Hello and welcome to the 28th CardLife DevBlog,
Connect the Dots is finally live and lots of other things to discuss, so let’s get to it:
Connect the Dots Character
It’s here, it’s finally here! After a long anticipated wait we have finally released our first iteration of the Connect the Dots (CTD) system. It’s still an early prototype so there are still a few bugs and you can only draw your own player character (so no crafting just yet), but hopefully you can have some fun with it.
So how do I use it? You can load the CTD interface by selecting New Character from the main menu screen. You can then draw your character and press the Create button to load into the game as normal. While in-game you can press F8 to view your character in third person so you can admire your creation.
If you quit, don’t worry, we save your character so you can play with them again. You can do this by simply selecting Last Character from the main menu or by loading them directly from within the CTD interface by selecting the folder icon. From here you can choose to load the default character or your previous custom version. Please be aware though, at the moment we only save your last character that enters the game.
As a final note, this is our very first iteration and does contain some bugs that we will be fixing in the near future. We have also had to disable a few features that are not complete yet such as your back pieces of card inheriting their shape from the pieces you draw. This will all be added in upcoming releases.
Today’s patch can be downloaded through the launcher and contains the following updates:
- New front end Main Menu
- New Main Menu music
- Connect the Dots crafting interface (player character only)
- Other players should also be able to see your customised character
- New default player character head
- Improved jump that allows you to better jump up small ledges
- Work-in-Progress Inventory screen (press I in-game to view)
Ongoing Work: Caves, Ores and Crafting
Ed has made great progress on the Cave system and it’s starting to look really good. We now have differing densities of caves depending on how deep you are in the world and the system is now ready for me to start tweaking the values to get a good balance. The next step is to add veins of ore into the world which is the prerequisite of the crafting system.
Brian has begun to implement the inventory/crafting screen (you can get a sneak preview in-game by pressing the I key). At the moment it’s not interactive but he is now in the process of hooking up the backend system into this new screen. This will then allow you to manage your resources using a simple drag and drop system. It won’t be long until these two systems can be integrated into the build along with the CTD system and we will have one of the core gameplay loops in the game.
Ongoing Work: Terrain Generation
Neil has spent most of the week looking into our existing code base and analysing where he thinks he can make an improvement. The good news is that he has found lots of things he can optimise and this will see a major improvement in our performance. This is a long term task and so there won’t be lots of updates but it is critical to the project.
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So I hope everyone had a Happy Easter. Some of the team are still on holiday as they enjoy some time with their families but everyone will be back next week raring to go. Please do send us some screenshots of your characters - we would love to see them.
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,