Weapons, Animations, and Season's Greetings.
12 months ago – Fri, Dec 22, 2023 at 04:57:45 PM

Hello backers! 

Since our last update our team has been working towards getting the beta up and running. This has included a lot of work on our back end, server file management, campaign invites, and more. At the same time, other parts of our team have been working on adding new weapons and animations to our characters. 

Animation

Today we wanted to highlight the work our animators have done to bring QuestHaven’s miniatures to life! (Can we really call them miniatures if they are life size?).

We are using a mix of Inverse Kinematics with traditional animation in order for the characters to work properly in the different stances regardless of their weapons or armor. 

Weapons, lots of weapons.

In the world builder Alpha are very few weapon options when it comes to creating mini's. We decided to fix that by adding over 300 weapons, with many more to come!

Season's Greetings

Finally, we wanted to wish you happy holidays! We look forward to having you in QuestHaven's taverns this new year of 2024! We thank your for your on going support!

New features, content, and multiplayer (big update).
about 1 year ago – Tue, Oct 31, 2023 at 06:25:45 PM

Greetings adventurers, its been a while since our last update on Kickstarter.

We have been hard at work adding new features, bug squashing, polishing, and bringing the game online.  Since we missed bringing the updates from our previous Tavern Hall event (Discord/Twitch) onto Kickstarter, this update is a bit longer than usual. 

Over the past few months we've been working on the following:

• Networking
• Game Master / Player permissions
• New figure animations
• Setting up hundreds of new weapons
• Setting up thousands of new assets (Elven, Pirate, Western, and other themes).
• Modular interaction system
• New figures and monsters.
• Character Sheet system.

And much more, we hope you enjoy this update in our journey of crafting QuestHaven. 

Interactions

One of the new features we've recently added is a dynamic radial menu that allows you to interact with objects and figures. This system will serve as a base for all sorts of interactions, from turning off and on lights, animating objects, changing the state of traps and monsters, etc.

Here are a few object interactions:

Figure Interactions:

As we move forward, we can keep adding new animations or other buttons to the dragon (and other figures). We could for example give him a button to roar, and another to emote a fire breath attack.

New Weapons and Improved Animations

We are adding new animations for our figures including new combat stances, as well as weaponless idle poses for social encounters. We've added hundreds of new weapons, and are adjusting each weapon to adapt to the selected stance. In this video you can see how a 2 handed weapon stance becomes dual wielding one when adding a weapon to the offhand. After all, savage barbarians should be able to wield large weapons in one hand.

State of Multiplayer

The following video is taken from a player's perspective, with the game master controlling everything except the blue draconic figure. Just a brief example of our newly networked tools. 

To all our Pioneers and above tiers, we expect to bring the Multiplayer Beta by the end of November! Please keep in mind however that this date is not set in stone.

State of VR

We have been focusing on developing all of our tools in PC first, once we have the multiplayer beta in a stable state, we will switch focus to adapting these tools for VR. We will first be working on PC-VR, and later towards standalone. There are some major changes that we need to undertake to make standalone VR a reality, including switching graphic pipelines within Unity (our game engine). We've done a few dry runs of this process with QuestHaven, but have decided to postpone it until after the Multiplayer Beta is live, as this major task will take several weeks. 

Prototyping for Mixed Reality

Many people have been excited for Mixed Reality with the Quest 3 and other upcoming headsets, our team included! Here are two quick prototypes we made for UX design purposes. 

Mixed Reality First Person:

For a while we've been wanting to prototype a mode of mixed reality where you can move the figure around the map, and your surroundings are the figure's perspective: 

It is unclear at this time if this is a mode that will make it into the game, as it can be disorienting while moving the figure. One idea we have at this time is to fade to black or passthrough while the figure is being moved. 

As always we welcome feedback and invite you to join our Discord. Thank you for your support!

PS:

Fog of War, Character Sheets, and the road to beta.
over 1 year ago – Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 12:01:49 PM

Hello adventurers! Today’s update is based from our last tavern hall.  

But before we dive into it, I just want to add a brief personal message, thanks for all the well wishes while I was down during the last update. I am for the most part recovered, and back to working on this wonderful project. – Alejandro / !Nox

So, what many of you are surely wondering about, how is the beta coming along? We are still working hard on transitioning multiplayer SDKs (the SDK we were working with was deprecated). There is still no fixed date on when the beta will be coming out, but rest assured we are hard at work in bringing our taverns and dungeons online. Expect more details on this process for the next update.

Meet the Team: During the stream we also introduced some of the members of our team, talking about who is working on 3d modeling, character sheets, animations, fog of war, networking, asset optimization / integration, and more. Feel free to check out the 40 minute stream on Twitch.

Fog of War

The star of our latest update was the Fog of War system, traditional fog of war methods are basically a darkened layer between the camera and the world. When it came to our fog of war needs, we had to find a solution that worked from any perspective, be it top down, at an angle, or from a first person perspective.

While its still a work in progress, we are happy with the direction the fog of war system is taking.

Fog of war will be completely optional, true line is a more immersive experience, but gameplay mechanics that come along with Fog of War can be useful to some GMs / tables. As always, we aim to give our players the flexibility to play and run their games, their way. 

The fog of war system will be a tool that the GM can customize to fit their needs. When the fog of war is enabled the GM will be able to tell what players can see, while still having a clear view of the map.

Character Sheet Creator

During the stream we also covered the character sheet creator, it allows players to build character sheet templates, or grab an existing template and fill it out. The character sheet creator has logic nodes that will allow power users to dive in and create some custom automation. 

While we did cover more of this system on stream, we will be diving into it in a future post featuring how it integrates to the chat system and other online tools.

Upcoming Assets Survey

Finally, we went over the latest assets that we have brought into QuestHaven, including more knights, castles, vikings, and feudal Japan themes. Our next asset pack to work on will be more involved than usual, we went over the complications of these two asset packs on stream. We are running a survey on our Discord as to which asset pack our asset team should integrate next.

We would love to hear from you on Discord.

A challenging month. (personal message)
over 1 year ago – Mon, May 22, 2023 at 03:19:31 PM

Hello everyone, this is going to be a bit of a more personal message from myself (Alejandro / !Nox). I’ve been debating whether to share this here and eventually decided for it as my personal health affects this project.

May was off to a great start, I participated in Game Dev Guild, an online conference where I had the opportunity to talk shop with other developers and give a talk about some of the optimization approaches, we are taking with QuestHaven given its user generated nature. Unfortunately, a bit after the conference I injured my back.

I was hospitalized and bed ridden for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking it one day at a time, focusing on getting better. At this point I’ve been through physiotherapy and can walk again. Being on my own two feet feels like an incredible win!

In a few weeks’ time I am expecting to make a full recovery, all be it with some changes to my habits. The main concern over these weeks when it comes to QuestHaven is the fact that I can’t really sit down to code for hours at a time, I've now set up a standing desk which helps! That being said, I’m by no means anywhere near 100% productivity, and I believe its going to be 2-3 weeks until I’m fully back in the game.

Now back to QuestHaven! The good news is that the team has been able to pick up some of my slack. The character sheet system that we showed on our last stream has made some significant advances.  And Israel (one of our developers) has been leveling up his skills big time, tackling all the networking code needed for multiplayer.

All in all, this month’s events have been a setback, but rest assured we are working to build this game for all of you who supported the project.

The journey so far, and new features to come!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 01:13:43 PM

The Journey so far

Since the Kickstarter we have been focusing our development on improving our world builder. From overhauling our UI, to reworking our object placement system. We’ve also added thousands of pieces for you to place in your maps! As we keep growing the amount of objects in the world builder, we've found that we need to work on a better system to more conveniently search and sort through all these parts. 

We had originally planned on adding close to 3,500 assets by release and are excited see this side of the project advancing ahead of schedule. So far, we’ve added 5,500 objects for you to place in your game, with 600 of them coming from the latest patch!

Speaking of the latest patch, we released World Builder Alpha 1.01 last week. Here are some of its highlights:

World Builder Alpha 1.01

We've started to add color variants to many of the objects inside of QuestHaven, this will remain an ongoing process, expect more variations for objects that didn't get them this patch.

We've added some much needed functionality to the room creator, you can now select what floor and wall you want to place.

As we move forward with development and work towards the beta, we are working on refining our player tools. We've updated the figure movement system for PC.

The road ahead

We wanted to share this visual representation of our roadmap. Its split into 6 core sections of development:

• World Builder
• Art
• Player Tools
• GM Tools
• Backend Servers (Data)
• Multiplayer (Gameplay)

As you can observe above we have focused most of our development so far on the Art, World Builder, and backend servers. We have recently shifted focus to working on game master tools, player tools, and multiplayer as we build towards beta.

Character Sheet Creator

Early on in our project we decided to have QuestHaven be rule agnostic, allowing you to play any system or homebrew within our platform. Because of this we are making a character sheet creator that allows you to create templates.

In template creation mode you can create a character sheet from scratch. You get to decide where to place stat boxes and different types of input fields. Of course, we will allow players to share templates. Below is an early prototype of this functionality:

Once you have a template, you can then fill it out as you would any other character sheet.

Are we getting closer to Beta?

As our development team works on different aspects of QuestHaven we are getting closer to beta. 

We are currently in the process of switching networking solutions, which ties into many tools, like dice rolling, player movement, music, and much more. While we are hesitant to give an exact date, we are pushing ourselves for late April. 

Beta will be PC and PCVR, as there is still a lot of optimization that we need to work on for a smooth standalone experience. As for PCVR we've transitioned to using OpenXR, so you should be able to run it on a number of headsets!

As always, we welcome you to join us on Discord »