I started placing the 3d assets of the castle on top of the citadel, starting with the walls. It’s very nice to see the castle no longer as a blockout. The castle is going to challenge me quite a bit, like placing assets in rooms and underground dungeons.
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It’s a good strategy to use Heavy Attack to hit multiple enemies at once. Also, Heavy Attack has a higher attack range, which allows you to attack enemies from a long distance. You just have to be careful to take into account the high recovery time.
I am focusing on placing the 3d assets in the initial area of the castle. Here the player can take different paths, for now I’ll focus on the one that leads to the first shortcut. Doing the interiors has its challenges, adding walls and floors without messing up the rooms next door makes me busier than when I was doing the streets in the citadel.
Today I did a performance optimization pass, including lowering the sampling quality of volumetric clouds and reducing the quality of global illumination. I can again stay around 16.6ms /60fps on my target machine (i5/RTX 3060 at 1080p). Also for aesthetic tweaked the lighting to make it brighter and also tweaked the fog since it was blocking the view too much.
I am adding 3d assets in the castle area. I changed the layout of the original greybox a bit to fit the stylistic side of the setting, it doesn’t affect the gameplay so I think it was a good decision. I’m also changing a little bit the workflow of how I’m placing the 3d assets, so for now there might be a difference in the detail between the castle and the city, I’ll fix it in the next art-pass.
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By using the Invisibility Cloak I can make myself invisible so enemies don’t detect me. It’s useful when there are enemies in the rear, for example soldiers equipped with crossbows. I need to remember to update that enemy character model, it’s currently a placeholder.
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I am placing the 3D assets for the ‘garden’ part of the castle. I think the ruins fit in quite well, it gives the castle that aura of mystery. In the distance it’s still a bit empty, but I plan to add more parts as soon as I can.
Often using Possession Ability as the only way to kill the possessed enemy can be a good alternative strategy. The slowdowns you see in the video were before the optimisation, they don’t happen anymore fortunately (for now).
I am focusing on the last section of the castle garden. This square is larger to accommodate 4 enemies without restricting the player’s movement, as this is not intended as a difficult combat.
Enemy soldiers are among the first enemies the player encounters in the game. While they are not too difficult to defeat, they are not to be underestimated when there are more than one of them.
Today I decided to fix the brightness of the game, as some outdoor areas were too dark. Rendering in Path Tracing, I realised that the light bounces in lumens were not enough to make certain shaded areas visible. I increased the camera exposure to increase the brightness in the shadow areas without breaking up the bright areas too much.
Dodging consumes a lot of stamina and is not recommended to use it too often. By design I have decided that its consumption is high because in this game the dodge is very fast (compared to the average action game) and using it too often might be too overpowered to use. In future I will have to add visual and sound effects as feedback for when you use the dodge.
I am focusing on the castle dungeon. The challenge has been in getting everything under the castle without overlapping with other rooms above. I had fun adding the lighting, even though I know I’ll have to retune it later.
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Fighting a skeleton enemy. They are among the first enemies you encounter in the game. If they see you from a distance, they start running and perform a running attack. Relatively easy to kill when alone, they are not to be underestimated when there are many of them.
I have finished with the dungeon for now, replacing most of the dungeon greyboxes with 3D assets. The dungeon covers a good part of the area below the castle. Compared to the greybox I decided to raise the ceiling of many rooms but fortunately I did not encounter any major problems as overlaps with other rooms.
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The dungeon feels like a combo betwen Elden Ring and Mortal Online. How cool 
Will there be traps, hidden doors, and mimic chests to fill it?
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Glad you like it! The intention is to add them but I haven’t made any prototypes yet. I originally intended the dungeon to be just a small section of the game, but at the moment it’s progressing better than I thought, so I think I’ll add more rooms in the future, probably with traps and hidden doors.
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The Silver Knights are the first enemies that can give the player a hard time at the beginning of the game. Their attacks can kill the player in a few hit. A good strategy is to strike them from behind, for example by using the invisible cloak skill.
I placed the 3d assets of the part that takes you to the high area along the castle wall. There is an enemy soldier with a crossbow at the top who shoots the player on sight. There are covers along the way where the player can take cover from the arrows.
In indoor areas the brightness is low, so I added a small light around the player, very similar to the light in Dark Souls. I’ll probably remove it, in a first person view it doesn’t look good especially if you have an enemy in front of you, the light illuminates the enemy in an annoying way. I’ll place more torches to increase overall visibility.
