Hello and welcome to the 41st CardLife DevBlog,
No patch this week but lots of progress to share with you - so let’s get to it:
Ongoing Work: AI & Combat
As I mentioned last week Aldo and Alessio have been working together to lay the foundations of our AI and Combat systems for future improvements. They have been making good progress with the updated locomotion model but they have run into a few issues with syncing between the client and the server causing the creatures to move erratically. Alessio is currently looking into this and we have a few solutions to fix it but it’s preventing us from pushing an update out. Aldo has been helping out when he can but he has also continued his work on the spawning system which is starting to take shape. This will mean that we can setup more advanced spawn rules for the creatures, such as spawning in groups or at specific world height.
Ongoing Work: Loading Screen
One my biggest issues with the current live build at the moment is the loading screen as it stalls on 0% for a long time and a lot of people think the game has stopped working. It has always been a low priority issue as we still have major gameplay systems to implement - but Brian has found a bit of spare time and has started to improve it, so that there is always progress on the bar. While this may sound like a trivial thing to fix, it’s pretty much the first thing you see when you load the game and we want to give the best impression possible. We have also added a small animation (see above) to the loading screen so that even if the number stops going up there is something still moving on screen to show people it’s not broken.
Ongoing Work: Imp & Fire
Mike has now finished cardifying the Imp as you can see above and we’re all pretty happy with it. This is not the final step though as he still needs to create a texture for it and then name each piece using the Connect the Dots naming convention so it can be exported to the game. This is a really important step as this is when we decide which pieces can be customised and which are automatically generated when you craft your own pet version. Once Aldo has finished the spawning his next task will be to add the new creatures we have ready into the game.
The Imp is also our first ranged creature in the game as he throws fireballs, so we have started work on what our very own cardboard fire would look like. We knew we wanted the fire to look like our X-statement image with the Dragon and Mech (as seen on the website) and we also wanted it be made out of 3D meshes to give it that cardboard feel. We have tried out several different techniques but we are starting to get something we like - here is a sneak preview work-in-progress version that we’ve been working on:
Ongoing Work: Collision
Neil has come back from his holiday and is continuing his work on the collision with a renewed vigour. He’s specifically working on the collision test for when you place down building pieces and then he’s going to finalise the edge stepping work so that your character can automatically walk up 2 high stepped terrain. Once this is done it means we can put together a release with the new collision system and caves - I’m really looking forward to this!
Ongoing Work: Music
If you have played the live build you will have heard our Forest biome soundtrack and with the imminent arrival of caves we have started to work on the music for our underground biomes. At the moment the music plays all the time but this was only ever a temporary solution as the world felt quite empty when we didn’t have any creatures. We want the majority of the sounds you hear to be coming from things you encounter in the world such as wolves howling or other players mining. This doesn’t mean we don’t want to have background music it just means we want the music to convey a certain message when it does play i.e. it might be a certain time of day or it might be tied to a specific world event. With this in mind we are going to be changing the music trigger to play on a timer for now so the majority of time you will hear no music.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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,