Hello and welcome to the sixteenth CardLife DevBlog,
As normal I will give you a rundown of what we have been up to this week but I also wanted to take a step back and give you some insight into the bigger picture for CardLife and what our upcoming plans are. So let’s get to it:
What's the Plan
If you read the DevBlogs you will already know that we have spent a long time getting the core tech working well i.e. a huge cardboard world that can run on low end PCs. With the launch of the live build a couple of weeks ago, this began a major shift in our development focus away from technology towards gameplay. While this doesn’t mean we have finished working on tech, it does mean that the majority of our team have begun working directly on gameplay features such as character movement, crafting and mining the world.
So what does this mean for the short term - basically it means we can start to release content into the live build for everyone to enjoy - woot! The first chunk of this gameplay will most likely revolve around caves, ore and crafting new tools (which people with long memories will remember we actually started several months ago before our big shift). We will also be releasing this content for free as all our previous launches.
In regards to our long terms goals, it means that we are starting to put together the first building blocks of the actual core game experience. As I have mentioned before, our plan has always been to be a pay up-front game i.e. not free-to-play with microtransactions. As we start to add more content to the game: crafting creatures, combat, a fully realised world etc - in other words an actual game, we will start to charge for the game, but we’re a way off that at the moment. Initially this will be a very heavily discounted price and will purchase the full game up to release. We also do plan to offer an optional up-front payment for super early bird adopters.
Forest Biome
Our Forest Biome is coming along very nicely with almost all of the environment assets being created including the world and foliage. The next step is to start adding the two together so we can actually walk and play in a forest. We have also begun to start animating the creatures such as the wolf which will roam around the world. One thing to note though is that we don’t plan on adding water for a while yet so the first iteration of the Forest Biome will have collision at the edge of the world.
Player Character
Cian has spent a lot of this week working on improving the player character and how he moves through the world. If you have played the current build you have probably noticed how weird the character jumps and the very bumpy camera as you walk up hills. We basically found a bug in the code that was applying four times the normal gravity which was causing lots of weirdness, so when we do the next update the character should move a lot better - and actually sprint (if you hold down shift).
Terrain Glitches
It wouldn’t be a DevBlog if I didn’t mention terrain glitches :). Ed has been working tirelessly on improving these and there is definite sunlight at the end of the tunnel which is a big relief to everyone, especially Ed. Next he will begin work on adding caves and ores back to the world which I cannot wait for, as it adds so much to exploration and seeds the beginning ingredients for crafting.
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This has been a really productive week for us and 2017 is so far looking very good. I hope the same for you guys and once again Thank You for all the supportive messages we receive via the in-game feedback form and our online portals. It really does make a difference.
Cheers,