Hello and welcome to the seventeenth CardLife DevBlog,
The live build has been updated with a new patch, so you should check that out if you haven’t - see the changes below. A lot of you have been asking for more content from the in-game feedback. Hopefully in the next few weeks we will be able to fulfil those desires as we gear up our content pipeline, so stay tuned! Anyway, here’s what we have been working on this week:
Live Build Patch
We have just pushed the patch this morning so you should be able to download the new update that contains:
- Further fixes to the terrain so you should see less spikes/artifacts when placing/digging dirt amongst other things
- A new world that is going to be the start of the Forest Biome - Trees/Bushes coming very soon
- Updates to the character’s movement including improved jump and angle detection so you don’t just walk up cliff faces now
- A new system message that gives some purpose to what the live build is being used for
Trees, Bushes and Getting Hungry
Mike has been finalising the textures for both the trees and bushes in the Forest Biome. Once we add the hatchet (work on this starting next week), trees will be able to be cut down to get wood, that you can use in crafting and base building. The bushes on the other hand will become a source of food that you will need to harvest to keep your hunger at bay. Berries will also be a source for creating dyes so you will be able to colour your crafting creations.
Cian on the other hand has been working on the algorithm for placing trees. As you can see by the above image the plan is to try and have clumps of trees that form medium to large sized forests, with small copses and single trees scattered across the rest of the landscape. This should give a good balance between heavily forested areas and grasslands. At the moment this is just the base source of noise. Eventually it will take into account the material they are being placed on (i.e. trees don’t grow on stone), the angle of the slopes and the height of the terrain.
Resources
Brian has been beavering away at resources so that when you dig/mine a material in the world you get something to collect. This may sound simple but it’s actually more complicated than it sounds. This is because firstly we have chosen to use a more natural spherical dig (which leads to lots of issues) and secondly because we are an online game. So we have to be very careful about how we handle resources to make sure that you can’t lose or gain resource by mining it, placing it down again in the world and then mining it again. Anyway, Brian is working on that and this is the beginning for us to start adding more tools :) - and then crafting!
Base Building
If you ever played the very first few iterations of CardLife you will remember that we had a card placement tool that allowed you to rotate, scale and drag pieces of card to create varying sizes of cardboard planes. This was a lot of fun and you could also use the Saw tool to cut and edit those planes for even more customisation. Whilst this was creatively very free, it had one major drawback - it was very hard to use it for what it was actually designed for - creating a base for you to store your precious loot. We actually bought the above Cardboard Castle and I spent a long time trying to rebuild it in-game using the cardboard building system and it was a nightmare.
So we went back to the drawing board, deliberated for a long time and then decided that the best way for us to deliver base building that was still creatively exciting, was to use cardboard building blocks such as foundations, walls and ceiling pieces that you can slot together - just like the Cardboard Castle I built in the real world. The answer was staring us in the face :). But, we wanted to retain some of the creative freedom we had with our initial system so our plan is to use the Connect the Dots crafting system to allow you to customise the shapes as you build them. Hopefully this will give us the best of both worlds. So, I have spent the last couple of weeks designing those pieces with some of them shown in the above image (please note: they are not textured and are very much placeholder assets).
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Another week passes by and it feels that we are getting ever closer to adding more meaningful content to the game. Your support and patience has been outstanding and every time I read: “Good game, but please add more!”, it invigorates me further to keep pushing everyone so that we can add more as quickly as possible. I hope you have had a great week and enjoy the new build!
Cheers,