Reign of Guilds News

Development blog #5

1 | World and locations

1.1. County Unsund – Tulglas city

It is the second county from south to north on the eastern mainland where the climate is cooler.

Tulglas is the administrative centre of the county. It is located in the cosy bay formed by main freshwater artery of ROG world. Similar to Harbour maritime trade and extensive commercial exchanges thrive here with the other counties.

We found new architectural solutions for the county. You can meet them everywhere, except southernmost and northernmost cities and villages.

Counties of the outer circle (i.e. entry level) would have 2-3 additional villages without banks, associations, auction, trading space. But there would be NPC, portals, respawn places. It reduces burden on the starting locations.

In addition, we reconsidered the concept. Now every county would have 12-15 mining locations. The range and resource level depend on the geographical location. Total resource level will remain the same. It was intended to reduce any possibility of monopoly through the one TOP-guild zerg.

1.2. Entry level castles

Last time we talked about the role of castles in the ROG world and prepared basis for its creation. It was about picket fences, wooden platforms and towers, stone walls and also about gates. The larger part of the castle siege is connected with the gates.

Entry level castles (15 and 30 lvl.) will be surrounded by wooden picket fence, also they will have 4-5 towers, and all necessary buildings will be located on their territory: keep, barracks, armory, forge, and also a tavern. Furthermore, this castles has small lookout forts. These forts are important strategic positions during the sieges.

More information about forts, their role, process of capture and division of castles into internal and external parts will be described in the next article.

2 | UI

Our team started work on the important element - user interface or, simply put, UI. The challenge ahead is to make UI pleasing to eye, user-friendly, clear and fitting into the setting and visual ROG style. And now we are ready to show the results of the work on the main player screen which includes HP and MP bars, energy, compass, clock, equipment, hotbar, chat, buff panel, and interface to control the groups. This, of course, is not the final version and everything can change.

3 | Animations

Initially, the larger part of animations after prototype should be transferred to a new character with the necessary corrections. However, quality requirements are not static. That’s why we decided to redesign about 80% of animations and to correct 20%.

The reason for the new animations falls not only to our aesthetic point of view but to the creation of new combat system 2.0. It will become more dynamic, sneakier, and harder. In addition, new version of engine let us redesign the rebounds mechanic. It became more vibrant in terms of code.

But, fortunately, our new animator can easily handle it!)

3.1. Animations with two-handed sword

Combat stance

Run right

Sprint

Dodge back

Hit 03-09

Hit 01-07

3.2. Animations with shield and sword

Sprint

Hit 12-06

Hit from block

3.3. Animations with one-handed sword

Dodge right

Combat stance

Run back

4 | Programming

All maps in MMO games are divided into many servers unbeknownst to a player. Using the case of WoW, Ogrimmar hosts one server, and Durotar the other. At the same time, it is not a problem to move from one location to another. These locations are divided by huge gates. When you go through the gates, the previous location becomes hidden from view before you can see the next one. Thus, disconnecting the previous server and connecting the new one, a player does not suspect that he hosts completely different server. This technology is called Seamless travel.

This is one of the most difficult parts of any open world MMO. In some games the transition between servers poses many technical problems, including disconnections, dupe of items, zeroing of equipment. The prevention of such problems is our priority.

At the moment, the seamless system is already added to the PTR server, and testing is about to start.

5 | 3D models

5.1. Models for the buildings constructor

Our team like to optimize the process of the creation of different objects, that’s why we prepared a whole set of logs of varying lengths and thickness for the gate constructions and other buildings (maybe even sauna). A wide range of logs let us create many variations of using it. A possibility of applying one of 6 materials (light, light aged, dark, dark aged, and materials with mold and moss) will make every building unique.

5.2. Models of the commodities and resources

Commodities and resources we can divide into 4 main groups:

Wood;
Stone;
Metal;
Fabric.

We already told about places and ways of mining in the previous articles. And now we want to tell about the models of the commodities and resources.

5.3. Models of the armour and capes

We can boast about new 4 tiers of medium armour.

The first 4 tiers almost doesn’t show metal elements. It is based on the quilted and woven fabric and leather.

This armour is universal, i.e. without profession requirements.

We don’t forget about decorative elements of the outfit. We prepared the sets of capes in different colours and prices.

Among these capes there are some models that player can get only for pre-order.

However, it should be recalled that the capes and shoulder pads are rather social element. It almost doesn’t have any useful characteristics for a player.

6 | Conclusion

Hand on heart, we can tell that we are satisfied with the increasing speed of work on the project.

Alpha-test is not far off. Information about it will be sent to every participant on the email (the number of participants no less than 12 thousands). Our team looks forward to the start of this new and important stage.

We intend to enter the final stretch before alpha-test and we will meet:

Preparation and audit of the created world for deploying on the test server.
Implementation of the new combat system with renewed animations.
Implementation of the new mobs and correction of the critical moment of AI.
Adaptation of respawn mechanics to the new world, and functionality of teleports.

See you in the world of ROG later!

Development blog #4

Notice: We respect the desire of the Steam community to get familiar with the new projects within Steam, so we decided to publish regularly (every 2 days) previously released reports on our Steam page, until we catch up with the current ones. By the way, you can read all the reports on our website.[reignofguilds.com]
Reign of Guilds roadmap[reignofguilds.com] - combines all development reports at one place.
And here's our Development blog #4 (originally released 07/13/18)

Dear friends!

It’s time to share our progress in the Reign of Guilds development with you in development blog. Today we have prepared extremely interesting, as we believe, information.

You know that transition from the prototype stage to the early alpha goes through a huge layer of work and it’s extremely hard to visualize and absolutely uninteresting to players. But we decided to tell you what exactly we had been doing.

1. Open world

1.1. Landscape

The world of Reign of Guilds is out there, like the truth of Mulder and Scully!

When 4 continents were created in WorldMachine, we’ve immediately faced several game design problem.

ROG and mountains

It all started with mountains – their slopes were totally flat and as a result, materials of these mountains laid low, evoking despair even to game designers. We changed the relief of all mountains – now there is no flatness but snow and grass on the ridges.

ROG and hills

In terms of realism hills add credibility to the world. In terms of FP game convenience, a long play session would have been difficult because of the hills, that is why we’ve added plains.

ROG and rivers

Banks of big rivers were too steep and not beautiful enough to us as well, so we had to make new riverbeds. Now river banks are flat, rivers are calm, so Game-designer’s inner demon of perfectionism is satisfied.

ROG and landscape materials

Along with topography adjustments, we were selecting and optimizing 15 landscape materials for 4 climatic zones (winter, autumn, summer and hot summer). These materials, called layers, are layered to each other, that allows creating huge variety of combinations (for example, we put snow on dirt and suddenly we get ... dirty snow).

1.2 Flora

Do you remember us preparing a bunch of biomes? So, we have taken their introduction in the game world seriously. The SpeedTree program has taken over the eighth version, becoming a really essential assistant to game developers all over the world. Plants generated by the eighth version have not only become several times better in terms of quality and optimization, but the functionality has became wider and more convenient as well.

Now, it allows creating realistic plants at the previous optimization level and sometimes even improving it. We could not miss such a gift from above. Therefore, we rolled up our sleeves and started selecting biomes 2.0. We adjusted loads, seasonality, wind behavior, and as a result we have got something that is much superior to the prototype in the picture quality.

In the end, we selected 12 types of forests of different variations (summer, winter, autumn, spring, coniferous and deciduous and large-leaved ones).

Forests were distributed around the world with the procedural flora application functionality. What is it? UE4 allows creating a kind of aerosol paint containers, but with a variety of trees, stumps, snags, stones instead of paint. In other words, everything that a developer and community wants to see in their forest. Settings of these “containers” allow creating absolutely unique and diverse territories.

Creating spawners is not the fastest and easiest process. But it is the only optimal way to fill such a huge world. This means that we manually put all trees in the locations that are points of interest.

1.3 Daerkunn County - Harbour Settlement

At the moment, the work on the first county is finished by 50%. Daerkunn County is territories in the southeast of the Eastern continent. On its outskirts, there is a Harbour settlement of municipal importance. Harbour is a port settlement and stands out with NPC merchants who will forward goods to other Counties on ships and thereby embody the idea of intercontinental trade, that was actively discussed on our forum.

2. Castles

2.1 Walls, wall materials and other castle components

Most events in the ROG world will take place around castles, there will be about 30 of them on each continent. Considering such a scale, we could not simply built a castle after a castle – there must be a structure to unify and simplify this process as much as possible, while preserving the diversity and uniqueness of each object.

As a result, we prepared foundations for creating castles of different levels: in counties of the initial level, these are wooden structures that will be surrounded with a wooden paling. Accordingly, the design was based on various types of paling with different methods of joining logs, platforms and stairs.

The use of these elements allows unifying each castle, everything now depends only on the level designer’s imagination.

*an abandoned fort on the outskirts of the world

With the increase in the castle level, the foundation materials will also change. For castles made of stone, we have prepared several wall foundations (flat ones, as well as with internal passages).

These elements will come to life by applying certain brickwork on them. Brickwork is a complex structure material that allows creating plenty of variations. It looks something like this:

The main task is creating a visually three-dimensional material, so that a wall does not look flat.

Then, this wall is simply stretched out and the world gets diversified with vertex painting (see the description below).

2.2 Towers

We have done a compelling work on creating castle towers, which have a strategic function during the castle sieges. Towers with gates are not only checkpoints, they also help in the castle defense. Towers must be convenient to shoot from and offer a good view of the castle surroundings. As with walls, a variety of towers will be achieved by applying different types of brickwork and vertex painting on them.

2.3. Vertex painting

We are working hard not only on the diversity of the surrounding flora and fauna, but also emphasizing the history of individual settlements, breathing life into a variety of buildings. We modify them, as if these buildings had been exposed by time and the climate of the Reign of Guilds world.

For this, a vertex painting tool is used, followed by procedural generation of layering different materials. Thus, objects that will be in the northernmost latitudes will be covered with permafrost, those in humid areas - with moss and mold.

2.4 Gates

Gates in games are often just gates, in some games they close and open, in others not, sometimes they look beautiful and sometimes - really beautiful. In our game world, even gates have their concept, as their hinges include a good portion of the castle capturing mechanics. There will be a separate article devoted to the gate concept. In the meantime, we will show you how it will look and a variety of gate types in the ROG world:

And these are grates, that will be an additional fortification of the gate, obtained at the castle grading.

Such a diversity of composite elements will allow us to create plenty of different gate coolness variations for castles, high and low. Our game modelers have created a gate in the form of a constructor (with separate loops, door bolts, lattices, fortifications, decorative elements, etc.) and these elements will start merging into a single mechanism looked after by our game designers. Visual effects are definitely a good thing for magic, but the most important thing is, still, a code. We have saturated the game with all the magic, which effects we showed you in the previous journals.

3. Magic

3.1 The earth magic

Stone arrow powder

This magic mechanics is similar to the fiery arrow powder, the difference is in the speed of flight, distance, targeted area and stability. So that’s how it is! While it seemed like just taking a stone and throwing it.

Rockfall powder

Another gift from above is an AOE rain of boulders. In this case, the amount of gross damage is calculated separately for each character. That is, 2 characters with the same amour will be damaged differently under the same rockfall. Someone will be more lucky, someone less. Unlike the fire puddle that you already know about, the rockfall powder has a higher duration and damage frequency.

Development blog #3

Notice: We respect the desire of the Steam community to get familiar with the new projects within Steam, so we decided to publish regularly (every 2 days) previously released reports on our Steam page, until we catch up with the current ones. By the way, you can read all the reports on our website.
Reign of Guilds roadmap - combines all development reports at one place.
And here's our Development blog #3 (originally released 02/23/18)

Hey everyone!

We continue to tell you about the development of Reign of Guilds, and today we want to talk about creating the world of our game and about the biomes that players will be immersed in the study of various lands.

On our forum we discuss the development of Reign of Guilds. You can always share your bright ideas and thoughts and we may actually implement them into the game as Reign of Guilds is a community-driven project.

https://youtu.be/HwAowBClCvI

Development blog #2

Notice: We respect the desire of the Steam community to get familiar with the new projects within Steam, so we decided to publish regularly (every 2 days) previously released reports on our Steam page, until we catch up with the current ones. By the way, you can read all the reports on our website. And here's our Development blog #2 (originally released 01/24/18)

Hey everyone!

As you remember, we’ve made our first dev’s blog on how we develop the Reign of Guilds before the New Year.

This time we will concentrate our story on a more specific part - VFX for buffs/debuffs and abilities.

Eager to know what we’ve prepared for you?

- Water magic is depicted by ice, so don’t forget to get warm clothes and hot tea before watching as things might get icy;
- Earth magic is your best protection in the game which also looks cool;
- We will also show you some more abilities that might help win the fight.

On our forum we discuss the development of Reign of Guilds. You can always share your bright ideas and thoughts and we may actually implement them into the game as Reign of Guilds is a community-driven project.

Enjoy!

https://youtu.be/OR-KYc2HvX4