Daemon Monthly #4

Daemons,

We have a few new sword abilities in the pipe, some behind the scenes features and upgrades, and a touch of art added to our website. Let’s take a look!

Development

Abilities

Sword abilities, despite introducing new mechanics to the game system, are moving along nicely. Roy has added framework level support for three new mechanics: Taunt, Parry, and Toggleable Abilities.

Taunt, if applied causes the recipient to only be able to target the caster of taunt, creating opportunities for your team to get off that clutch heal, resurrection, or rain of fire!

Parry will give the swordsman the ability to deflect the next incoming direct damage for a duration. We are starting with one second as our initial value, to make the use of parry skillful.

Toggleable abilities allow the user to turn on the ability, then turn it back off when they choose. Crazy, I know. :o Our first toggleable ability is Auto-Attack, which really needs a new name. Perhaps Assault, Barrage, Bombard, or Pain-Train! Anywho, it allows the caster to lay down an ongoing series of strikes to a target, while consistently draining the caster’s stamina. If the caster toggles it off, uses another ability, runs out of stamina, is separated from the target, or is stunned, the assault will end--giving the victim ample opportunity to subvert the assailant.

All three abilities have received animations, passed development, and are now awaiting particle love. After that there will be icons, sounds, quality check, and finally testing. So these three still have a way to go on their journey.

Meanwhile

We’ve been hard at work improving things behind the scenes. We’ve made some refactors to our system to reduce our coding needs and make our code more testable as well. We have also upgraded to the latest versions of Visual Studio, Service Fabric, and Unity--keeping pace with their new features and opportunities.

A large task that is in progress is a reorganizing of our server code base. As part of this process, I’m currently working on a service to handle a user’s session and will serve as a message router to our other microservices. I hope that this session service will also allow us to add reconnecting support to our game.

Currently, one of our largest tech hurdles is that we’re a real time game that requires a constant connection--and we’re on mobile, where connections aren’t terribly reliable. I’m hoping this restructuring of our code will enable us to tackle this hurdle and cast aside our chains to the enthralling master known as: Wigh Figh.

Oh! Our website’s About Us page has received some love recently as well, special thanks to the talented and amazing Leeanne Krecic! Make sure you check out her new and rapidly growing webcomic: Let’s Play!

'til next time Daemons,
Trey

Change Log:

• Features
  • Added a new run animation
  • Animation Blending
  • Ability Framework
    • Toggleable Abilities
    • Taunt
    • Parry
  • Ability Development and Animations for
    • Auto Attack
    • Taunt
    • Parry
• Auxiliary Development
  • Upgrade to latest versions of Visual Studio, Service Fabric, and Unity
  • Refactor
    • Mocked data providers so that our unit tests don’t query the database
    • Generified our new message listeners to reduce the amount of networking code we have to add
  • Add a development testing tool to allow developers to force the opposite team to cast an ability.
• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed line renderer to not update material file

Web

• Gave the about us page a facelift by including character art
• Added error reporting on job application
• Made a dynamic copyright for the footer
• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed storage of job application on the website
  • Fixed layout of positions on highlighted opportunities

Back to news