Waaaay too long since my last update.

Since then, I’ve been working (not nearly as much as I should be) on outdoor environments and a skill tree.

I want this game to follow the classic RPG class formula of Mage, Fighter and Thief, but I didn’t want to constrain my players to a single class. Instead, I decided to go with a classless/multiclass concept where players are able to traverse a large skilltree which is implicitly divided into the three aforementioned classes.

Take a look at the prototype:

So this is still an early proof of concept, and all of the visual elements will probably change, but it’s going to function in pretty much the same way as shown here. You’ll also get a (very) small taste of the kind of skills you might see in the game. One more note: the three skill branches never merge in this example, but I think they will in the final version. Also, all parent nodes of a skill must currently be unlocked before unlocking a given child node. I’m not sure if this will persists, or if I’ll remove that constraint to give me freedom of traversal.

Other than that, I’ve been spending a bit of time building some outdoor environments to try to nail down what my worlds will look like.

This first screenshot is, quite honestly, pretty bland and generic, but it will at least give a sense of how villages will be laid out in the world:

After I made this scene, I procured a license for Gaia–a really powerful and full featured terrain generation tool for Unity.

Here’s what 15 minutes of work with Gaia looks like:

Pretty amazing huh?

So in the end, I think I’ll be using Gaia to build my world, and then I’ll refine the terrain manually and tweak the positioning of settlements and other points of interest to best suit the game’s story and gameplay.

That’s it for me.

Stay tuned for an update on NPCs and monsters!