Devblog August: Building Driftborn's Gameplay Foundation

an in-depth look behind the scenes of the less exciting but equally important systems behind our game

Things have been pretty busy behind the scenes lately. A lot of the work we have been doing is not necessarily the kind of stuff that immediately turns into a flashy screenshot or a new area to explore, but it is some of the most important work we have done on Driftborn so far. Over the past months, we have been rebuilding and expanding the foundation that supports movement, interactions, abilities, and racing. A big part of that has been Locomotion V3, which is now reaching the point where the core system is properly coming together. And when we say "locomotion system", we are talking about quite a bit more than just making the creature walk forward. ═══════════ Locomotion V3 ═══════════ Movement has always been one of the most important parts of Driftborn. You spend a huge amount of the game controlling these creatures, so if moving around does not feel good, basically everything built on top of it suffers too. Locomotion V3 has been our attempt to properly build that foundation rather than continue stacking more onto the older prototype. The system currently handles different gaits, acceleration and braking, steering, reversing, jumping, drifting, swimming, and the different states that come with them. A lot of time has also gone into the actual feel of movement. Haddix, for example, should not respond like a weightless game character that instantly rotates the second you touch a key. Steering has a bit of weight behind it, different gaits react differently, the body visually follows through during turns, and drifting has its own movement and animation behaviour. Acceleration animations blend over the normal locomotion. Turning has its own overlays. The body reacts to slopes. The feet adapt to the ground through IK while still allowing the actual animations to lift the feet naturally. The camera also reacts to things like jumping, drifting, and harder landings without affecting the actual gameplay movement. A lot of these sound like tiny details on their own, but together they make a massive difference. ═══════════ Multiplayer ═══════════ Another thing we have been trying to be very careful about is multiplayer. There are a lot of systems that work perfectly fine when you have one player running around in an empty test map, then completely fall apart the second another player joins. We would rather deal with that now than discover it much later when half the game has already been built around assumptions that only work in single-player. Because of that, gameplay movement and important race logic are being built with multiplayer authority in mind. At the same time, visual systems do not need to become unnecessarily expensive network systems. Things like animation overlays, IK, and camera effects can be calculated locally from the creature's movement instead of constantly being sent over the network. We prefer performance over seeing your friend's tail twitch a little later than they would. Keeping those two things separated has made the entire system much cleaner. ═══════════ What is GAS? ═══════════ No, it's not Gotta Add Shit or Great, Another System. It is Unreal Engine's Gameplay Ability System, or GAS. The name makes it sound like this is exclusively some kind of magic spell or combat system, but it is much broader than that. (trust me) For Driftborn, it gives us a framework that we can use for gameplay actions, interactions, abilities, and states without every new feature becoming its own completely separate system. Yay performance. So instead of ending up with fifteen different systems all independently trying to figure out whether the player is allowed to do something, we can start giving those actions a shared structure. There is still plenty being worked out here, but getting this foundation in place now gives us a much better base for the gameplay systems coming later. ═══════════ Racing Framework ═══════════ Pretty important stuff for a racing game, yeah. The first version was basically the foundation you would expect: checkpoints, laps, race start and finish logic. Race tracks can now use a spline running through the route to understand where racers are on the track. That gives us much better information than simply asking which checkpoint you touched last. For example, wrong-way detection can now look at whether you are actually progressing backwards along the track instead of deciding you are going the wrong way just because your creature happens to be facing at a weird angle. Which is particularly important in a game where drifting exists. The race system also now has proper lap tracking, server-based race timing, finish times, placement order, and the beginnings of the race HUD. Basically: the Race Manager itself acts as the referee while each creature keeps track of its own progress through the race. Most importantly, we are heavily focusing on the anti-cheat part of this and try to make it as waterproof as we can. There is still a lot we want to add before racing is finished, especially around the actual race experience and UI, but the underlying system is finally becoming something we can properly build on. ═══════════ ETA? When can I play game?! ═══════════ Systems like these are not always the most exciting development updates from the outside. There is no giant new map reveal here. No new creatures :( A lot of it is us staring at code, animation graphs, and debug numbers, trying to figure out why one leg decided it wanted to become a helicopter. But this work matters a lot for everything that comes afterwards. And most importantly, it means the systems we are building now are being made with the version of Driftborn we actually want to end up with in mind, rather than only what happens to work in today's test build. There is still plenty of polishing to do on Locomotion V3, and there are more gameplay systems currently being worked on behind the scenes, but this has been a pretty big step forward for the project. We'll have more to show once some of these systems start turning into things you can actually get your hands on. For now, though, back to the Gotta Add Shit systems and helicopter legs.