Here is a "dry" changelog for Elteria Adventures. We decided to split story posts from the dry changelogs.

Pre-Alpha 0.10.2 b81 -> Pre-Alpha 0.11.2 b101

• New notification interface
  
• Ability telegraphs for other players and monsters now are correctly displayed
  
• Implemented basic world regeneration after the destruction of the world by abilities
  
• Finalization of the animation system in the engine
  
• Added population system: Objects, monsters, chests, etc. now spawn in the world themselves in different places
  
• The character now starts without abilities, abilities are obtained by leveling in the character window (C key)
  
• All resources necessary for leveling are present in the inventory since creation, this will be removed as soon as it becomes possible to get them using the gameplay methods
  
• Added a voxel patch system for a swift world update
  
• Added vignette post-effects
  
• In the character window, skills can be selected and placed on the skills panel. Clothes and blueprints are also can be chosen
  
• Added tips on the ability panel
  
• Added voxel damage system. Abilities now do damage to voxels but do not immediately break them, although the exact numbers have not yet tuned. And there is no damage display yet

• Updated character jump animations
  
• Added effect for a block with a sword animation
  
• Updated character portraits
  
• Updated character animations: run, attack with a sword, attack with a hammer, idle, running with a hammer for a female, basic animations of movement for a female, running with stone hands for the male
  
• Added Sword Block ability for Fighter
  
• Added Stone Clap ability and slow effect for it
  
• Added resistance to negative effects such as pushing and stunning
  
• Stone Hands is now switchable ability with CD 1 second
  
• Blazing Shot ability simplified

• Added Hammer Smash ability for the Aster's Crushing Hammer
  
• Added ability for Solara's Grace
  
• Added abilities for Dark Blade Leonard
  
• Added ability for Sir Karst's Armor
  
• Added abilities to the Diadem of Willen
  
• Added double jump for Sturdy Leather Armor
  
• Added Grog's Frenzy's ability - flying sword
  
• Updated descriptions, titles and icons for many items

• Added Plum Octopus
  
• Added Large Tentacle
  
• Added the Tentacle AI
  
• Added tentacle abilities
  
• Added the tentacle bush
  
• Added the Spring Sunflower
  
• Updated the Skeleton animations
  
• Updated Beelemo fly animation
  
• Updated Nature and Wonder gems animations
  
• Updated the round bushes
  
• Updated tentacle bush
  
• Updated desert biome textures

Bugfixes are omitted due to the closed state of the development.

Hello everyone!
Up there is a follow-up to the previous post, the focus of this gif is the blazing fast voxel update time. It used to be about eight times more. Please note, the effects here are not yet synchronized with the faster update.

Currently, we are working on Artifacts. They are a major thing in the game, a huge part of the game time will be spent acquiring artifacts. Previously we had very few of them, and that is one of the main reasons why you still not playing the game! But now, we are reworking the old ones and adding times more!

In Elteria Adventures, artifacts always give you some unique abilities, that is one of our core principles, so for us, it means a lot of work on that mechanics. Models are all ready, but abilities animations and game logic - only partially. This is a lot of work, it's not yet done and it will take some more weeks.

Slots for artifacts are not typical. They are functional, not anatomical. Power Sources usually give powerful offensive ability, armor and accessory - defensive ones. Some abilities are obvious and some are more specialized. At this time we need some foundation, a baseline. Later we will add more bizarre and strange artifacts. We have only started.
Here are some screenshots of artifacts:


There is a total of 5 equipment slots, and last ones are boots and tool. Boots are not our focus at the moment; we only have models for them. (Our 3d-artists are working fast!). And about the tool was told in the previous post.

Here are some pretty gifs of new animations:

• New sprint animation
  
• New melee hits by swords - it will be used a lot!
  
• Double jump - ability of the Sturdy Leather Armor, one of the easiest to get Artifacts
  
• Block - the new ability for Fighter calling

We mostly have to share the visual stuff. We are putting much effort into the visual part of the game.

If you want us to talk about other things or have questions, please tell us in comments or message us in social networks!

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Hi everyone! Elteria Team here.


This week has been marked by huge technological breakthrough made by our brilliant programmers: they have been able to decrease landscape update delay several times! Fighter's ability Tectonic Fault now breaks voxels with only 30ms delay! It used to be about 500ms. This has been done with some incredible coding magic. For those who interested: they basically redraw patch on affected part of the screen in the shader, while the landscape is slowly updated in the background.
Here is a short video.

The Glove, we changed it's name too many times. It's the primary tool in the game. Now it's called Neophyte Glove. Maybe we change its name again. Instead of making a dozen different tool type items, we decided to upgrade it incrementally. It is not used in any battle capacity, so it's not about balance, it's about player convenience! Currently, we laid down roughly 15 upgrades to it, at least 9 of them will have a visual distinction.

One of the early upgrades will give the ability to create personal space, an Elteria Home heart. This will instantly create a Home Field - a special zone, in which player resurrects after death and in which they can start building their first home. Only one Home Field per character is allowed.
Of course, the player can rebuild this area how they want, but by default, it will be a premade hut. The following pictures are concepts of what there will be located:




Regarding what this is... let it stay a mystery for some time!

You probably have not noticed yet, but the sound part of the game was lagging behind. We have been gaining on that very much lately. We started a partnership with an awesome sound design team, and while our code team is building an improved sound engine for the game, we had received two primary music themes!
Elteria Adventures - The Main Theme:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_FadUDyk5cYSm5kLw4Ltih2zM6lIkk1X/view
Elteria Adventures - Wooden Biome Theme
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nADgjXec9A2GLDNt15wOKeIAjrKGd2F3/view

And lastly, look at this cutie! The plum octopus. Yes, of course, It WILL try to kill you!



If you want us to talk about other things or have questions, please tell us in comments or message us in social networks!

Twitter: @ElteriaGame
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Hello, fellow Elterians!

Long time no see. We are working on making Elteria Adventures a full playable game before we can bring you closed and then open Alphas. Which means bringing some things to levels at which it can be played as a game and not just a demo. And of course fixing bugs. A lot of bugs. This is our goal for the next few months and today we want to share with you latest progress.


We are continuing working on graphics update that we started in the last major version. Full rework of rendering pipeline is a challenging task and we've been fixing bugs and bringing full features live since then. Some of the new features that are now possible include:

Night mode and day cycle



Dynamic lighting, lighting effects and glow



Water shading



Dark places and light sources



You could see in last DevLog that caves were bright, and water was boring. Now the game fully supports dynamic and static light sources, including moving lights from spells and creatures and fixed lights from things like torches.


Character creation and progress are two very important things for the game like Elteria Adventures. Last time we shown to you early design of character page, now it's making its way into the game.



We also added simple character creation page, but there is not much to look at :)


Mostly we have been working on fixing bugs, but they are not fun to talk about if you can't experience them yourself. We can show your reworked Gems! They were only concept arts in the last post and now they're in game and they look cool!




For the next few weeks we are planning on making first three Callings solid to play, implement character progression and add abilities for a few artifatcs. This along with level design and small impovements will make game playable in adventure mode. Stay tuned to see what we have in mind, it's going to be fun! ;)

If you want us to talk about other things or have questions, please tell us in comments or message us in social networks!

Twitter: @ElteriaGame
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Hello fellow gamers! It's been a while. As we said in last DevLog post, we've been working on rework of some critical game engine features, which we (almost) completed in the latest development build.


One of the things our game engine was lacking up until now is modern rendering technique - Deferred Rendering. Most modern game engines use some form of it to bring players the image they see on their screens. You can learn a bit about differences between traditional Forward Rendering technology and Deferred Rendering in this article.

Using newer rendering technology lets us now have things which we couldn't have before, like dynamic lighting from multiple light sources and particle effects, which will bring a lot more life in the game without concerns for performance.

And performance is our big concern! There are a few things let to tune, optimize and test on different hardware, but Deferred Rendering gave us a boost in rendering performance from 10% to 90% depending on user's hardware and graphics quality settings.


Again, if you want to dig dipper in the tech stuff of it, you can start with this article describing the difference between the old networking we used and the new one.

In the start of the project our goal was to quickly achieve working results and it was much easier to use reliable and robust TCP for our networking than bother with handling lost packets ourselves. Unfortunately, it's not a good long-term solution for a lot of games, including ours, since it needs to be as real-time as possible without any spikes in delay between client and server.

Which is why we completely rewritten our networking library from the ground up now using UDP instead of TCP. Preliminary test show increase in stability and network delay, but some bugs still need to be worked out.


We are also work on Alpha world level design. In the build we added a lot of new tools for terrain design which allowed us to create cool caves.



A big progress have been made in developing the new Tentacle Biome, current results you can see here.




Since we didn't have much changes this time, we decided to share with you some things we are working on now.


One of the most important pieces of game interface is a Character Screen which displays your equipment, calling, abilities and many other info. It's on its way to the game, but you can get an early look at the design now.




New mob in the making is Plum Octopus. For now we can show you only concepts of it, but expect it to be in production very soon :)




Rabbits is a race of enemies that will oppose players in achieving their goals. They have warriors and mages and they're relatively smart. A statue of a Rabbit Warrior was in game for some time now, you might have seen it on one of the videos or screenshots.




Dynamic and egaging game world is one of our main goals in developing of Elteria Adventures. We are currently working on adding more interractive traps in the game, concepts of which you can see below.



On top of it is a Tentacle, which is technically a mob, albeit pretty stationarry one.

Next is a spring that will launch player that step on it directly upwards with some bit of air control - it can be a way to reach higher places or to recieve signifficant damage from a falling.

The last one is a sort of a tunnel that drags nearby players inside and unless they're carefult, transports them on the other side, which can be any place including a death trap ;) Watch your step...


Gems are an important part of the exploration gameplay in Elteria Adventures and we want to make them less generic and more fun. New gems are in the process of modeling now, but you can check their concepts now. From left to right: Dark Gem, Lava Gem, Wonder Gem and Nature Gem.




Please leave your questions and thoughts in the comments bellow or in one of our social networks:

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Hey everyone! We want to share current progress on the game by talking about changes we made in the latest major dev build.



In previous major build we reworked skills panel. In this one we added the resources panel to display all your current resources, highlight resources you just collected and show you which ones will be consumed by actions such as building. Also, the new chat, which is an important part of any MMO game :) Few others small things have been added to the GUI, they will be highlighted in other changes below.



We reworked how Tool Glove works. Now it switches mode to Mining / Gathering with small GUI change and it lets you mine stuff with left click and gather resources with right click. It's possible to break world, trees, ores, gems and other stuff with many skills, but if you use anything except Gather ability, you will get less resources.




Though still work in progress, we added the main way players will build in open world and during the battle — blueprints. You will be able to find them during exploration from chests or as loot from monsters or create them yourself. They not serve only decorative or structural purpose, some will be useful in battle by providing auras to allies or even attacking enemies.

As you can see, you need resources to build each blueprint depending on materials used and the blueprint itself.



In previous dev build we added Beelmo — a new Lemon Bee monster. Now we added it's ability: when it stings you it starts running away and if you can't kill it in a few seconds, you yourself will become a Lemon Bee! While you are in the bee form, you can't your abilities and more vulnerable, but you can jump higher and perform double jumps to reach places you couldn't before!

With this we introduced the polymorph mechanics in our ability engine that will help us make a few more interesting abilities and cool game mechanics '^__^'



Skeletons will protect Dark Gems and attack anyone who will try to get their precious :) A bit more of them in this video.


As you can see on the screenshots above, we moved the camera above character's shoulder from above it's head and adjusted field of view and camera distance. It should provide better gaming experience. All abilities have been adjusted for the new camera position.


You can see it in the video here, we updated a few important textures in game, like grass and gems and added Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion. New textures give the game a more consistent look. Check this tweet about restyling to see how it was before and how we are working on game style.

We updated a few animations to add some character to them so they don't look plain as they used to :) It's still work in progress until it will be consistent throughout the game.



It's... not boring any more :)


It was only things that are easily shareable in form of a few screenshots, but a lot of work we do can't be easily seen. Still, we want to share it with you to give a glimpse on the development process:

• Animation Engine rework. We use our own animation graph system, because the engine we use didn't have one when we started. Because of that we had problems with stuck or not working animations from time to time. No more of that since we reworked a few core things in it :)
  
• Fixed air control, it now works like in most action and action-adventure games.
  
• Updated sound engine to support more easy integration of sounds in game and fixed some sounds.
  
• New artefacts and resources that have no use for now. We will talk about them later ;)
  
• A lot of bugfixes!

Hope you stick with us to see more! '^__^' Next update will be a bit boring compared to this one because we are working on some things in the game engine that are required to ship the game to an alpha stage and continue it's development. We will see you with new DevLog when it's done!

Please leave your comments and ask questions, we will be in comments ;)

Today we are launching our Steam Community page! Join us in discussion here and on other social networks:

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