Hello and welcome to the seventh CardLife DevBlog,
I’m very excited to tell you that we are very close to being able to release a new build update - but here’s what we’ve been working on this week:
Terrain & Multiplayer
Brian and Ed have come together and have started getting the terrain and multiplayer core tech up and running in CardLife which is very cool. Our world now can effectively be as big as we want which means we have a really good base to start adding our gameplay features. The other big plus now is that the framerate has significantly improved on my PC which is fairly mid spec - I was getting between 20-40 fps on our world of 300m2 whereas now I’m getting between 50-80 fps in a world that is essentially infinite (although we will definitely be capping the world size). On the multiplayer front, Ed has begun to work on getting a dedicated server up so that when we release our next update everyone will be connecting to the same game :).
Creature Exporter
Aldo has continued his work on the creature exporter and hopefully later today or tomorrow we should have a creature model fully built in the editor and then we can begin working on the Connect the Dots (CTD) crafting system which will allow you to customise the things that you craft.
Player Character
Another big decision that we have taken recently has revolved around our player character model which is currently our little box boy:
Now that we nearly have multiplayer up and running we need to make sure that we have a rigged and animated character that can sync over the network so you can see other players running around. This has meant that we have had to change box boy to both suit the rig we are using and to fit into our CTD crafting system. This will mean that you will be able to customise your player character from the beginning of the game, but it does mean that by default he will be changing. As soon as we have a finished render of the new and improved box boy I’ll post it out.
Planning & Upcoming Build
This week we also sat down as a team and discussed what our plans are for the next six months leading up to our first major gameplay build. It gave everyone a chance to give their input and allowed us to come together as a team and make sure everyone is on the same page. What we actually figured out is that we are in a good place and hopefully (fingers crossed) we can smoothly build towards a really exciting build - which will most likely be the first time we start charging for the game.
Of course we will be releasing lots of interim builds before then for free and getting as much feedback as we can. With that in mind we are also very close to releasing a new build which should include the new world, digging, placing material and multiplayer - our plan at the moment is to release it sometime in the next couple of weeks if everything goes smoothly. I’ll of course let you know if that changes.
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Once again that was a fairly long DevBlog., but everytime I sit down to right one of these I always start to think of things I want to tell you. Hopefully this just means we have been working hard :)
Cheers,