DEVLOG 03 – A Journey Continues

Hello, Hello!

Welcome back to our Third development update for Ex World Online: Obsidian. Just a small recap of the previous monthly development blog:
We have agreed on the title for our first expansion of the game, tackled the combat and gameplay mechanics a bit, pushed out some 2D concepts for our modelers to work with and lastly, made significant progress in our lore.

So where do I kick off from the information I left you all with last month to digest? I suppose a good start would be to jump into the least interesting developments and build our way up to more exciting news. :’)

• Ex World Online Obsidian Backend Development Updates

We started a re-evaluation of our entire inventory system to work well with our new combat update which was translated entirely into C++ code for better optimization and utilization long term. One of the reasons for re-evaluation was so that we could code the proper systems to link to our website, more specifically our inventory to our online database. We have also linked character customization and sync to our database for easier transfer of data between the levels.

In addition to that backend, we also filtered out a rough draft of how we would want our friend request and party request systems to function. The social aspect and community of Ex World Online is one of our main highlights and we are working hard towards improving this function to ensure that it is as user friendly as possible. We were able to allow the system to display the request status with an async method without disturbing the main game thread with some minor tweak and improvements in our locomotion system.

• Lore Update

A huge part of Ex World Online is the lore, and as we mentioned last update, we have two seasoned writers on board which has allowed us to really delve into some breath-taking creative writing and story telling. We intend for our lore to be an immersive experience that players would not feel inclined to skip through due to the repetitive dialogue quest lines found in most common MMOs. The Obsidians, as you will find out on the lore on our website, are a fierce race and through questing, players would learn clues about them that could eventually lead into victory over them. Hint, hint, PvE invasion.

• User interface Update

We have been going through a couple of iterations for our user interface, and we have decided to go with something pretty basic and user friendly until we have more of our combat mechanics flushed out so we can properly place where we want things. But needless to say, we are keeping in mind an interface that is widely optimizable by each user to cater to their own design/gameplay.

Below you can see one of our iterations we are positively lining towards for testing purposes, but haven’t incorporated it fully into the project yet.







• Combat Mechanics Update

As mentioned in our previous patch note, we wanted to have a more complex and optimized combat system, so we’ve been reworking a couple of functionalities to provide a better combat feel in terms of locomotion, abilities and damage system and to give to our designers and artists the possibility to add, edit and remove any type of system (abilities, experience, stats/attributes, Ai.. etc).
For that, we can showcase here a couple of major updates:

• Refined most of the implemented components in the previous month and started using them with the current game assets

Example: Character’s resources and attributes, Ui (Skills hot-bar, character nameplates, etc).

• Modded the engine to easily assign the new models to the new skeleton and adding the animations. (The character models are now also set into pieces to adapt over the equipment system). Now the engine supports importing extra bones on each character mesh without any issues on our advanced locomotion.

• Added the knight and Fighter class abilities with the new combat system. The list of abilities are being set for debug and testing purpose while our upcoming plan is to implement these by using an ability book and a talent set that can be unlocked with levels and other conditions.

• Added a basic Ai with the new combat system for combat testing purpose.

• Created a debugging mode for the faction system where you can have PvP with other players.

• 3D Character models Update

Now onto the more exciting news! We have been hard at work with creating our own models to begin proper marketing and advertising of Ex World Online and I think we proud with the progress we have made thus far in terms of our own in-house models. We have moved on from the low fidelity assets we had from the market place to our very own.
Below, you can find screenshots of some of our playable races.















Looking forward to sharing more of our development progress with you all next month!

Best regards,
Geneva
Community Manager