Hey you awesome people! We just pretty much realized this Steam community area thing exists, and wanted to get into posting here. Now, we aren’t gonna summarize everything that has happened in the development so far (you’ll see it when you get to launch the game THIS YEAR (or support us on our Patreon for earlier dev updates so far)! Anyways, here’s what we’ve been working on the last few months with Taival:
Improving melee & ranged combat
The combat we’ve seen so far in Taival has not been to the level we’d like it to be. Yes, the characters’ hands do a swing animation with the sword, but that’s not enough for us!! What we want is dynamics, blocking, proper combos, oomph and feel.
First, we took melee to a whole new level. We replaced ALL of the combat animations, added completely new proper swing VFXs hand synced to the animations, we added some impact frame freezes to the animations, we added knockback and we hand tweaked animation playback with curves for the exact feel we wanted for the attacks. In total we added and replaced 60 melee attack animations, with custom combos for all weapon types, which have now been elevated from just generic “Unarmed, 1 Handed and 2 Handed” to “Unarmed, Sword, Greatsword, Greathammer, Dual Daggers, Sword & Shield and GreatAxe”. Each of these weapon types have custom animations and combos, and thus each weapon will feel different to play.
For ranged combat, we leveled up this thing up a big notch as well, allowing for a ton of variety between ranged weapons. From physics based bows to AOE exploding sticky bomb magic projectiles, this system should bring you guys a ton of different approaches. Really excited to see how you guys feel about the combat!
World content scaling (balancing)
We had a lengthy conversation on how player progression and world content balancing should work. The biggest issues we considered were based on the simple fact that we won’t have hundreds and hundreds of playable quests due to the scale of the team and this being an early access release (though we’d love to haha). This creates the following restrictions. We can’t have entirely level locked zones, because if the player eg. completed 3/12 quests in the first zone, heads to the next one, and returns to the first zone 10 hours later, the quests are now no longer rewarding or useful to the player, causing them to miss the majority of the content. Likewise having weapons locked to a single level would cause similar issues, as we want content to be relevant longer due to there not being hundreds of weapons for every level of player progression.
This is why we decided on a hybrid, having all content scaled in Taival, but to a specified range. This means having a minimum level requirement to be able to use a weapon, but the weapon can be found in multiple different levels. A level 10 common steel sword will do less damage and be missing eg. the heavy attack compared to a level 15 rare steel sword, which will drop later when player levels on. The same goes for enemies, they scale between a level range, keeping playable content relevant longer, while still offering a threat for too low leveled players. As for the quests, the rewards and XP also scale to the player level, ensuring the player has rewarding content regardless of where they decide to head in the game!
Updated Spawner System
We updated the game’s spawner system for NPCs, animals, pickupables and so on. Before dynamic objects (such as animals, pickupables and similar) could be spawned via a radius from the spawner. These objects would then respawn during runtime. Now it is possible to select certain terrain layers to place the spawning points. This means it is super fast to for example create a spawner that spawns 10 chibkin animals per 100 square meters everywhere in the world where there is a certain blue grass texture on the ground. This allows very fast even distribution of content, while also ensuring great scalability as creating more land with these textures automatically receives the content matching that biome!
Multi-Phase Pickupables
This is another little system we just got together. It’s basic but should offer a lot to the gameplay experience. It allows pickupables (any objects you can pick up to your inventory via E or similar button) to have multiple states, through which they go as the world’s time goes on. This simply allows eg. having plants grow (and rot) over time!
What’s fun here is that the time it takes to eg. have a flower grow doesn't have to be in mere in-game hours. It is possible to set it to be even years (ingame time haha), meaning we could have a huuuge special flower somewhere in the map, that only grows to the full state after 25 hours (or even 100 hours, no limits here) of ingame time, after which some super cool endgame gameplay would unlock by gathering it! Of course this would be a rare scenario, say a huge beanstalk plant finally growing to the sky unlocking an area after tons of played hours. Let us know if you get any fun ideas on what such a magic plant could do or unlock! 😀
The World of Taival!
We also worked on adding a lot of side quests (that we won’t spoil here ;) ) along with expanding the world with new biomes, creatures, and loot to discover.
Below is a collection of a bunch of different environments that we spent countless hours working on! Besides adding all the foliage, painting terrain, adding models and NPCs to the scene, we have spent a ton of time on different ambience effects. In the images you can find stars, fog, water, smoke, dust particles… Basically a ton of stuff that you don’t pay attention to when playing but you definitely notice something’s wrong when it’s not there. In order the places are Lantern’s Crossing (during an invasion), Gaelwind Plateau, Guldo’s Mill & Malt, Jungle beach (haven’t figured a proper name lol), Hermit’s Crooked Tower, Gloomwood Lake and finally the northern watchtower. Enjoy!🙂