Hello and welcome to the tenth CardLife DevBlog,
So this week is going to be slightly different in that I’ll update you with what we have been up to and I’ll also be going into specific detail on our Connect the Dots crafting system. So let’s get to it.
Combining Meshes
If you have been following these DevBlogs you will know that we have done quite a bit of work on moving our project over to Voxel Farm so that we can generate a large cardboard world that can be edited. This is obviously no small feat and we have done a large amount of the work - we have a large world and it runs at a good frame rate but the last few percent of any task always seems to take the longest and this is no different. Currently we are trying to implement the editing part of this task, which involves you being able to edit the world (think digging or mining) and then place that material back down.
Now this works great if you do a single edit or a single placement of material but as soon as you add another piece of material nearby it is creating artifacts when the voxel world combines the meshes, which doesn’t look that great. This is obviously fundamental to our project and so we want to make sure that this works perfectly and looks and feels really nice before releasing it into the wild. Unfortunately this means we are going to have to go through Voxel Farm’s source code and make it do what we want it to do. Once we have this in a state that is just as good as the live version of CardLife, we will launch it along with the multiplayer & chat which is working great :)
Connect the Dots Crafting
This part of the DevBlog is going to talk about our ambition for the Connect the Dots crafting system so please bear in mind things might change as we implement them.
As with a lot of games, crafting involves collecting x number of ingredients and then combining those into something you can use i.e. a sword or a piece of armor. Now our game is going to have that but CardLife is made of cardboard and cardboard can be shaped and edited to make it look how you want. With this in mind we want you to be able to customise the creations that you craft and we think we have come up with a pretty good solution to allow you to do this.
Let’s take a look at a simple stone spade that you will craft. You will collect the required ingredients such as wood and stone and place them in the crafting interface and then press the big craft button. This will then take you to our Connect the Dots screen as below:
Now this is where it gets interesting as this screen will allow you to draw the shape of the spade so you can customise it. The only requirement is that you will have to connect the red dots while you draw - similar to the old connect the dot puzzles - as these dots will make up the minimum shape the object needs to adhere to so that it functions. So in the case of a spade it needs a handle and head to dig.
So to do that you would select the pencil tool and draw in the left hand side panel connecting the dots as you go. Once you have drawn a complete shape, the right hand side panel would update the 3D model to match the shape that you have drawn. You can then use the mouse to manipulate the 3D model so you can see all angles before you commit to craft it. You will also have noticed that there is a dotted line in the drawing space and this is purely for guidance, so if you just wanted to create the spade exactly as is, you could just trace along the line.
A spade is a very simple example though and the degree of customisation is limited, but when you start to use this crafting system to create your own character or a new creature companion such as a skeleton or a dragon which is made up of several pieces of card, the customisation significantly increases allowing you to create something that is really personal to you.
In the case of something more complex we will also be layering in some rules that mean that you don’t have to draw every single piece of card. For example a spider has eight legs, but we will only require you to draw one leg and then we will duplicate it eight times. This means that we can have fairly complex characters and creatures without having tens of pieces of card that you have to draw or edit, as we want it to be a simple intuitive system.
Finally we also want you to be able to change the base color of each creation and eventually be able to paint detail on top - so if you want to give your iron shield a crest you will be able too. Although painting will probably be a later edition.
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I hope this gives you a better idea of what are plans are for the crafting side of the game and I can’t wait to see what people come up with when we eventually launch this aspect of the game. We may even release it as a tool that people can play with before we put into the build so we can gather some feedback, but I’ll let you know nearer the time. I hope you have a great weekend.
Cheers,