on Trello and I can never keep up. I'll just post some pictures and you'll get the ideas.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The other main focus over the last month or so has been with optimization. As I mentioned before, there's a challenge related to scaling our environment this way in that we don't want the game to become harder to run. Wizard Boy has been mostly built through Blueprint, which is notoriously a little slow since it's technically a scripting language. I've been working with an Unreal developer to rewrite important chunks of the codebase to be in native compiled C++, which in theory should give a substantial boost to performance. My goal is to have the new castle run at an equitable place to the current castle despite being much more complex. How close we're going to get to that is yet to be seen, but we're putting a lot of effort into trying to make it happen![/p][p][/p][p]Not much I can screenshot to show that progress, but suffice to say as much work has been put in on that end as with the environment. Hopefully it will invisibly make the experience much better in the long run![/p][p][/p][p]Ducky Dev has brought on a new team member (everyone say hi to Anna!) In the short term, Anna is going to be working on a separate game in the background while this Wizard Boy update is continuing to churn. Nonetheless, you may still see some work that Anna does come up in the updates here and there, since she's pretty much excellent at everything and sometimes we just need her help to continue things rolling.[/p][p][/p][p]Will continue to update you as we progress with the castle! By next update, I hope to be able to have that functional whitebox ready to play with ya'll.[/p][p][/p][p]-John[/p]