Hello and welcome to the 26th CardLife DevBlog,
Lot’s to share with you this week; a new gameplay video, new patch and new DevBlog, so let's get to it:
CardLife - A Glimpse into the Future
As I mentioned in last week’s post I planned to release a new gameplay video showcasing some of our upcoming game features - well it’s now live! It’s a short video that hopefully gives you an indication of some of our planned features going forward. We really enjoyed making it and I hope you enjoy watching it:
Patch Notes 29
Cometh Thursday, cometh a new patch. As normal you just need to login and you will automatically receive the update. Here are the major changes:
- You should now be able to see other characters holding tools and playing animations when interacting with the world i.e. digging, logging etc
- As part of the above change new third person animations have been added
- You will now be able to see where other characters are looking as there head will move to follow their crosshair
- The messaging system has been updated to now include objects you pick up i.e. dirt, stone etc
- The hunger system now only messages on screen when you are hungry and below
Third Person Character
As I touched on above we have implemented a new third person character with new animations so you can see what other players are doing. This has been a hybrid of actual animations that the character plays such as swinging the hatchet and code systems that react to the player's input such as head look. I was really looking forward to this update as it really makes the online aspect of the game feel more vibrant as you actually feel like you are playing with other players rather than static robots. If you want to look at your character you can press F8 and it will switch to a very work in progress third person camera.
Messaging System
Alessio has continued to work on the Hunger system and in parallel has been implementing the generic messaging system - which currently displays your hunger state. This system now tells you what you have picked up and will eventually display what you drop from your inventory as well. It’s a work in progress system at the moment but it’s nice to see small things like this coming online as they all add up to a better game experience.
Improving the Launcher
One thing that we have planned to do for a long time was improve the launcher. Currently it gives us way too many issues like corrupted patches and general errors. So I sat down with Brian this week and we put a plan in place to improve it. While this is not directly gameplay related we do see a drop off in the amount of people who download the game from the website and then actually make it into the game. Obviously this could be for many reasons but I strongly believe the launcher is a significant cause of this. So stay tuned for a launcher update in the near future.
Caves & Ores
We have finally come full circle. The first DevBlog I ever wrote was describing how the world would be created in strata layers and how we were planning on adding caves and ores. Unbeknownst to us at the time this led us to accelerating our plan to move to a voxel engine and started us down the path to Voxel Farm. Many months has passed since then and we are now finally at a point that we are adding caves and ores back into the game. This will be an ongoing feature as we get it up and running - but the work has begun!
Ongoing Work: CTD, Audio and Visual Effects
As always we have lots of ongoing tasks that we have been working on. We finally fixed the last major bug we had with CTD crafting system and it’s working really nice. We need to do a few more rounds of internal focus testing and we should be a in position to release it - which I am very excited about. It’s been a very long journey but definitely worth the wait. We have also started to work on the audio and visual effects for taking damage and dying which will be implemented into the hunger system in a upcoming patch.
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Thanks for reading and if you haven’t watched the video yet you should check it out :). As always if you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter and our very own Forums.
Cheers,