Hello! I know it’s Sunday, which means I’m a day late on this Saturday DotO Update. Sorry about that, things have been very busy. But enough about that, we have important DotO news to talk about.

This week we welcomed Josh to the Knob Cat team. His job title is Universe Architect. He’s going to be helping build our servers and get all the social functions working! We’ll be adding his bio to the site as soon as I get around to it.

In game news, we can now chat with NPCs. They roam around town and comment on the Obelisk, adventurers, and their general lives. I wrote all ( well, most of…) the random dialogue for them but it’s still fun to walk up and see what they have to say.

I need to start remembering to take more screenshots. Above we see Testo in the finished sewer dungeon. It’s really exciting to finally have one section of the game feel so complicated. Ben’s artwork makes a sewer seem like a beautiful place to be. We still plan on having Nyka animate several aspects of the maps and battlefield. But we have a few other mobs and companions to get moving first…

For those who are wondering, the maps aren’t procedurally generated. We chose to make six large maps and then randomize the positions of mobs and chests. This saved us a lot of development time that would have been taken up making more random or procedural maps.

I think this approach has turned out really well and makes things so much easier. It allows us to focus on more important aspects of the game.

Anyway, I’m at my crappy day job and should probably get back to the grind. If you have questions about DotO that you’d like to see answered in future blog updates, send them to me on Discord. Talk to you again in two weeks!

Cheers,
Joe
Executive Prime