[GAME] Skylands of Arnythos

[timetravel]

Skylands of Arnythos is an open world third-person role playing game where the player is thrown into a world where a set of mystifying events occur, your goal as an Apprentice will be to piece together the meaning of the events and their significance within the world. The game play and the story changes depending on the player’s actions and the world will respond to the player’s decisions and behavior.

The game takes place in a world called “Aliaterra” which means "Other Land" in Latin. On a skyland called Arnythos. The skyland of Arnythos is divided into 3 Provinces, Una, Yira, and Nori. The prequel will take place in the province of Yira.



Features set

-Intriguing story line with a variety of quests to support the story
-Large open world with dungeons, instances and cities
-Extensive inventory, character, talent, equipment and combat systems
-Unique user interface allowing easy selection of skills/items and consumables
-Ability to create your own character
-Unique class system allowing combination of multiple classes and their spells/skills into one.
-Exploration rewards
-Smart enemy AI
-The Void

Playable classes

-Warrior
-Scout
-Mage
The prototype will be limited to these, but full game would have 3 sub-classes for each major class

We take inspiration from the following titles:

-The Elder Scrolls series, most notably Skyrim
-Dark Souls 2
-World of Warcraft
-Divinity 2
-Kingdoms of Amalur
-The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Early screenshots








Minimum requirements

Skyland of Arnythos is designed to run on mid-high end Windows based computers (DirectX 10 or higher required). Controller support will be added later on.

About us

Skylands of Arnythos is being developed by myself and Sarr. The original game design and core systems are all made by Sarr, while I primarily focus on visual effects and game play scripting as well as most of the upcoming graphic design work. We both basically met each other on the Unreal Engine marketplace, I've always been inspired by his vision for the game and I am excited to join him in the creation of Skylands of Arnythos!

Fully featured Blueprint versions of the systems used in the game are currently available on the marketplace, this is a great way to support us!
Inventory and Equipment System
Simple Multiplayer Chat System
Spell Cast System
Character Attribute System

You can find more screenshots and short videos on our Facebook page.

[Sarr]

(reserved)

First Talking NPC:

[Kitmit]

Makes me think of Bethesda games, looks like it will be good. Make sure to have lots of unlisted quests to be discovered!

[Deficient Gamer]

Hey I really like your project and it's something I'd love to do myself (my dream game would be a cross between Skyrim and Witcher 2/3 ) and you've created some great content already however I feel the scenes you've shown ( 2 and 5 ) need more love. I played Skyrim for 20 hours before I realized it just felt pointless and shallow, while I've played hundreds of hours of The witcher games and it's largely because every detail in the world felt exact and purposeful. Obviously what you are showing is really early and you don't have all the content you need in place yet, but I'd recommend trying to tie together a few specific scenes with all the clutter and detail you'd like in the final game (or better yet, getting a concept artist to imagine these scenes) so you can establish an atmosphere and "feel" for the game.

The first screenshot almost has that level of detail but the others are lacking it and I'd say the buildings you have created are too square and uniform. The witcher 3 had a building in Novigrad which was falling over. A small detail, which could be missed by if you weren't paying attention, but it's a little detail that adds so much character to the world, especially when NPC's are talking about it and explaining why the building leaned over. I'd love to see some concept art for the game because your world maps look really interesting.

Obviously lots of work put into it and it sounds almost like my perfect RPG so I wish you the best of luck.

[Filly_The_Owl]

Well i highly assume that the pictures are pre WIP since they lack of a straight art style and overall design.
And you guys need to start thinking about saving all these variables and levelstreaming instances for such a large world.
And alos you guys would need some storydesigners and dialogue writers.

I do not think that 2 people cant make... since im trying something by far heavier on my own. But i doubt that you guys are prepared for this.
I hope the story isnt the only thing you are proud of, its the actual gameplay that matters and in your case story and gameplay is a combined thing.

I would love to see a video of this!

[Sarr]

Just wanted to say, this is heavy pre alpha stuff, first goal is to create a demo which will be based around the arena from the first screenshot, and with that we will start a crowd funding campaign , the demo will be designed to give players feel for the gameplay, the combat system, AI, etc.

Right now we are focusing on programming the base systems and such, and most of the environmental assets right now comes from various marketplace packages

Just wanted to add, this isn't the first large project I've worked on, nor is this my first game (it is my first game in unreal tho)

[Sarr]

There you go guys, its just a simple spell test video, ofc again, pre alpha stuff, we polishing the spell system at this stage, making sure it can support all future needs, and abilities that we plan to create.

[MΚULTRA]

Awesome work dude! Your Marketplace work is amazing so I can't wait to try this out. I better be at the top of your list for testing

[timetravel]

Here's a video showing off the system I will most likely be using to handle the channeling of lightning spells, it was really fun to make and learned a lot about the Beam emitter in the process.

[Sarr]

Hey guys !

Starting today, me and Max (timetravel) will be doing weekly post regarding progress and work done on Skyland of Arnythos.


Battlefield Report 1

Right now, we are still dealing with core systems:

Combat System -> added hit events (previously the system would calculate damage, and reduce the targets health by the damage dealt, but there was no event to inform the character that they been hit) currently used to display damage dealt and to trigger "hit reaction" animations. they will be used to display combat and status texts and things like, cancel attacks, cancel combos etc.
Also planned work to add ranged weapon support to the Combat System, and also currently there is a bug where a spell can collide with the casters equipment.

AI and Dialogue -> Our NPCs can now talk to the player! we using behavioral trees for AI and dialog separately, so right now, we have one giant tree for AI behavior, and every NPC has a separate dialog tree.
still a lot of work needs to be done in this (quests for example, or trading) but right now, NPCs do have simple AI logic, which allows them to talk and also allows them to cast spells, attack, block, move etc.

We have moved demo release and crowdfunding campaign to mid March.

Stay tuned and see you next week!

[timetravel]

Hello there! Here I would like to share the progress I have done this week as well as what I have been up to in general.
Battlefield Report 2


New rig!
Last week was my first week where I could finally get back to work with a new development rig that I built. The process was not without problems as I had to deal with a bent CPU pin and BIOS update issues with the motherboard. After all of that dealt with (I fixed the bent CPU pin using a credit card and a needle in case you're curious) I could finally get back to working on SoA and transferring the particle effects and shaders that I had made previously on my old computer. Now back with the SoA project in hand I can integrate my work directly in the game and finely tune everything the way I want it.

Playing with electricity!
You can see the result of the first implementation for the chain lightning spell in the last video I posted here. The cool thing about this effect is that it demonstrates how much can be done by combining blueprints and Cascade together. For example, I am attaching the Source and Target of a beam emitter to 2 basic actors, I am and then bouncing these 2 actors wherever I want them on the skeleton of the mesh. The end result is that I can decide that at the beginning of the cast of a chain lightning spell, the electricity beam will start between the left and right hand of the player, and towards the end of the cast it will bounce all over the pawn, making it feel like the character is really powering up. Note that the casting animation itself is very much a work in progress.

Up next
This week for me is going to be re-working the particle effect that appears on the hands to make it feel more electric, right now it feels too much like some kind of effect that would be used for a frost spell. I've been exploring other games for ideas such as this RPG called Arcania that has a lot of interesting spell effects that I would like to emulate. Beyond that I'd like to revamp our Fireball as well.

[Filly_The_Owl]

But Arcania was realy realy bad so dont dare to get ideas from that XD you will break your game with it.

[timetravel]

Hahah I can see why you think so, but I was mainly talking about the VFX part of it which is quite nice!

[Sarr]

Hey guys !

Battlefield Report 3

Last week I didn't get to do a post, I was buried in client work and found it hard to find time to work on SoA except some minor bug fixes

I've spend what ever free time I had fixing various minor and major issues, also we now have a sound designer on board
some of the bugs fixed:

memory leak in the spellbook widget.
chain lighting type spells wrongly kept track of hit enemies.
there were few corrupt actors in the world, these have been removed/replaced (they causes crashes, and memory leaks)
....and more

Stay tuned and see you next week!

[timetravel]

New update from me!

Battlefield Report 4

This week has been weird. I spent a whole lot of time learning Houdini and getting used to the way it works. After a ton of research, experimentation, tutorials and messing around I have finally managed to create a useable 8x8 flipbook texture from a Houdini PyroFX render! This is super exciting to me, because now this means that I can use Houdini to generate very intricate fluid simulations and import them as an animated sprite sheet into UE4. This is going to be awesome for creating better smoke, fire and magic effects. I will now use this new knowledge to start working on impact effects to finalize a couple of spells that I have been working on.

Figuring all of this has been a long struggle and this is making me seriously consider creating a tutorial outlining the whole process in a very newbie friendly way, so more and more people give Houdini a shot.

Stay tuned for videos of the new effects!