Pandemic & Development

I do not love this opener, but I want to get it out of the way.
If you aren’t aware, I make Attunement as a hobby project. To some degrees that means when my life is busy, interesting or exhausting, I won’t work as much on Attunement. In short, pandemic just robbed me of my ability to be motivated to work on big developments (boss fights, gauntlet mode, etc).

I did find time to work on things, but they trended towards smaller scale improvements that felt like accomplishments.

That said, lets check out what’s new!

Ritehaven Revamp

I’ve rebuilt Ritehaven to be grander with more open space and area for activities.

• Dedicated playground area to test platforming and battling.
• NPCs to give as hints, lore and most importantly: to be target dummies to try abilities on.
• Introduces the player to cooldown and haste tokens.
• Introduces the Zephyr flying zones so players can try those controls.
• Has a bigger area for ‘Bot Match’ challenge selection.
• Plenty of room to add decorations and future features.

New Ability: Mudslide

Mudslight is a midrange attack that’s highly effective against airborne targets. Repeated uses can let you bully someone across and off the stage. This ability was added to give more tools to utilizing the map’s natural hazards.

Detonate / Harm Zone

Editor Inspectors

A goal has been to improve my ability to create and understand my content.
This is the Icon Database custom inspector, I can clearly see all of the icons. A future direction for this would be combining it with the Colors to let me pre-visualize how icons will look, and to create assets of those icons.
(Icons courtesy of game-icons.net!)

NPCs & Dialogue

Dialogue has come so far from last year’s greeting message. Now overlays can be queued in a row, you can progress and regress across them.

The new NPCs have ordered overlays so NPCs can provide helpful on-boarding for aspects of the game. It’ll also be an avenue for game lore and actual character personality.

New Map: Test of Alacrity

This is the largest stage to date, coming in three times the size of Cliffside.
The purpose of this stage is for longer, complex challenges:

• Collect the tokens (while enemies spawn and assail you)
• Survive a gauntlet of many encounters in a row
• Defeat multiple bosses.

All in all, it is the beginning of experiments to find other types of game play beyond just the direct 1v1 or 1vGroup combat. There was another one of these experimental maps, which just downright stunk, but might return if I find a way to make it good.

Bug Rampage

An easy topic to focus upon is fixing bugs with the game to make it run smoothly. Most are a small discrete problem with a tangible resolution and sense of progress.

More Avatar Diversity

Right now I support Earth Elementals, Water Elementals, Mephits, Evil Eyes and The First Shaper. I want to create more variety beyond this, especially if I want to represent a variety of bots.

I’ve begun some tests at exploring Animation Retargeting so I could use other humanoid assets on the store to both expand the main character’s animation set, but also create more enemy types.

SFX & Music

This began with improving my audio implementation, then moved on to music and to using object pooling. While I was on the topic I visited a number of abilities and gave them better SFX, including many interface actions that lacked them prior.

The game has around 20 music tracks that it will cycle between, some exclusive to certain maps.

Wrapping up

That’s a good summary of what I’ve been doing without getting too into the weeds on individual improvements. Thanks for tuning in and reading.

I hope to have the game in some public playable version eventually.

Keep on surviving and take care of yourself!