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Confetti on course completion 🎉

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There are situations where the golf ball is close to a wall or obstacle. You always hit the ball in the direction you're facing. So objects between the camera and the ball are not blocking the camera and are made transparent using a dither shader.

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For the golf minigame, the main character has a special golf outfit. But since you don't actually see the character in the minigame, just in a short cutscene, it was basically wasted work time 🤣

I'm from Germany and typical old German names are kinda a meme here. But somehow, some of these names have their own unique vibe. All shopkeepers in the game are part of an old merchant family and have first names like Albrecht or Gottfried.

The HUD is minimalist. Shot direction follows the camera's view, and the power meter only pops up when you hold the strike button.

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Since there are occasionally some darker spots on the golf courses, the golf ball also has a weak light source. The goal was to improve visibility for the player.

In addition to the realtime lights, I'm using the third-party asset Fake Point Lights by LazyEti. This lets me project stylized, beautiful Wind Waker-like light cones with sharp edges onto the environment.

For the golf courses, I primarily use baked lighting cause it looks awesome and fits well. But I also add realtime lights for the torches to create dynamic shadows for the golf ball and obstacles.

Since it's a simple minigame, there are only simple obstacles. There are static barricades that players can use to their advantage or navigate around. There are also dynamic simple shape rigidbody based obstacles with spectral visuals. Moving obstacles also leave a slight trail.

I created the classic grass pattern using a repeating grass texture and texture layering. The second layer, a simple gray-and-white checkerboard texture, is multiplied onto the base texture with a transparency value.

When designing levels, I focused on easy readability for players, variety, and variable verticality. The shapes of the levels were all created in Blender using simple cubes and textured with triplanar texturing.

With all the golf video games out there, I wouldn't consider making a full game just about golf. But a dungeon golf minigame in my action-adventure game? No objections, right? A quick technical and game design recap 🧵

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A small stress test with 30 active enemy instances. The performance was good, but the pathfinding with many simultaneous enemies was a real pain. Problem still exists and I need to put more work into this!

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The targeting system was a hge challenge! Here in the screenshot, we see targetable indicators (the small arrows) and the targeted indicator (the large arrow). During targeting, the character always rotates to the active target.

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The dodge roll does not grant invincibility frames, but it temporarily shrinks the character collider size and allows the player to move very quickly in a specific direction. Dodge rolls cost stamina!

Just a cool shot from the combat devlog :)

Most attack animations are purchased animations, which in most cases have been refined using the software Cascadeur and adapted to my character.

Simple, physical enemy attacks can be parried. As the game progresses, you not only stun the enemy for a brief moment, but you can also perform a powerful counterattack.

Some more interesting gamedev insights about creating the combat system in Velkyn ⚔️

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Visualization of the first enemy pathfinding implementation. I'm using A* for the pathfinding in Velkyn.

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The bow is probably not the right choice for this distance :'D

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If you approach enemies from behind and stay quiet (crouching), they won't notice you and you can launch a surprise attack.

I have tried to implement the field of view as realistically as possible. If the character is partially covered by the environment, the detection sensor reports a partial detection. Only when a certain threshold of visual exposure to the sensor is exceeded, the visual contact logic gets triggered.

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Enemy detection is triggered (depending on the enemy type) by visual contact, noises, or caused damage. For visual contact, there is an appropriate indicator when you approach the enemy.

My goal was to create a very dynamic combat system. Good and fair hitscans and in addition to classic dodge and parry actions, I also want to incorporate the parkour elements of Velkyn.