Fall 2022 Update
Hi Everyone! 👋
We hope you all are doing well and we appreciate taking the time to read our update. We thank you for all being so kind and patience as we work on Laxidaze. As we mentioned, we at Machine Elf Studios are all working on Laxidaze next to our full time jobs as well. It’s been tough balancing everything but we are committed and passionate about our game. Again, thank you and let’s go over our updates!
First, a little bit about our Kickstarter rewards! We’ve reached out to confirm addresses in the past few weeks as we’re getting closer to shipping out the Lockle plushies and the tee shirts. If you have not confirmed your address yet and it is a different address from the one displayed in Kickstarter, then please let us know through Kickstarter messenger. We’ve also gone with a new company for the tee shirts and will be reaching out once again for shirt sizes. Once we wrap up all the details, we will ship off the Lockles and shirts! 🎉
Now, over the last few months we have been diving deep into Lyra, the game designed by Epic showcasing best practices for UE5. Lyra features an implementation of a Gameplay Ability System that is designed from the ground up to best utilize UE5’s toolset. Aside from Lyra, we have also been experimenting with the Common UI plugin, also created by Epic. Our intention is to design and build Laxidaze with as many best practices provided by Epic, in order to make the game as performant and scalable as possible.
Part of the design set out by Epic, is to design as many of the big gameplay features as their own plugin. This enables these gameplay features to be easily enabled/disabled and ported into other projects. We’ve decided to make as many of our core systems plugins. Starting with our dialogue system and our combat system.
The dialogue system plugin we have created has also been successfully integrated into a base project created with Lyra as its backbone. The dialogue system now utilizes Lyra’s Gameplay Ability System in order to trigger conversations and coordinate dialogue events.
Our combat system plugin has been redesigned with Lyra’s Gameplay Ability System in mind. Lyra’s design fits perfectly into our intentions with Laxidaze’s combat system. We’re able to create, grant, and take away ability sets (each set containing several abilities) depending on character builds and equipment selected. We’re also currently designing the core architecture for the enemy/companion AI. Part of our main design philosophy for Laxidaze’s AI is to make it as independent of any animations or rendering in order to be able to apply it to our humanoid and non humanoid characters.
The Common UI plugin gives us a cohesive design for how to approach our UI’s functionality. We’ve done some preliminary integrations into our dialogue system and combat system. We are currently experimenting with Common UI and learning more about it. We’ll be sharing more on this in the future, especially when we start to receive art for the UI.
On the topic of art, we have gotten our first set of environmental art and props. This art is not final but we’ll be using it as we start to design our demo level.
One final update, we’ve created a public Trello board! We’ll be adding to that board and moving around the big features as we make progress on Laxidaze. We wanted to make a Trello board so you all could follow our progress more closely. We know we’ve been a little slow with updates so this board should provide everyone with a view of our current progress as we will be updating it consistently as we continue development. The board will mainly consist of high-level features and their progress. This first batch of features will be focused on the base game and as we progress we’ll be adding more to the board and to the applicable features. Follow it for more up to date updates!
Well that’s it for our update. Again, thank you for reading and your continued support!
Please follow us on Twitter and join our Discord as we have an awesome and growing community!
That’s it for our Fall 2022 update, catch ya soon!
-Machine Elf Studios 🤖