Back in the Drift: Everything That's Happened

It’s been a long time since the last real update here, and that’s because for a long while there wasn’t one to give. Into the Drift sat on the shelf, and the project went quiet for longer than I like to admit.

For the past several months, though, it has been back in active development, and a great deal has been built in that time. I never wrote any of it up as it happened, so this post is the catch-up: an overview of what has gone into the game since I picked it back up, broken down by system.

Two caveats before the list. First, this is a lot, and much of it is plumbing you’ll never see directly; I’ve tried to describe everything in terms of what it means for someone playing. Second, the game is far further along as a set of systems than as a story. Most of the work below concerns game mechanics; only a small part of the main storyline is playable. The Dev-Map puts the whole game at a little under forty percent complete.

If you want to see rather than read, the Media page has current screenshots, and the Codex has the in-game Compendium and the full guide to character growth.

The foundations

When active development resumed, the game already had its core shape:

• The 2.5D isometric engine used by the game.
• Travel from a generated world map down into generated regional maps.
• Procedural terrain, rivers, oceans and forests on every regional map.
• Multi-storey building, items and containers, creatures, weather, and saving and loading.
• A locked-perspective 3D region was prototyped to a playable state, compared side by side with the 2.5D version, and deliberately set aside.

Everything below was built on top of that.

The world map and world generation

• World generation you can steer
  • The setup screen was rebuilt around named sliders: water coverage, landmass size, mountain extent, polar caps, the tropic belt, deserts, swamps, scorched land, forests, rivers, plateaus and great pits.
  • A live preview globe shows the world taking shape, with randomise and reset-to-defaults buttons.
  • World seeds: leave it blank for a random world, or type one to generate the same world again.
  • World generation now respects the water coverage setting and produces distinct continents. Mountain ranges no longer block off entire continents.
  • Improvements to climate and jungle generation, with twice as many mountains.
• The world map itself
  • Clouds that drift across the map independently of the camera, in banks four times broader than before.
  • The water level is preserved when reloading, map markers rebuild correctly, and the rendered map is cached for faster return visits.
  • Fog of war, with exploration progress preserved even when the fog is hidden.
  • A minimap with a Known Locations tab.
  • The world map fades in with the camera centred on your character.
  • Towns appear as clusters of house and field glyphs, and a town’s glyphs shape the region you walk into.
  • Roads join the towns on each landmass, climb over hills, and cross rivers and ravines on bridges.
  • Lakes, hills and hillocks, flower fields, jungle glades, grassland cracks, fissure fields in swamp and scorched land, cave mouths, camps, rocks in the shallows, wells, palisades, shrines and quarries all have their own glyphs.
  • Story landmarks appear on the map as you reach the relevant quests.
  • The first world-map encounter: bridges held by bandits who want a toll.
  • Danger rises with distance from camp and in harsh biomes, and deeper places roll better loot.

Regions, terrain and wild places

• Terrain
  • Terrain height, climbable cliffs and banks, and fixes to keep characters standing at the correct height.
  • Cliffs and banks fade around you when they would hide you.
  • Four-way map rotation, with a cache so a view you’ve already seen comes back instantly.
  • Half of all regions have winding streams, which end when they reach the sea.
  • Large lakes, ravines, grassy hills, and plateaus with routes to the surrounding terrain.
  • Farmland regions, cedar forests that finally grow, and flower fields that aren’t perfect circles.
  • Lava that burns.
• Caves
  • Natural caves carved into a region’s own hills, opening on any of the four sides, with entrances and intact roofs.
  • Caves with rooms, descending pits, and furnishings laid out by the same rules the villages use.
  • Anything overhead fades or hides while you’re inside, and what’s in the cave shows only from inside it.
  • Mines, with a road leading in and the miners’ camp at the far end.
  • Deep quarries, with machinery placed clear of the rocks.
• The sky
  • Rain and storms, and rain that no longer falls under the ground.
  • Cloud shadows that climb terrain, step onto rooftops and pass over buildings.
  • Dappled god rays through the gaps in the clouds.
  • A day and night cycle, with nightfall timed to the relevant dialogue during story scenes.

Towns, villages and villagers

• Towns across the world
  • The harbour town was the first: whole buildings with real doors, a harbour front with a boardwalk, piers and a dredged quay, and a road down to the sea.
  • Towns now appear across the whole world, each one its own place, instead of the harbour turning up everywhere.
  • Villages grow street-first on flat ground, cut foundations into slopes, and place buildings along the streets.
  • Houses have furnished ground floors, terraces on their roofs, exterior stairs and fenced gardens.
  • Farmsteads with sheds, pens with real gates that open and shut, and animals that stay penned and keep calm.
  • A harbour in hill country becomes a bay in a valley.
• The people in them
  • Villager sprites cut from generated sheets, with assigned homes, small talk and displayed names.
  • Well over a hundred new villager faces across the trades, and all three hundred checked by eye to match their assigned roles.
  • Names generated by race, gender and homeland.
  • Merchants keep their stalls, smiths keep their forges, and the watch walks its rounds.
  • Villagers are assigned homes when a region is generated. Those assignments survive saving and loading, and villagers can enter through their doors.
  • Villagers rest in rooms with beds, clear of doorways.
• Trade
  • A trade window with goods from around twenty professions, including occasional rare items.

Building

• Walls shortened to a storey that stairs actually reach, with every place that assumed the old height fixed.
• Blueprints you raise with a hammer, and a build menu rebuilt with a category column and an item grid.
• Furniture that faces four ways, windows and shelves set into walls, and fireplaces you light by clicking.
• Twenty-three household objects, twenty pieces of village clutter, and buildable fences.
• Single doors in every wood and stone, and thirty-five styles of double door.
• Tables and surfaces that carry clutter.
• Docks you can build over water and walk across.
• Roof terraces, and exterior stairs that run along the wall to a real upper door.
• Construction casts real shadows, blurs with the rest of the scene on other storeys, and furniture no longer pokes through the floor above.

Ruins and dungeons

• Ruins on the surface
  • Ruins have their own world-map icons, two or three storeys, and damaged floors supported by walls.
  • Buried treasure caches you dig up, and ancient caches with rarer things in them.
  • Bandits squatting in ruins.
• The underworld
  • Stairs leading below the story’s ruin, with a stone staircase back to the surface.
  • Dungeons four levels deep, with rooms, corridors and twelve room types, libraries among them.
  • Real darkness: torchlight that casts shadows, walls lit by distance and line of sight, and previously explored areas shown darkened and desaturated.
  • Doors aligned with dungeon walls and closed when first encountered, braziers and candelabra you can light, and every piece of dungeon furniture looked at and sized by hand.
  • Stocked chests, racks and book shelves, with tomes and scrolls on the shelves.
  • Three enemy types per floor, which stay behind shut doors.
  • Deep dungeons out in the dangerous far regions.

Camps, bandits and the wilds

• Bandit camps pitched in the wilds, a camp on every spot the world map marks, and a way up to any camp on a plateau.
• Bridge tolls, on the world map and in the regions: pay, or fight your way across.
• Rogues armed like bandits, and Wulfgar’s hall is now a real fight.
• Bedrolls, cots and tents, sliced from two new camp sheets.

Combat

• Combat mechanics
  • One resolver for every hit, whoever strikes and whoever is struck.
  • Armour that absorbs a proportion of damage rather than subtracting a flat number.
  • Critical hits and armour penetration, and increased shield damage.
  • Twelve damage types with resistances, and reflection.
  • Two-handed weapons that hit like a truck, and a world half again as tough to match.
• Weapon shapes
  • Each weapon family has a shape on screen: the sabre’s arc, the spear’s thrust, the arrow’s path.
  • Sweeps, long thrusts and ground slams; volleys and shots that chain between targets.
  • Multi-stroke patterns: claws, triple cuts, figure eights and whirls.
  • A glowing slash stroke that is the hitbox, drawn with the Procedural Idyllic Slash shader, timed off the swing and sized to the body swinging it.
  • Spears and lances thrust forward; other polearms can swing.
• Ranged and thrown
  • Aim and release, with a crosshair while you aim and a drawn bow lying across the aim line.
  • Hold to keep firing, with paired one-handed ranged weapons.
  • Bows, wands and slings rebalanced; a bow was the worst weapon in the game and isn’t any more.
  • Whips and slings as new weapon families.
  • Thrown weapons that reload instead of being spent, and javelins that fly point first.
  • Bombs: crafted, tiered and lobbed.
  • Projectiles hit objects along their visible paths and stop at walls.
• Effects and statuses
  • Thirteen on-hit effects, from burning and lifesteal to chain lightning, fire rain, execution and splitting shots.
  • Fire, frost, poison and web pools left on the ground.
  • Twelve statuses, most recently Petrified and Soaked for the stone and tide schools.
  • Statuses show on the body, several at once: poison bubbles, flames, ice, webs and blood.
  • Stronger damage over time, with on-hit effects listed on item cards.
• Defences
  • Shields that block arrows as well as blades, and great shields with heavier penalties.
  • Dodge as a skill that trains by getting out of the way.

Creatures and wildlife

• Biome enemy tables for every region, starting with a wandering rat, a desert scorpion and the Wolf-Rats.
• Eighteen biome enemies in the first pass.
• Thirty-eight animals with behaviour based on their temperament.
• Birds that walk until something frightens them, and rare, aggressive mad beasts.
• Six elemental slimes.
• Hostiles that hunt the whole party, press a chase and only give up far from home.
• Hit one and it comes for you, and so does its kin.
• Rival peoples fight each other, and sentient enemies keep still until they are hunting.
• Enemies that shoot, from high ground when they have it.
• Creatures that hop the ledges you jump.

Companions and the party

• Brynja
  • Follows you, wanders when idle, and holds her position without jittering.
  • Fights at your side, defends herself as well as you, and camps with you at the fire.
  • A redrawn portrait with a full set of expressions.
  • Travels between regions with you, and warns you the moment the harbour town loads.
  • Heals whoever is hurt and casts damaging thraeds at your enemies.
• The party
  • A party panel with portraits, health, skein, vigour and statuses.
  • Companions level up, and you spend their attribute, skill and mastery points on their own sheet.
  • Combat roles (healer, buffer, single target, sweeper, mixed and tank) that pick the skills to suit them, and stances for how far a companion ranges.
  • Archers who keep their distance and switch to a blade when pinned.
  • Companions who craft from their own kits and eat from their own packs.
  • You can squeeze past a companion and can’t hit one by accident.

Character creation and progression

• Creation
  • Race and god choices affect starting attributes, skills and magic school.
  • A build sheet for spending creation points, a starting kit by race, and your first mastery chosen at creation.
• Attributes and skills
  • Five attributes, each capped at thirty.
  • Skills that train by use, and skill points that buy ranks, cheaper early on.
  • A soft level cap at fifty.
• The seven lines and mastery
  • No class to choose: your attributes determine your line. There are three purist lines, three blends and the Wanderer.
  • Mastery points each level, tiers that cost more as they climb, and tiers opened by the line rather than by attributes.
  • Fifty-two mastery skills designed, thirty-three of them built.
  • Vigour, the resource spent on physical abilities.
  • Each mastery has an icon in its line’s colours.

Thraedweaving

• The skein, a pool that grows with Will and level, and thraed slots opened only by training the craft.
• Seven schools: flame, frost, nature, stone, tide, life and storm.
• Thirty-two thraeds across three tiers: bolts, bursts, wards and healing.
• Target selection pauses the game and highlights targets in range.
• Distinct spell effects with their own lighting, and a storm school that throws lightning instead of blue fire.
• Three ways to learn a thraed: a choice every four ranks of the craft, tomes on dungeon shelves, and one-use scrolls.

Items, equipment and loot

• Equipment
  • Fourteen equipment slots, with a selection of items for each armour slot.
  • Nine grades of material, from withy to moonsilver, and quality tiers from I to X.
  • 145 weapons, new polearm, mace and axe sheets, and six greatsword designs.
  • Rings and amulets that grant attributes, skill ranks and resistances rather than armour.
  • A pouch for quest items, and a Sort button for the pack.
• The loot generator
  • Five rarities, from common to randart, and eighty prefixes and suffixes.
  • Suffixes that change how a weapon plays, and egos that petrify and soak.
  • Generated items that keep their properties when dropped, dug up or bought.
  • Rarer finds the deeper and further you go, with a one-in-ten-thousand chance to roll a random artifact at any depth.
  • Twenty artifacts, each found once per game, with the most spectacular art held back for them alone.
  • Faction loot tables, better drops from elites, guaranteed equipment drops from bosses, and beast parts from the animals you hunt.

Crafting, food and alchemy

• Felling trees, mining boulders for stone by rock type, and foraging wild herbs and mushrooms.
• Crafting, alchemy and distilling benches, plus field kits: a mortar and pestle, a tinker’s roll and a cooking kit.
• Around sixty recipes, with every wild herb and mushroom good for something.
• Thirty-two draughts, including wards against the elements, and weapon coats and venoms.
• Cooking as a trade: meals that grant modest, lasting buffs to the whole party.
• A 176-icon set of crafting ingredients.
• Nourishment for you and your companions.

Story, quests and dialogue

• Quest tracking
  • Quests, objectives and turn-ins, a tracked objective panel, and hints explaining how to complete objectives.
• The story so far
  • Arriving in the Drift with Brynja, and a safe place to land.
  • A Roof Overhead: gather, build a shelter, light the fire, and spend the first night.
  • The harbourmaster refuses you passage, and you discuss it with Brynja at the quay.
  • The Thieves’ Road to the old ruin, and down into the underworld beneath it.
  • Wulfgar’s hall at the bottom: fight him, spare him, recruit him or slay him.
  • Taking the relic early, and a story that adapts to it; then the road back and a night in the harbour.
  • The crossing itself: a rippling portal, a flight sequence and a landing.
• The world’s lore
  • The Drift is now a world of its own, Drīfmēarc, the realm of dreams and shadows with many doors leading out and in.
  • Ahtar, Doma and the Aeternian Empire, the thanes, and the wyrdports only a few can open.
• Dialogue
  • Conversations moved out of code and into editable files, Brynja’s and the villagers’ small talk among them.
  • Portraits that dissolve between expressions, with forty-eight faces that can be flustered, happy or angry.
  • Dialogue that uses your name, race, god and pronouns, with revisions to make conversations sound more natural.
• The Journal
  • A quest board, a relationships roster, the character sheet, and a Lore tab that is published on this site as the Compendium.

Interface and controls

• The whole interface moved onto one carved plum-and-gold kit: dialogue, menus, the character sheet, the trade window, the inventory and the build menu.
• A main menu at native resolution, with visual feedback on buttons and a distinct appearance for disabled controls.
• Context cursors that show what a click will do, and a mouse wheel that cycles between actions when there’s more than one.
• One click that picks the right tool for what’s under the cursor.
• A hot bar of twenty-four slots, and key and gamepad glyphs that follow whichever device you last touched.
• Item cards with rarity, tier, material and affixes.
• Named saves, with confirmation before deletion.
• Kit-styled dialogs, an About screen, dismissable hints, and Exit to Main Menu.

Music and sound

• Every folder of music is a playlist: the village, the wilds, the dungeon, the world map and the menu.
• Seventeen new region tracks for desert, lush, polar, scorched and swamp country.
• Town music changes with the mood of the scene.
• Sounds fade with distance on one shared curve, and villagers cry out when hurt.

Light, shadow and presentation

• Cast shadows for trees, creatures, items and buildings, which rotate with the view.
• Building faces self-shade on the side away from the sun.
• Distance pointillism, a screen effect that breaks up the far field, is now the game’s look.
• Shader flames on everything that burns, and a limit on combined light brightness.
• A long list of performance work, from walking a town without lag to a cached world map.

Behind the scenes

Tools that don’t ship to players but make everything above possible:

• A Sprite Calibrator and a Shadow Calibrator for adjusting sprite and shadow placement by eye, in the game’s own renderer.
• The Item Forge, for granting, tuning and saving any item live.
• A Slash Lab for tuning weapon strokes, and a Thraed and Mastery Calibrator.
• A static checker that catches the kinds of mistake that actually happen here, which has saved me from a great many broken builds.

What’s next

The systems are in good shape, but much of the story remains to be written and built: the main storyline beyond the relic, the handcrafted places it happens in, and the location types still to be added to world generation, from cities to the Great Pits. After that come settlement building and the army-sized battles it leads to.

The Dev-Map has all of it broken down piece by piece, and I’ll try to keep this devblog a good deal more current than I have been. Thanks for sticking around.