The lower you go the weirder it gets, try to reach at least level 4.
It's a dueling game. In Exanima you have exploration and it's possible to fight multiple enemies at once.
It's possible for a single blow to take a lot of your health. Even if you have armor and enemy gets a solid hit, you can lose a good chunk. Nevermind the blows that send you to the ground, leaving you helpless for a moment.
I know? It's possible to die from one hit it just not common because game actually tracks the momentum and power of the hit so every time its a bit different and its easy enough to avoid or mitigate harm. In the game above its more like a kill switch and usual preset stuff, either you get one-shotted or get wounded with a glancing hit - two simple conditions, I doubt there are any fancy calculations going on in there. Exanima anims are mostly procedural too instead of recorded movesets.
You can take the combat system, tweak the camera angle and add movement (it already has 3d movement, you don't just move front-back like a fighting game) and exploration. What I mean is that, clearly, physics-based combat is possible, without it looking like 2 drunks lunging at each other with sticks.
It's not coming anytime soon. Come back in a few years.
Force thaumaturgy, role system and new levels are in the next update after this one.
19/10/20
We are still working hard to get the renderer beta update ready, there's nothing big left to do, but quite a lot of little things to finalise.
We've rebuilt our undead / body decomposition on the new procedural material system, and also given them more realistic morphing. You can see from the screenshot how there's various procedural effects from bruising and vascular damage to skin sagging and tearing. We've got some other improvements to introduce that we showed you some prototypes of a while back (like organs and bones showing), and they are easy to add now that the system is in place. This is a big improvement over what is currently in game, and definitely gives the undead a much more creepy appearance.
Body Decomposition Revisited
Some example decomposition levels from the procedural character systems updated for the renderer, and improved morph targets. Bodies and undead look more detailed and realistic, and this is the base from which we can...
We've also put a lot more work into our procedural cloth. This is not the most exciting material, but it features very prominently on characters. We wanted cloth to look more realistic in general, have good wear and dirt effects and also work well with more vibrant colours. We're also updating our colouring system to something more versatile that is built around a new palette based on dyes.
We've rebuilt our post-processing on top of our new renderer systems, with a few good improvements and the introduction of a good gamma feature for the new settings screen.
Besides that we're still just fixing, tweaking, adding smaller less critical features and updating key assets to get everything ready to hand over to our testers. We're getting through it pretty fast so hopefully we'll be able to do this within days.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
26/10/20
This week we introduced various features that were still missing in the new renderer. This includes our blood effects for characters, weapons and sprays, various blending and animated emission effects, hair shading, and a few other things. We also just got everything up and running properly, so we have a seemingly stable playable build.
We didn't have any specific shading for hair in the new renderer, which is difficult to get right as it reflects light in quite a unique way and to the trained human eye very easily looks flat, plasticky or metallic. In the end we developed a very fancy shader with multi-chromatic anisotropic highlights and reflections, some back-scattering, and a few other tricks. We also made the hair of undead look patchy and aged.
New Hair Shading
New renderer needs new hair shading. We had to use a lot of fancy methods to get some dynamic lighting that doesn't just look wrong on hair.
A lot of what we've been doing is just updating our materials to take advantage of the new renderer and also some assets where we felt they needed more polish. We've put the new tilesets in and are just going through stuff and doing final tweaks. With the new renderer being largely programmable in real time we couldn't resist experimenting a bit, and we made some really nice improvements here and there, particularly for displacement mapping which now looks more 3D and includes some shadowing and GI occlusion effect.
We are still working on our outdoor GI solution, most of the work is done, but we're still experimenting with some aspects of it. As this is only used for a couple of arenas at the moment we might just disable those while we run the first beta test, as everything else should be ready now.
We also made some improvements to motion, the physics and graphics synch more accurately which makes motion even smoother and reduces perceived input lag. We also fixed some camera jitter which had been annoying us for a long time.
There are some minor things to do to get everything packaged up in a release build, but we're basically there. We should be able to finish updating key assets and polishing things up during the early testing, which hopefully won't last more than a week or so.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
9/11/20
We're still putting the last few bits together for a release, converting assets and building packages etc., and just polishing things up. We do tend to get a bit carried away with the polishing part, but during these pre release periods where we interact with the content a lot we get into a rhythm and get through stuff quickly, especially now with all the improvements to our tools.
We've also been doing some very exhaustive testing, trying to catch up on various old little bugs and testing the renderer for compatibility with different hardware. We have a history of issues with Intel integrated graphics that we were never able to solve completely, but this time round we seem to have got the renderer working flawlessly, without compromising quality or performance. This is going to be a really huge graphical improvement for people running integrated GPUs.
Procedural materials is something we've been sinking quite a bit more time into. These are super important for the overall look of the game, but also support some very important new itemisation and customisation mechanics. Developing one of these materials well once means doing it for every item past and future in one go, so it's worth the effort. This is especially important now that we've integrated the same methods into our standard asset pipeline, which allows us to get a consistent level of detail and quality which we would never achieve if we had to put all the work in each time. Here's a screenshot of one of our new procedural leathers in different quality, wear and colour:
New Procedural Leather
Still updating and improving some of our procedural materials. this is the latest leather. These materials are applied to all our items automatically, and now also used in other content development, so it pays off to do...
We've updated and replaced a huge amount of assets now, mostly in the early game where our oldest assets were found. We have kept the look of everything consistent with how it was, but just better. One more small thing, but surely appreciated by Exanima fashionistas, we decided it was time to update our belts, check these out:
New Belts
It was time to update our belts and add some new ones.
Anyway, won't be long at all now before we put the renderer update out, and we're already turning a lot of our attention to the arena update that will follow shortly after. We've been filling in the last few gaps, like some missing tournament match types, and discussing how we will integrate various future mechanics, with some focus on multiplayer. As we've mentioned we want to turn the arena mode into a much more fleshed out game mode with much more to do, and a platform that we can continue to build new features into.
That's all for this week, have a good one!
-the BM team
16/11/20
The renderer update is essentially ready, along with the last important procedural materials and various asset updates. After our great success getting the new renderer working on Intel graphics, this week we had a much less successful run with AMD. We are having issues with their OpenGL drivers, it works, but performance is bad and there are some visual artifacts. We haven't had much luck solving these issues yet, so we'll return to them after release.
Anyway, before we release the renderer update and start patching people's save games we want to complete one more thing, which is the core of the itemization changes and a big part of what the new procedural systems are designed to do.
Currently items in Exanima only have a few preset modifiers, such as "rusted" or "exceptional" which encompass quality, condition and any other differences. You generally know what to expect from certain items, and what's better or worse. The item progression is very simple and linear, you pick up something better and discard the old until you have the best.
With the new procedural material system we're also introducing new properties and randomization mechanics. Each item has independent quality and condition with many possible levels, a separate set of traits, and some other variable properties. The same items come with different material combinations and variants of similar materials. Materials can also have their own pool of traits which they can apply.
Quality and Condition
Examples of how material quality and condition affects the appearance of metal items.
This means a lot more variation in items, both visually and in terms of properties. Even static rusty items in the environment will vary significantly, and this ties in to other systems we're introducing. In story mode there will be a way to improve the quality of items with a new consumable resource, so you will want to choose how much to invest in which items, considering your options carefully.
This is a complex randomization system, it will still generate thematically appropriate items, appropriately combine fancy or simple materials and dyes, follow colour schemes etc. Dyes, paints and lacquers will also be introduced, allowing you to customize the appearance of your items. Dyes can also be used to restore an item's appearance cosmetically, without functionally improving its condition, and you'll be able to clean dirty items if you have the necessary cleaning items.
Metal Paints and Lacquers
Metallic lacquers and matte paints applied to armour, and the effects of condition on those.
These mechanics now apply to apparel and armour, but will be part of the upcoming procedural weapons too. Another related feature we're introducing is randomizing "static" spawns of items in the environment, so that different items will appear in new and different locations on each playthrough, including even chests or other containers. Encounters will also have partially randomized equipment, and in some cases we would like to give some special encounters that carry more important items a greater degree of randomization, while still following a theme.
Have a great week!
-the BM team
Arena is pretty much the same, a bit more expanded from original version with the hub, item rotation and NPCs, it became a separate gamemode. It will also get its largest update yet before the end of this year with a lot of new stuff.
