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This blog post will showcase the first portion of this new stage of development, and highlight my progress moving through my Trello Board.
As can be seen, the first thing on the list (Project list takes higher priority) is to add the North Titan Texture. This is because of an issue I discovered via testing, that the Titan, despite having a north facing texture, never uses it.
I thought at first it would be somewhat of an issue, but the resolution was to retype the file name of the texture correctly, as the game, when building a character from these texture files, is case sensitive, and I called the filename "Titan_North" instead of "Titan_north".
This shows a before and after the resolution of this issue. Note the change in the filenames, a simple issue, but one that took a surprising amount of time to resolve due to the lack of information RimWorld provides about the issues themselves - a lot of the time fixing an issue is trying to figure out what the issue actually is. Nevertheless, the issue was resolved.
This screenshot shows the new art assets for the Titan Walls. This art is still a placeholder, despite it looking more accurate to the game (as opposed to a big grey box). As I am not an artist, I will stick to using placeholder art assets for the continuation of the project, including the wall assets. Despite this, the assets created for the wall are far more suitable for the project than the previous set, and are a more accurate translation of the original source material into RimWorld.
The large colour difference between these placeholder walls and the prototype walls is due to the fact that with the new prototype walls, building the walls out of a different material will now have an impact of the colour of the wall; these walls are made of granite, the darkest rock type in RimWorld, hence their dark appearance.
I next updated the art for the ODM Blade assets. Again, I am not an artist, so this was simply a case of transitioning the art from a prototype asset to a placeholder asset. The reason I am making this transition for all art assets is because whilst the art is unfinished and to a far lower quality than I would release as a Mod, it is suitable enough for use in the project; it is clear to see what the assets are meant to represent from the source material. The prototype art used was a copy of the Gladius (a sword in vanilla RimWorld) asset, chosen as the Gladius XML data file was the starting point for the ODM Blade asset. I then used the dimensions of this asset to create a rough approximation of what the assets would appear like, in order for art that I can comfortably use as place holders. After this project is submitted, I am intending to commission an artist who specialises in the RimWorld artstyle. This is because firstly, RimWorld has a specific artstyle that, if I were to release this project as a mod, I would want to have a finished and polished list of art assets to go with it, instead of the place holder assets being used as of now. Secondly, RimWorld has a surprisingly technical depth to applying its art to textures; some of the assets I have created are suitable placeholders, but overlapping textures even just by a single pixel on certain objects can cause a visual downgrade to the overall Mod. Shown here is the placeholder Blade art asset being equipped by a pawn in combat.
After this, I re-organised the Trello board, reallocated my time and began work on re-updating the Titan Wall Gate. This asset was in dire need of a re-work for multiple reasons. The first is that, after testing, it was discovered that when the "gate" portion was open; that being, the center gate moved to the side, the entire asset, even including the wall portion of the asset, can be moved through by characters. I also wanted to recreate this asset as it currently creates a dependancy on another Mod: Doors Expanded.
Mod dependancies on other mods are incredibly common, with the majority of popular mods requiring other mods to work. This is because it is an incredibly common practice in RimWorld modding to mod other mods to create a new mod. The reason I had to use this mod as a point of dependancy was due to the fact that Vanilla RimWorld does not support the existence of 1x1 doors. Similar to the issue with having walls larger than 1x1 (albeit for a different reason as walls can not exist larger than default as they are an atlas object, but with doors it is an issue with the hard code of the game itself,) I was unable to create a door larger than 1x1 as the game simply didn't support it at a functional level. Doors expanded is a mod created by someone far more experienced than I am with mod development, and is a complete overhaul of doors in RimWorld, down to the code that allows them to function and exist. This mod allows for doors of any size, the mod itself coming with doors that are 1x1, 2x1, 2x2, 3x2 etc in size.
Whereas I am restarting the Titan Wall Gate file in order to resolve a gameplay issue, I will still, unfortunatley have to maintain this dependancy in the project. As opposed to one single Wall Gate, the asset will be split into two new assets, a Small Titan Wall and a Titan Gate.
This image showcases the new placeholder art for the new Small Titan Wall and Titan Gate, as well as the placeholder art for the Titan Walls, used to encompass a small colony, as one would playing with the mod.
After this, I went through and made some balance changes; certian parts of the mod will now be locked behind researching.
Research in RimWorld is the games main form of showing progress, create a colony that can survive comfortably enough to afford the man-power to research new technologies, and the player is rewarded with new weapons, tools and mechanics to use.
The Titan Walls, and all aspects of it, are locked behind the <Stonecutting> <researchPrerequisites>. This means that the player has to have researched Stone Cutting as a colony to be able to build the Titan Walls. I decided to have it at such an early point of research as with a new threat in the form of the Titans, it would be unfair to not provide the player with a defense against them.
Comparison image to showcase the visual difference between source material and in-game assets.
https://www.alittlebithuman.com/the-walls-of-attack-on-titan-explained/
A standard play-through will have the player start with Stonecutting, among many other things, already researched. This balance choice was to ensure that players starting with a Tribal start; IE little to no research at all, will not be able to access the Titan Walls. This is because the Titans themselves are a high-level threat, and won't appear until the player has reached a further level of progress into the game.
The ODM Gear is however, locked behind the Smithing research requisite. A standard play-through does not normally start with this unlocked, and as such, requires dedication to unlock. It also means that there is a portion of time in a standard playthrough where the player will have access to defence from Titans, but not the capability to attack. This is a somewhat suitable translation of part of the source material - time is spent preparing before being able to counter attack the Titans.
This shows my progress as of late in polishing and developing further the project, and my aims to create a polished product by the end of it.
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