Hello and welcome to the 32nd CardLife DevBlog,
No patch this week but we have made lots of progress, so let’s get to it:
Ongoing Work: Ores & Strata
First up is Ed’s work on Ores & Strata. If you have played the live version of CardLife you will have noticed that the surface of the terrain is only one layer deep. In our Dev build we have now changed this so that the surface material continues into the ground as the above image shows. We have also added the rest of the stone materials (Heavy Stone, Dense Stone and Core Stone) into the relevant strata layers, which means the strata layers are now a mixture of stone and dirt. Ed has also updated the ore placement algorithm to take into account a minimum and maximum sized deposit per ore and how rare that ore is within the world - with deeper ores being more rare. This means we have the beginning ingredients for our crafting progression.
Ongoing Work: Building
Cian has made some really good progress on the building. We can now place down square foundation pieces and then snap them together using visual snap points that you can hover over. The next step is to start adding the rest of the pieces that Mike has created to allow the actual creation of buildings i.e. walls, ceiling, stairs etc. We have also designed the building system to be fully data driven. This means in terms of modding you will be able to just open the .json file and tweak the snap point names and positions in notepad if you want to change how different pieces snap together. It also means you could create new pieces by just using paint (to create the 2D images) and notepad (for the snap points) which is really cool.
Ongoing Work: AI & Combat
AI and Combat are also developing nicely. Aldo has got wolves spawning and he is now working on getting their movement and steering setup on the server side. Alessio on the other hand has begun to implement the sword attack animations and setting up the state machine. Both of these tasks are fairly big and will take a while but it’s really exciting to see them developing.
Future Builds
For the past several months we have been trying to do weekly builds that showcase the improvements and features we are working on. As we are starting to work on major features though (i.e. building, combat, AI etc) we are going to move away from doing weekly updates. This means that going forward we will have less frequent updates, but each update will be more meaningful and contain more content. Don’t worry though - as soon as a feature comes online we will do a build - it just might not be every Thursday :)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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,