Hello! We are happy to announce that we start a series of devlogs about our game Endless Wander, a story-driven RPG, beginning today with this one. In this series, we’ll talk about the status of the project, the features of the game, and the challenges we face along the way.

SAVE SYSTEM

Nowadays, saving is probably one of the core feature in games, even more in a RPG. It was just a question of time before we tackle the subject. It’s one of those systems that needs to be implemented as early as possible to avoid any issues.

In Endless Wander we need to save multiple things: player, quests, NPCs, cinematics and dialogues states, and world general state (door open,close, time of day, ...). We opt for a classic system that has a define number of save slots, it was the fastest to implement and a sufficient solution for the game.

We have two types of data to save: data bound to the world and the others. Each actor (in Unreal Engine, actors are objects in the world) defines itself how it’s saved and loaded. They are automatically notified when the player or the game call for a save or a load. The other type of data is handled by the save system which implements how they are saved and loaded.

DIALOGUE SYSTEM

We wouldn't go far lacking a proper dialogue system, a story-driven RPG without dialogues is like Frodo without Sam Gamgee. We also had to do it now since quests needed it as soon as possible.

Inspired by CD Projekt Red’s system, Endless Wander implement a choice system with “important” choices that advance the story and minor choices that gives you extra information. We selected this approach as it’s an easy to understand system, yet powerful to narrate the story.

Each dialogue is composed by multiple groups of choices. In a group, there is at least an “important” choice that will move you to another group when selected. When moving to another group or selecting a minor choice the associated dialogue is played and displayed to the screen (in case of audio dubbing the audio is played as well).

WORLD COMPOSITION AND BETTER MAP

The world composition is an Unreal Engine feature that allow us to create a large world composed of multiple areas. With this tool, we can work on each zone individually and also work on the world scale on all of the areas at the same time to blend them together. It handles level loading and unloading depending on the location of the player to avoid having the whole world loaded at all time.

In the 0.1 version of Endless Wander, the forest of the starting area was a big mess of low-height trees. It made travelling through the woods clunky and a bit unenjoyable. We improved this by changing the tree meshes and height, removing a bunch of them and adding bushes to still give this feeling of a big and wild forest.

Stay tune for more updates on the project !

Ederia Interactive Team.