Devlog 1: swings, footing, and land that fills in

A busy stretch on the game: a voxel RPG, played over the shoulder, running on its own engine built from scratch.

Combat

Left click swings toward where the camera looks, and the body snaps round to face it. A swing hits anything in a short arc in front of the body. Swings chain into a combo, and its last hit knocks the target back with a little hop. Hits flash the target white and put a health bar over its head. Knock a wanderer out and a fresh one turns up where the first started, a moment later.

The player and the NPCs fight by exactly the same rules: the player is just another agent.

Movement that feels right

Small changes that are felt all the time:

• Diagonals aren't faster any more. Holding W and D used to run noticeably faster than one key alone. Now every direction is the same speed.
• A quick start and stop. Not instant, not floaty: enough weight to read as a body.

The Object Creator gets its own program

The tool for building trees and props used to live inside the game's menu. It's now a small program of its own, the Object Creator, and the game's menu is just Play, Settings, Quit.

A shorter view, for now

The world now loads a smaller area around the player than before, with the fog pulled in to match.

Land that fills in on other cores

Pressing Play used to mean waiting a moment for the world to appear, because the land was built a few pieces at a time on the same thread that runs the game. Terrain generation and meshing now run on the other CPU cores, nearest first, behind the fog, and control is immediate.

• The area around the player now loads in a fraction of the time it took.
• Running across the world stays smooth, without the hitches loading used to cause.
• The game plays out exactly the same whether a piece of land arrives early or late.