Hello and welcome to the second CardLife DevBlog,
As I mentioned last week I’m going to try and do one of these every Thursday and this one is particularly important as we have come to a major decision in the development of CardLife.
Development Strategy
Our original strategy was to spend a small amount of time creating a decent sized temporary world (which we have released) so that we could then split our focus, with some of the team focusing purely on gameplay updates and the other half of the team working on the core technology of CardLife (i.e. making a huge world that runs at a decent framerate and is online).
We decided to do this so that we could keep engaging the community with regular gameplay updates while allowing us in the background enough dev time to develop the actual core tech that will run our game. What has become apparent though, is that as we have tried to add additional content to the temporary world such as caves, ores etc, the performance of that world has drastically decreased and the time it takes to actually procedurally build the world has exponentially increased.
So after a lot late nights trying to figure out a quick and efficient way of improving this situation we have come to the conclusion that we would have to spend too much time on optimising tech that in the end we are basically going to throw away. So we have made the decision to focus solely on our core tech for the foreseeable future until we have a much more scalable world, which is what we always planned to do in the end.
Ultimately this means that we will be slowing down on the content updates in order to achieve this goal, which will actually allow us to do much faster updates in the future. So it might be slower now but it’s a better investment of our time in order to deliver the whole game faster.
Content Creation
Now while our code team has been refocused, this won’t stop us ploughing ahead with the content creation. Our resident artist Mike, has begun exploring what our cardboard creatures are going to look like and our audio designer has started to gear up on what our music sounds like as you explore the world - the cave music is starting to sound really cool. So hopefully in a future update we will be able to show you some screenshots of our creatures and possibly some music downloads to give you an idea of what we are working on.
I will also be starting to flesh out the design even further and will be revealing more about the game as we go forward, so I can get your feedback and work that into the design.
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Once again this turned out quite long but thank you for your continued support, we read every message across all our social media and from our in game form and it really helps when we see such a positive vibe within the community. I hope this gives you an insight into what we are planning and more importantly why we are doing it.
Cheers