Weather

• Changed weather according to biome
• Added in new weather effects
• Added antialiasing
• Added color correction

AI

• Optimized AI behaviour based on distance to player
• Randomized enemy size (effects speed of enemy and drops)
• Added herd AI

Optimization

• Optimized big room
• Removed snow from village

Balancing

• Changed camera back to normal
• Decreased bear boss difficulty
• Animals slowed down in snow drifts
• Changed the way you throw your spear

Misc

• New HUD
• Added berry sound
• Enemies can no longer spawn on top of you
• Fixed texture in bear room
• Added ability to zoom camera

The next update will focus on the Husky!

The post Iktsua v0.1.9 appeared first on The Indie Accord.

We are proud to announce the second video update for Iktsua. In this update we talk about AI, weather, and the community. Dont forget to get the newest update when it drops in 2 weeks!

Community Input
In this next update we are really focusing on using the community feedback to make Iktsua better. We have poured over the comments, and watched all of the youtube LPs in an effort to find the best parts of the game, and the parts that people have issues with. So for example, if we see the player floundering with not knowing where to go in a LP, we add in some sort of cue to tell them where to go at that part in the next version. We also worked on optimizing the big room because we had a few people complain about lag.

Visuals
We also worked a lot on getting the effects on the tundra working. As of now, its extremely hard to tell the biomes apart. We decided to focus on trying to give each biome a distinct feel. to accomplish this we have different objects, enemies, and weather in each one. In this most recent coming update we will be changing the weather in each biome. (Check the video for the actual effects, I think they look awesome!) We are also working on pulling the entire game together with a more unified palette (more on this next month!)

AI
Last but not least (actually its my favorite part) we worked on animal AI. Iktsua carries a very simple hunting system, but we do not think that should limit the fun. Much of the battle is fought before you throw your spear, in sizing up your enemy, approaching from the right angle, and executing your attack perfectly all without freezing. To this end, we are always improving the mob AI. In this update specifically we added randomness in enemy size (which correlates to their strength and reward for killing) and more group AI in wolves and yaks.

I hope you watch the video and give it a try!

P.S. Here are some screens of the newest version!!

The post October Iktsua Video Update appeared first on The Indie Accord.

We were recently approached by sketchfab.com, and asked to upload some of our models. Sketchfab is great site that allows you to upload models, and then allows users to view them in 3D space. This is super cool, and we expect to upload a ton of our models to show in future devlog posts. For now, I leave you with our first test upload: the main character.

Iktsua Main Character
by theindieaccord
on Sketchfab

This character completely modeled, textured, rigged, and animated in about a week for a game jam. We are in the process of giving him a makeover

The post Main Character Model appeared first on The Indie Accord.

I just wanted to announce the first of our monthly updates. Our goal is to have a video update showing what we are working on, followed by a demo 2 weeks later of the new features. Sound good? Cool. The first video touches on:

Water
New Village
New Fog
Talking/Interacting
New Lighting

Let us know what you think! The demo will be coming around Sep 15th!

Website https://internal.theindieaccord.com/

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/IndieAccord

Twitter https://twitter.com/TheIndieAccord

The post Iktsua: Monthly Video Update! appeared first on The Indie Accord.

The trees were a bit boring, so I varied the heights and rotations.

The trees looked really close together so  I tried to space them out.

Things started to look better (to my programmer’s eye), but I noticed something while walking through the trees, they were all sort of uniformly spaced and sized. The random was too random, you could tell what I was doing. You can see that the trees are all close in size and spaced evenly apart:

I tried to think about how trees actually worked, and I have no idea if I am right, but I thought maybe the larger trees could have some smaller trees clumped near their base. Perhaps the larger tree dropped some seeds and the saplings grew up near it? Anyway, I tried making the tallest trees have a couple of smaller trees clumped around their base, the result looks a lot more organic to me:

And the final result in game:

Let us know what you think about anything (the models, the colors, the programming, the biome logic)! I would be especially interested in your ideas about how to make the forests look realistic and interesting while still randomly generating them.

-Zach (iamscissors) 

As always, any support you can offer (either monetary or by simply playing our game) is greatly appreciated!

The post Iktsua: Procedural Forest Development appeared first on The Indie Accord.

Hello everyone! I just wanted to do a quick update for #screenshotsaturday! It features the giant walrus that I have been using to test with.

I have been focusing on the walrus in Iktsua this week. It used to be the yak AI, with some slightly tweaked values but now it is its own (much better) thing! I have also put in all the walrus sounds that our sound designer, Widzy has provided us, and they sound great! Expect a new alpha sometime in the next 2-3 days with the upgraded enemy as well as a couple other features.

Short and Sweet! See you guys later!

-Zach

The post Iktsua: Screen Shot Saturday appeared first on The Indie Accord.

This means that we have won Unity Pro (and all the amazing features that come along with it) as well as some free games

We would like to thank everyone who viewed/downloaded/commented/LPed/tweeted about Iktsua during the last month and a half! We couldn’t have done it without your support (and critiques).

This is really exciting for us because it not only gives us a great tool to keep working on a game that we love, but it also lets us know that there are people out there that like it too. For these reasons we have decided to keep working on Iktsua as one of our main projects. This means you can expect more alpha builds over the next few months with improved features, video dev-logs, and polls about features/enemies/graphics. We hope that the indieDB community can help us shape this into a great game.

Sincerely yours, (and very giddy about the win),
-Zach

P.S. As always, here is a screenshot of the newest in-dev version (with a hint at a new game play element) for you

The post We Won! appeared first on The Indie Accord.

Hello Everyone!

I just wanted to do a quick news post about what is happening with Iktsua. We have been hard at work taking care of all of the bugs and balancing issues in the first alpha. Last night we released the 3rd alpha, which has a lot of the issues fixed.

We have also entered Iktsua in a little contest at 64digits. It would mean the world to us if you would go vote for it (or your other favorite game) (You must register first). If we won the competition we would win Unity pro, which would allow us to really make Iktsua shine with better visuals, feel, programming, and maybe even online play.

That being said we plan to add the following features in the future:

• A husky dog for you to hunt with
• A dogsled
• More bosses
• More environments and biomes
• A falcon (maybe? let us know)
• A completely upgraded and redone story that spans multiple lifetimes of your character
• Visual improvements

Thanks for all your support! I am really excited to make this game!

DOWNLOAD

The post Iktsua Alpha! appeared first on The Indie Accord.