Hello and welcome to the sixth CardLife DevBlog,
So I’m back in the office now after having spent two weeks unpacking lots and lots of cardboard boxes - and there’s lot’s to tell.
Terrain
Brian has continued his work on the terrain and made some really good progress. Specifically he has been working on allowing us to have really smooth terrain. Now that may sound strange as you probably think of our terrain being made up of sheets of card with a vertical hard edge - but when I say smooth I’m really talking about the horizontal smoothness. It’s always been our intention to have an organic world built from cardboard. If you make anything from cardboard in real life you probably have used scissors or a knife to cut a smooth shape into the card, as our current Saw tools allow you to do and we want that to be reflected in the world that you play in.
This is one of the major reasons we chose to fast track our implementation of a voxel engine, as trying to randomly generate a large enough world using our cardygon system was causing us major issues. When we we upped the resolution of the perlin noise to give us smooth terrain it was taking us days to generate a map - and when you want to quickly iterate on something that timeframe is clearly not acceptable. Thus we had to lower the resolution and size of the world in order to get builds out to you guys to play. Hopefully we have overcome that problem now as you can see below:
As you can see we still need to texture the world properly, but the code for that is almost done and we will soon be porting over this tech to our CardLife depot tree which is very exciting - and will mean I will stop pestering Brian about whether it’s going to work or not :).
Multiplayer
In terms of multiplayer Ed has been beavering away at making our server authoritative which in very basic terms means that all the players who join a server are receiving the same information about other players and world edits (see DevBlog 5 for more info on this written by Ed himself). He has made some really good progress but has come up against a few small issues that he is currently working through - although the middleware that we have chosen doesn’t really have the best documentation so he is having to go through the source code in order to figure out what is actually happening. Once he has fixed these bugs he’s going to port over the networking tech to our CardLife depot tree so we can start rebuilding what we had in the new big world, but with multiplayer!
New Coder, Creatures & Cardboard Exporter
First off we are welcoming a new coder (Aldo) to the CardLife team which is very cool - he has got a very broad skillset which will definitely help us going forward. As I showed you in DevBlog 3 we have begun creating some of our creatures that will inhabit the world. Aldo’s first task has been to write a custom exporter that will take those creatures and turn them into 2D shapes so they can be rebuilt in 3D in-game. Now while that may not sound that exciting, this is a major step in our unique crafting system that will allow you to easily customise the creatures that you manage to create. I will go into more detail on this in a future DevBlog.
Mech & UI Style
For the past two weeks Mike, our resident artist has been continuing his work on the creatures and vehicles in order to fully develop how our cardboard art style will look and more importantly fit into the game. He has mocked up a very cool image which really shows the vision of the game which we will be releasing in the near future, but in the meantime here is a really cool screenshot of our mech:
Mike has also been working on the UI style for the game with the first screen up for grabs being the inventory and crafting screen - we have done a lot of iterations to make sure this screen is both intuitive and easy to read. Please bear in mind the below image is still work in progress with many placeholder assets. Also as I described above, our crafting system has a unique way of crafting the items/creatures you make in-game and this screen is just where you add the components required and select what schematic you want to craft:
Attributes & Progression
I have spent the majority of this week working on the attributes (i.e. health, mana etc) and working out their relevant progressions from the beginning of the game to late game. I’ve deliberated a lot and had lots of discussions with the team but I’m now at a point where I’m pretty happy with how the stats themselves progress. Again this might not sound that exciting but it will have a major effect on the gameplay both in terms of the delta of power between starter players and end game players and in terms of how you feel when you get an upgraded item or creature. Once I have locked the stats in I will write a DevBlog going into more detail on what stats are available and how they work.
I can reveal though that we are not planning on having player levelling in the game (at this point anyway), but we will be providing a means of progression through gear that will be tied to your character. This will be in the form of regular gear and creature souls that you acquire from defeating golden versions of creatures you meet. These souls will then allow you to either recreate that creature as a companion/mount for your character or equip it to your character in order to gain a proportion of that particular creature’s stats yourself. We hope this will be a really meaningful decision and will help define what type of character you want to play - as souls and creatures are a really big part of our game.
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Right so that was an unintentionally mammoth DevBlog but hopefully it gives you a good idea of where we are and what our upcoming plans are.
Cheers,