EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

May 18, 2023

Performance improvements, bug fixes, and enough star sabers to stop an imperial army arrive with this latest update!

May the Fourth Forever

Well, maybe not forever. We do have many more rare social media prize code drops to last throughout the month of May! Can you collect them all?

Animation Optimization

Optimization is rarely exciting but often a net positive and sometime necessary for sustained development. With so many custom skills and variants for different weapon types, our character timeline ballooned to nearly 10,000 frames. Over time, we've been able to trim this down to about 7,000 frames with this latest update. The biggest change was consolidating the alternative animations for the class-specific weapons when using sidearms and auxiliaries. Now, the weapons will quickly fade out and back in at the end of the animation. This streamlines the animations while drawing focus to the weapons being used. After all, what's the point of upgrading a fancy new sidearm if it's going to be hidden behind your other weapons?

Optimization is an ongoing process, but this update was a major push forward in our battle against performance issues and file size!

Bug Fixes / Changes

There has been a persistent bug impacting AOE cores such as Ultra Obliteration that would cause the client to freeze if used against 2 targets without enough energy. We tried for awhile to resolve this issue, but to keep this issue from remaining in game and freezing battles, a stopgap solution was introduced in the most recent update: All AOE skills have the same energy require when used against 2 targets as 1 target. This will affect cores and regular class skills. In a way, it makes sense to unify the cost for 1 and 2 targets since players do not have a choice weather to target 1 or 2 players with an AOE, it's an automatic increase is energy cost. This may perhaps make AOE skills more viable in 2v2 and Juggernaut battles.

Tags: Nightwraith