How’s it going? Hope you’re having a great Saturday! Today is just a quick blog to let you know what everyone is working on. We’ve made so much progress in the past month that it’s hard to keep track of everything that has changed.

Nyka has been working on swapping out some assets from old grayscale ones to updated color ones. We were originally going to color mobs in engine, but decided that Ben is much better at coloring. So Nyka just has to catch up the animations to the new versions.

Also, sometime soon, Nyka will have updated our player character animations so that they blink! No more dead stares for Testo.

Ben has turned his attention to dungeons and is creating preliminary sketches so that we can test some new layouts and make sure everything is to scale. I’m so excited to finally be rid of the placeholder dungeon tiles! I plan on making the next update video when that gets done.

Tj has been hard at work updating a lot of menus and windows with our new assets. It’s really pulling the game together visually.

Also in programming and math, Tj and I have sorted out an issue with experience. Our old formula scaled too hard and literally broke our sheet when we projected it to our expected endgame ideas. Now the experience rate is much lower and things scale as they should with the future of the game in mind.

We also made an unexpected change to how our Paragon system works. You can now get between one and six Major Stat points to assign when you gain a level in Paragon. There’s a whole new system and a bit of math and luck to it. Next week I think I’ll do an in-depth Paragon update to explain the system.

For now, I should get back to work. Hope you all have a great day!

Cheers,
Joe
Executive Prime

Hey everyone! Happy Saturday to you. Time for a new DotO Update Blog. A lot has happened in the last week, most of it has to do with our game’s inventory system.

There’s a lot of items in this game and you’re going to get a lot of them, so you’ll naturally be spending a lot of time in your inventory. Naturally we want to make it work as good as it can. Things need to be streamlined so that you can easily tell what you have and what you can do with it.

Things are coming along well, but there is a current issue where our system can’t quite handle the massive amount of items that you can accumulate in the Dungeons. We don’t have a Blacksmith yet, but we have a preliminary way to scrap items and clean out your inventory. But, it tends to freeze up when you try to scrap too many things. Don’t worry though, Tj is setting to work to figure out some solutions to make everything run smooth in the future.

Enough about the problems though, we have so much new stuff that IS working! First off, our inventory no longer just displays item names. Now you can actually see all the items that you can get!

Another new improvement has been with the item tooltips. They’re now looking a lot better and have almost all the information you need, presented in a clear way. Below, you can see the tooltip for the legendary head, Discarded Crown. In the yellow text, you can see it’s legendary power is a lot of Gold Find, as well as it’s other 2 modifiers and some flavor text.

Eventually, your equipped item will also pop up so you can compare new things to see if they’re an upgrade or more trash for the crafting material pile.

Speaking of Crafting Materials, those can now stack! Instead of taking up thousands of inventory slots, you can now easily see how many you have. Once again, it’s another small thing, but another great step towards the final product!

We’ve got a lot going on and the code is improving everyday now. Those are the major updates to inventory, but we are still far from the finished product. Anyway, I better get back to work. Have a great day!

Cheers,
Joe
Executive Prime

Hey, hello, and happy Saturday!

I’m struggling a bit on what today’s topic should be. (Sorry, I skipped last week because of writer’s block too.) I think my brain wants to make these blogs more important and grandiose than they need to be, then I just end up overloading myself and not getting them done.

This is not to say that there isn’t stuff happening. In fact, we’ve been moving at a new breakneck pace. Tj, our Digital Alchemist here at Knob Cat Games, has been adding in features and crushing bugs non-stop. If you want to actually SEE some of the new stuff, I posted a video to my YouTube yesterday, so go check that out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlNcQsi8i6E

Some of the most exciting new things to me is finally having all of the Tier 1 mobs in the game. Dungeons 1 through 10 are now packed with enemies and things are starting to scale properly in testing. It’s awesome to see things begin to fall into place. We’ve moved from calling new builds “Prototype” and have now settled on “Version”.

Dungeons, while still having placeholder art, are now huge and have the full amount of Mobs. It’s hard to take a screenshot of how big the dungeon actually is, since we can’t zoom out, but trust me. I can’t wait to see the final dungeon artwork from Ben.

Tj has also started laying the groundwork for a few new systems. While far from being the final Blacksmith, you can now scrap unwanted items and get crafting materials from them. You can’t craft anything with those materials, but you know, we’re getting there.

Another new thing that we started is the energy system. While hated by some players, it’s a requirement in games like this, otherwise I would never stop grinding for that sweet loot…

Speaking of sweet loot, here’s a little peek at the legendary body…

Mobs can now be Elites, which means they can drop that good loot! They’ll have a little skull icon by their health bar to let you know.

And I think that’s all the major new stuff, I’m going to get back to some game testing! I’m also going to try to make sure I write down topics for future blog updates, and I really want to stick to this Saturday schedule. Something that would really help me out is if you have any questions or topics you’d like me to cover, hit me up in Discord and let me know!

Cheers,
Joe
Executive Prime

Ben and Nyka have been working for a while designing all of the mobs for Dungeons of the Obelisk. We have quite a few drawn, some animated, and only two in the actual game.

Until now! Our resident Digital Alchemist, Tj, has turned his attention to getting more mobs into the actual game. Starting with the big boy tank mob, Blub, and everybody’s sure to be favorite clever girl, Sludgesaurus.

Both of these mobs are considered “specialists” as they fill a certain roll on the enemy team. Blub is a tank and focuses almost entirely on having as much Health as possible. Blub can still pack a good punch, but they’re also very slow so you should have time to see it coming.

Sludgesaurus on the other hand is all about doing damage. Their “Spit” attack hits hard, but they can also “Anticipate” your movements and increase their Critical Hit Chance.

If you’re looking at the image above and wondering why Puke Rats and Blubs are still in black and white, well that’s something we had planned early on. We were going to allow the code to color the mobs with shaders to allow for different colors and recycling mobs. For example, maybe a blue Glub would show up and have different abilities.

We pretty quickly decided against this idea. Ben’s skills at coloring would go to waste and shaders just cant color as good as Ben can. So we just need to get the Puke Rat and Blub animations re-skinned with the updated colored versions. This should happen as soon as Nyka wraps up work on the current batch of mob animations.

Building a game like this is lots of small steps that keep adding up. There is always something new to do and some new challenge to overcome. Each decision can impact the future look, feel, and direction of the game.

Now that Blub and Sludgesaurus have joined up with Glub and Puke Rat, we just have the healer mob, Rot Bat, and the Dungeon Boss, who still goes unnamed…

Hope that gives you some fun info about the new mobs. I hope to share the Rot Bat details with you all soon! Talk to you next week!

Cheers,
Joe
Executive Prime