Update#3: New Year's Warm Up

First of all, let me wish you Happy New Year, I hope your holidays were as great as mine :D! During the X-Mas break I did not have much time to progress on the game, was travelling and seeing the family, however right after the holidays I started with some tasks which were staying in the backlog for some time. First of all I managed to rework the UI. I do not have the screenshot to share yet, since there are only placeholders to be seen, but once I replace those with graphical components I will post an update. The main challenge there was finding the solution I am pleased with, by nature I am bit of a perfectionist, plus I like to have things prepared for future, but this time I have to fight those traits, as I was seeing that this task would never end otherwise.

Additionally, I continued to refine my Blender skills. There was an issue which was bothering me for quite a while. Some of the building models I have developed, there are a few which have thatched roof. To be able to achieve the effect I use 'Hair' particles, which does not work very well with 'Freestyle' outlines (since the number of particles is huge and those are small, Blender will crash after a couple of hours of rendering). The first solution to be able to render the model with outlines, but without the roof, was excluding the layer from rendering in 'Node' editor. However, leaving the roof without outline is not an option, simply because it does not look right when rendered. After researching for alternatives I was about to give up, but finally managed to find a solution on my own. I basically render the same layer twice, but on the once which is placed below I set the color to black and scale it slightly up.

UI+GFX

• Created a new archery model (the previous one was not harmonizing well, plus was taking to much horizontal space)

• Configure the town hall model to have outline around thatched roof (did not finalize the model though yet).

Game Core

• Implemented new UI with placeholders so far (waiting for paycheck to purchase the UI packs I have in mind to integrate into the game)