Hello everyone,
Welcome back to our dev blog.
Quite a few things have happened since we released the character customization and our pre-release players have created a lot of amazing looking characters already.
If you want to see a few of them, you should keep an eye on our Community Updates!
Character Customization
A lot has happened on the character customization side.
Until recently players had to create a new character every time they wanted to play, which was sometimes a bit annoying. So we added character saving earlier than planned and allowed them to save an unlimited amount of characters(for now).
The list will later also show the characters species and current level, which will make it easier to keep track of each characters progress.
Players can also finally give their dragons custom names.
The names between a players characters have to be unique, but they can still have the same name as other players.
While this most likely won’t change for single-player mode and listen servers, it will change for dedicated servers, which means players can’t use a character name that has already been taken by someone else on the same server. However the chance of a character name already being locked is extremely low since the restriction is only tied to that one specific server the character has been created on.
The character name as well as the players Steam name appear above the model in-game, visible to every other player in a specific radius.
Later it will also show a players clan and title in the name tag once these things have been added to the game.
Due to popular demand, we also added customizable accessories together with more customization options in one of our most recent patches.
Each accessory can now be given custom colors, because sometimes you just want your flower crown to look more Metal.
Character Models
If you have kept an eye on our social media, you might have already discovered the Eastern Dragon model or rather a work in progress version of it.
Lenar has been doing a lot of work on it recently and we are looking forward to the final result even though it won’t be in for a while due to the Lindworm being next on the playable creatures list.
Some of you have been asking us to give the skin of the Eastern dragon a shimmering effect.
You asked and we will deliver!
The effect will be customizable and allow players to choose up to 3 different colors.
Below is an example on the European dragon featuring 2 colors.
The second model we have been working on is not a main character, but a good boy…ahem…(playable) wildlife creature: The Drake.
It is currently missing the plates on the head and the back as well as the tail from the concept art. All these parts will be customizable, which means you can expect regional variations of this little guy.
All the other cool things
Not so long ago we welcomed AshesDrawn as a new artist to our team, who will work on a couple of Illustrations for the game.
Here is a work in progress image of the first illustration they are currently working on, showing the European dragon and the Lindworm, which will be the next addition to the game.
You can occasionally catch Ashes streaming on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ashesdrawn
Don’t forget to bring good vibes and dragons!
And last but not least: New features!
Even though we just added a simple in-game chat, we are moving away from the current version of Draconia being a walking & chat simulator by adding stats like health, hunger, thirst, stamina and so on.
Some of you might remember the old HUD element for these stats.
We scrapped it due to it being too distracting and started working on something new that covers all our needs without being too immersion breaking.
15 concepts later we came up with the version below, which will be at the bottom of the screen. It is still unfinished, but you can probably already see what we are going for.
The 6 slots at the top will show the characters 2 main skills (center), which are tied to LMB & RMB as well as a couple of other abilities, which are bound to the number keys (left and right).
The next row shows the mana, energy, health, thirst and hunger bars, while the bar at the bottom shows the amount of experience you need to reach the next level.
Buffs and de-buffs will be displayed on the left and right side of the character skills.
Some of these elements might change depending on player response.
That is it for this dev blog and we hope you enjoyed the read.
Don’t forget to wishlist, follow and/or share the project:
Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/1295900/Draconia/
Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/draconiagame
Discord – https://discord.gg/draconiagame
Twitter – https://twitter.com/draconia_game
Reddit – https://www.reddit.com/r/draconiagame/
See you next time!