Patreon Devlog #5 - December 2021
Added 2021-12-22 22:23:11 +0000 UTCHello Patrons!
It’s finally December. What a year it has been.
Before you start reading, as a small appetizer and to make the long read more enjoyable, take a listen to our main musical theme composed by Pavlos Kyriakou. It's not finished and needs final mixing still, but we hope you enjoy it for what it is:
This year has been a bit of a turning point for Age of Aincrad. In a big part thanks to all of you for supporting us. We were able to work more, work faster and more efficiently, and dedicate ourselves more to the cause since we had an additional boost of our friends supporting us along the way.
We started Patreon, we finished our new website, we set our server structure up, we finally have all our tools and workflow down for years to come. We even managed to get Age of Aincrad trademarked and secured without incurring the wrath of the SAO copyright holders.
Most importantly though, we had our first bigger test yet since we took the project over, with over 70 out of 115 invited people being able to make it. It feels like a success to us.
We gathered a lot of positive feedback from all of you and dozens of bug reports we’re still going through - there were many problems and we are slowly solving them as we go.
More than anything - the positive feedback we received from you gave us the confidence to take AoA back into the public spotlight. With this in mind, we will be officially reviving the game on all our social media channels, from Facebook all the way to Twitter.
This will (hopefully) result in an influx of new visitors and interest in the game. The more support we get the faster we can throw our jobs and focus full-time on this, so we hope it will blow up positively.
And all that happened up to this point is only the beginning.
This month’s winner for the Patron picture is:
humzaa_official!
We’ll send you a message soon on Discord! We want to know what you’d like to have drawn. If you have no ideas, that is also fine, we got time and there’s no rush.
Reminder: Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.
NOW - let’s get into the final update for the year.
New visuals:
The game got a visual overhaul based on feedback we received after the demo.
The colors are less strong and calmer on the eyes, the nights are a lot less “dark” than before.
The grass melts into the terrain, making the world feel a lot more organic. The atmosphere is a bit colder and fantasy feeling, less warm than before.
The below picture from our insider channel shows it off quite well.
If you take a closer look, you can also see small dust particles floating in the air. They’ll be appearing randomly based on the given weather at the time.
The fog got a lot thicker while retaining a stylized feeling. You can especially see it in the distance. It also feels nearly volumetric in darker weather. The fog additionally helps brighten up the world during darker weather, like storms and nights as you can see below. All this is part of a new weather system, but more on that soon.
Farming:
We’re finishing up our assets for the final skill this year, which is our farming skill.
Farming will be pretty important for cooking and the first iteration of the system will be pretty similar to how gathering works currently.
Down the line, we plan to reiterate it into a system similar to ArcheAge where you can claim a plot of land, put in some seeds, water it, care for it, give it a pat on the back, and then once it grows up nice and healthy, harvesting time begins.
So far we got some beautiful corn, spinach, potato, and hops (yes, for beer).
We want to finish setting up the plants and also still take a look at implementing the sought-after fire-making skill.
Performance Improvements:
Let’s be honest - the game was NOT running well. We know it’s early in the “open” development phase, but this test clearly showed there is a lot of optimization work to be done.
With that in mind, we will be upgrading a few things around February/March in 2022:
- Our Engine itself;
- Our shadow system;
- Our networking backend;
- Our tree system;
- Our character shader system;
Usually, the weather system would also be on that list, but… we already upgraded it for a more stylized solution instead of the realistic system we had thus far, as you could see in the pictures before. Furthermore, take a look at the videos in the next section to see how the visuals changed in real-time.
We removed a lot of the heavy bloat effects and swapped lighter versions in. Despite kicking out state-of-the-art effects like fluffy real-time generated clouds, the game looks better (!) and also runs better.
After nearly 3 weeks of nonstop optimizations and experimenting like crazy, we wrote out a step-by-step optimization pipeline for all objects we have in the game. This resulted in some insane performance improvements.
We managed to go from an average of 10-17 FPS on a mid-range card like the Nvidia GTX 1060 (running the game on the highest settings - called “Aincrad”) to 30-40 FPS depending on what’s happening on-screen! It’s an insane improvement and we can still squeeze more out of the game this coming March once the new tech is out.
We hope everyone can feel the framerate improvements as soon as we launch the next game client planned for Q1 of next year!
The New Weather:
As mentioned before, the existing weather system got completely replaced.
The new one looks pretty wild - much more “anime” feeling. Other than performing a lot better, it changed the entire feeling of space and distance. It comes with a variety of incredible effects, star showers, custom wind effects, and weather visuals like falling leaves, fireflies, and even wisps.
To make the sky itself fit the game, we tweaked our visual processing for a bit of a different color feeling.
All that’s left to do is the networking side of things - syncing it with the server for all players, both time and weather, as we did with the old weather system.
Age of Aincrad Night Storm - YouTube
Near Future
We will be running a lot more demos in 2022 for our Patrons. We also plan to get a separate server with constant up-time as to not break it regularly with live development updates.
For the next upcoming demo in 2022, you can expect the addition of farming, way better performance, the new weather system, tons of bug fixes and visual improvements, hopefully finally custom movement animations, improvements to our mount system, quest and dialogue upgrades, a more responsive interface (hopefully with fewer bugs), mob AI, working arenas, sweet new dungeons and much, much more.
We will also tie the game to a launcher, so instead of downloading a shady zip, you’ll get to just pull the freshest update available via a shady launcher.
We’ll be slowly building up content and running it by you to get approval (or disapproval) as we try to polish the game for a Kickstarter campaign. Your feedback helps us shape the game.
Age of Aincrad Redwood Wolf Exploration - YouTube
Endword:
Thank you so much for this entire year. From the bottom of our small hearts, sincerely.
Your support is what kept us going. For 2022, we finally hope to expand upon our Patron rewards. We will look at in-game items, mentions in descriptions, lore fill-ins, NPC cameos of our Patrons, credit entries. Custom quests if time and resources allow. Maybe even personalized gravestones - if you’d like to be dead in the game. Whatever you’d like, we’ll be looking into it. There’s a lot of graveyards to fill on Floor One, after all.
With all that said, we wish you a wonderful new year and we hope to see you around for the pre-Kickstarter journey!
