Hello and welcome to the 43rd CardLife DevBlog,
Lots to share with you this week as we work towards getting all of the core systems into the game. No patch unfortunately but this is mainly because everyone is working on major systems.
Ongoing Work: Loading Bar
If you have played the most recent live build you will have noticed that we updated the loading screen with an animation and smoothed out any major pauses. We did this because people were thinking the game had crashed as the loading bar used to pause on 0% for a long time. While the live loading bar is a vast improvement it was still quite laggy and we have now improved this using Cian’s streaming system which spreads out the loading of large elements (i.e. terrain textures) over several frames. This will go live with our next build launch.
Ongoing Work: Front End & Networking
As you can see from the above Main Menu image we have made good progress on the front end screens. Mike has now finished integrating them into Unity and Ed is now implementing them. Once this is done we should have the final flow from the front end, starting a new server and loading into game. This is also the first step in allowing us to support multiple servers and to allow you to start your own servers or play by yourself.
Ed has also started work on all of the server authentication tasks that verifies the users when they connect to our lobby so we know that it’s a CardLife account etc. This is a necessary task in the step towards releasing CardLife as pay up front product as we won’t always be free :) - Thank you Founders for already believing in us.
Ongoing Work: AI & Combat
Aldo has now finished his work on the AI optimizations, spawning rules and the improved chase behaviour (see last week’s DevBlog for more info on these) which should be going live in a future update and has now started to add the Bear to the world. Once the Bear is in it means all of the code systems have been setup to allow the content creators (design and art teams) to start adding new creatures albeit using the same behaviour. This is incredibly exciting for me as it means we can finally start to flesh out the game with more content. This also means Aldo can now concentrate on adding new behaviours such as ranged attacks like the Imp fireball:
Ongoing Work: Collision & Caves
Neil has finally finished his collision work and has now begun implementing it into the CardLife project. This means that in the very near future - possibly the next update - we will have caves and have switched over to the new collision system. This should bring a much needed performance improvement. Although I’m more excited about caves - finally - caves!!!!! We can then start adding creatures underground. I talked about caves in DevBlog 1 - that seems a long time ago now :)
Ongoing Work: Building Updates & Founder's Items
Founder’s rejoice - Brian has now done the necessary work to add the promised special Founder’s decorations items to your accounts. This means you will gain access to these special recipes and can then build them using any resource you like. These will go live with the next update. We have also started to work on doors, storage chests and beds to give purpose to the structures you build - so you can store your precious loot. With this Brian has also started to work on the server saving so that buildings including everything in them will now be saved if the server goes down.
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Cheers,