Hello and welcome to the fourteenth CardLife DevBlog,
So it has been a while with the Christmas holidays and getting back into the swing of things but I have lots to tell you as we have made some significant strides forward.
New Build
As of right now, we are testing our new build which we are hoping to launch to you guys very soon which is a huge relief to everyone on the team and has been a long time in the making. We have spent a huge amount of time getting the voxel technology to bend to our will and finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We now have the three core pillars of the technology working that allows us to have a huge world made out of cardboard, that is editable and works on the network. This is a big step forward and paves the way for us to start adding in all the content and gameplay that you guys have been requesting.
The new build will be rough around the edges with a few artifacts and bugs, but it’s main purpose is to test the technology that we have built so it will be fairly limited in terms of gameplay. At the moment you can dig, place down spheres of dirt and talk to other players via our voice or text chat. I’ll send out an email once we upload the build.
Terrain Issues & Networking
We still have a few terrain issues that need fixing and these will become apparent when you play the build, like small z-fighting and some terrain glitches that cause the terrain to deform when you edit it. Hopefully we will fix these relatively quickly and then Ed will be moving onto all the networking infrastructure that we need to setup to start scaling the servers and to have more people able to play the game. This will be a fairly long burn for Ed, but it’s an incredibly important task that will allow us to realise our true vision for CardLife.
Cardboard Lodding
As with every game development, performance is something that you always need to keep clawing back as you put more things into the game. As we are gearing up to start adding lots of content we have spent some time working on our cardboard lodding system which lowers the level of detail of our game world objects the further away they are from you. As everything in our game is made from cardboard sheets, we have been able to come up with a unique way of lodding our creatures by actually removing non critical pieces at distance. This has meant we have been able to retain the outline of the creature for longer while still keeping the performance acceptable. As you can see by the below image, the red pieces which have been tagged as non critical have been removed at a lower lod:
Connect the Dots Crafting
As I mentioned in the last blog Aldo has been beavering away at the Connects the Dots crafting system and he’s been making good progress. He’s currently working on the rules that auto generate the non critical pieces of card and allow you to create a customised version of the creature without having to draw every single piece of card. We have been having a lot of fun with the CTD crafting tool, with Mike making his latest hybrid creature which is a cross between a wildebeest, unicorn and wolf:
Forest Biome
We have also begun work on the assets for our first biome, the Forest Biome. I have started to make the world using world machine and Mike has started to craft all the additional creatures and foliage that we will need to populate the world and and make it feel like a forest. Our plan is to have lots of different biomes that create a really interesting world but we will develop them over time. Here is a quick screenshot of our new world in CardLife:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
So lots of progress but still lots to do. If 2016 was the year we began our journey and laid the foundations of our technology, the plan for 2017 is to start making the actual game. Hopefully you will all come along the journey with us as we really believe we have something special and we hope that we can live up to the expectations that some of you have already expressed.
Cheers,