Hello, and welcome once again to a new Carbon update. Today we’re going to be focusing on additional enemies, GUI work, new animations and we will explain some aspects of itemization design.

If you would like to be part of our community you can find us on our DISCORD channel.

We are still looking to recruit for several positions, mainly VFX artist and Technical artist. You can see all the listings on our JOBS page.

Here is a summary of the contents of our video update.

CHARACTERS & GEAR

Let’s start off with some character and gear work. The main focus is to create a broader variety of enemies and their skills, to get a proper feel for the gameplay.

Security Guards

Security guard was our first enemy, so we decided to expand on him and create a few additional versions with different weapons and skills. We added corporation striker equipped with a new SMG and Enforcer with a Shotgun.

Droid

Our character team created the Droid model earlier this year, and we can finally show new textures and animations. The Droid will have two versions - shielded and unshielded - with different behaviors and skill sets.

Weapons

A variety of new weapons and gear for the player plus an SMG and shotgun for Humanoid enemies.

animations

The last update we showcased some combat. We’ve further polished this and started to experiment with animation variations for the skills.

Character skills

On the bottom left you can see the Cleave attack. On the bottom right there is a new skill - Spin attack.

The Tag skill attack and its variations are used for the Trace Blaster.

ENEMIES

Our Droids are finally moving, rotating, and shooting, which allows us to start using them in combat situations. Animation of forward movement is below.

ENVIRONMENTS

We are following industry standards and implementing new workflows in our environments. The first part was to restructure our materials and create trim sheets for additional details of the assets.

CODE

A.I.

We have started working on Droid AI, which is a little bit different than standard humanoids. We have basic movement and primary skills for testing combat, next will be to create additional skills and polish what we already have.

HUD

We saw a lot of positive feedback around the HUD and GUI style, so we decided to explore this even further with some new HUD elements. We have created new mini portraits for the player and party members. We have also updated the inventory with silhouette versions of items in empty slots and added new enemy health bars for different rarities of enemies. We also started working on the implementation of new Item tooltips which you can see in the Design section of the blog.

DESIGN

Now we're going to look at some design aspects of our game. Every Action RPG is only as good as its itemization, so we don’t want to take this aspect of the game lightly.

Item qualities

We are sticking to action RPG standards here with a bit of extra flavor for the most valuable items. Item qualities are split into the following groups:

Normal(white) - items with up to 1 mod plus an implicit mod on item types where it’s applicable.
Uncommon(blue) - items with up to 2 mods plus an implicit mod on item types where it’s applicable.
Rare(yellow) - items with 3 to 6 mods plus an implicit mod on item types where it’s applicable.

Legendary(orange) - items with 2-5 predefined mods plus 1 mod from the legendary pool.
Unique(red) - items with limited availability in the current league. These have 3-6 predefined mods plus 1 unique mod.( e.g. if 20 people loot a unique item from limited series of 20, no one else can drop that item, unless a hardcore character with that item equipped dies and the item is sent back to the game.)

sockets

All items have a chance to generate sockets based on the item type, level, and rarity from 1-6 sockets. There are three types of sockets Warfare(red), Tactical(blue), and Security(yellow). Each socket can also fit mods (chips, DNA chain) of the same color. Higher quality items can generate empowered sockets of each type. Mods socketed in Empowered sockets benefit from the increasing effect of the mod by 50%. (e.g. if you socket a chip with 16% Increased Shield Regeneration it will give you 24% instead)

Item MOdifiers(mods)

Items in Carbon can have 5 types of Modifiers. Implicit, Warfare, Security, Tactical, and Legendary/Unique.

Implicit Mods are part of a basic item type. Warfare, Security, and Tactical can be generated at random on all items.
Warfare, Security, and Tactical mods have their own pool and are generated in different tiers and numbers based on item level and rarity.
Legendary/Unique mods can be generated on legendary and Unique items.

In closing, I'd like to say that there are moments as a developer where you are just making the game, and we don't always take time for regular updates. I love that we are doing these blogs to give you at least some insight into our progress and process. We hope you like what you see, and please share your comments on your platform of choice. We love to hear community feedback.

Thank you for joining us and keep an eye out for our upcoming blog update.

-LKR

DEV DIARY #23 - DROID, melee combat, gui and more…