News

DevBlog 18 - Progress

Hello and welcome to the 18th (yes, I have moved to numbers) CardLife DevBlog,

Lots of progress, lots to do, lots to discuss - let’s get to it:

New Patch Coming Soon

A new patch for the live build should be coming soon - either Friday or early next week - if nothing goes wrong. It should contain the following:

  • Oak trees which are scattered across the entire continent
  • Improved camera settings so you can actually see much farther
  • An update to the lodding system (lod = level of detail) which ties it into the graphics quality settings, so you will see lots of trees on fantastic and less trees on fastest
  • Additional materials such as compact dirt, stone, compact stone, sand and snow
    • Sand and snow might be placeholders
    • Additional materials will still only give you dirt at this point when you mine them

Player Character

If you have played the live build or follow us on Twitter/Facebook you will have seen that we updated the player character model a while back, away from the original BoxBoy that you see in the marketing images on the main website. We always felt this was a necessary step as we planned on using a set of pre-built animations & rig (the skeleton that drives the character). Having spent a few months with the new character though, which we built around the proportions of the pre-built rig, we decided that the model & animations don’t fit the style of the game we want to make - or in other words, we didn’t want to compromise on the vision we had for the game.

So we spent some time investigating and creating a custom procedural animation system that would give us the flexibility to create animations in the style that we want without being constrained to a particular rig. We think this has been a success and has led to a third iteration of our player character (WIP) - who now resembles our little BoxBoy from many moons ago:

Worlds & Materials

As mentioned above the upcoming patch should contain additional materials in the world. This is a major step and brings us one step closer to crafting. It also makes the world look a lot more like a real world which is very cool. The reason why we aren’t releasing this today is mainly down to how these materials blend together in the world. Our terrain is made out of voxels (which are essentially little boxes) - and when the material masks we use are brought into Unity, they line up next to each other with hard edges. As the game is stylistically made out of cardboard this doesn’t fit right and so we are making sure that edges between materials is smoothed out, as the below image demonstrates:

Ongoing Work - CTD Crafting & Building

As always we are working on systems or pieces of content that take longer than a week to develop. So rather than go into detail on each one of these tasks, I’ll give you an overview of where we are. Aldo is now seeing light at the end of the very dark tunnel of the Connect the Dots crafting system. It is up and running and we are now finessing the drawing mechanic which should allow some really creative and amazing customisations of your character, pets and gear.

The building system design is also coming on very nicely - all the structural pieces have now been designed and fit together. These are the pieces that you will you use to create your base. I will now be moving onto the objects that you find in your house such as beds, crafting tables etc. I also need to spend some time in the next few weeks designing the hunger system, creature abilities and animations - more on this in the near future.

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The project is now starting to pick up speed and I have every faith that it’s going to snowball even faster as we get more and more systems online. The next few months are going to be incredibly busy and exciting. As always please keep coming back with your feedback and I hope you have a great rest of the week.

Cheers,

Rich - Lead Designer