Hello and welcome to the 48th CardLife DevBlog,
Thank you Brian for keeping the DevBlog ship sailing while I was away but I’m back now, refreshed and ready to bring you some juicy CardLife news - so let’s get to it:
New Beginning
First up, in the next few weeks we are planning on releasing our biggest patch to date alongside a big announcement which I will discuss more below. With this will come the ability to run your own servers - multiplayer and single player - alongside a suite of other bug fixes and features such as Day/Night cycle and server state saving, so you will never lose your progress even if the server goes down. Unfortunately this does mean that we are going to have to reset the save database to move over to our new technology so anything you have collected up to this point will be lost.
While this is a necessary stage of the development and won’t be the last time we have to do this - please be aware we don’t do this lightly and fully understand this is not ideal. While this reset is happening we are also taking this opportunity to slightly reset the gameplay and remove some of the placeholder content currently in the game - such as high end tools and weapons - sorry Zhang!
Let me explain the reasoning though. The design of the game has always been for you to progress through four distinct technological ages (as described on the website). So you would progress from a loose Medieval/Viking era, through the Renaissance, to Modern Day and eventually end up in the Space Age. This would mean you would go from using primitive tools and weapons to eventually wielding plasma rifles and mechs with a heavy blend of sci-fi and fantasy. At the moment we don’t have any of this but when we released the first version of crafting we decided to let players craft the low tier items (Shortsword, Sickle, Hatchet etc) all the way up to Protonium - which is actually a Space Age material - as we had very little content. Here is the material breakdown I am talking about:
- Viking/Medieval Age: Wood / Stone / Copper / Iron
- Renaissance Age: Gold / Cobalt / Tungsten
- Modern Age: Thorium / Meteorite / Titanium
- Space Age: Carborundum / Mythril / Protonium
Now that we are planning to add more to the game and we are resetting the save database we feel it’s a good time to remove this placeholder content in anticipation of us adding the actual designed content that will see your character progress through the ages. The one exception is that we are still allowing the pickaxes to be made with high level materials so that you can still mine the ores to create buildings of your choice. Eventually the pickaxes will be upgraded to new models - jackhammers, drills and eventually the World Eater :)
While we are not there yet - I wanted to explain our reasoning for why we are doing this and as I mentioned we will be releasing a big update very soon that will feature everything I outlined in DevBlog 44 plus much much more. I will also release patch notes nearer the time that goes into more detail on what is changing.
Ongoing Work: Collision
As Brian has been keeping you aware, Neil has been beavering away at the updated collision and we are getting ever closer to having a new and improved collision system that will allow us to release a build with caves and give some much needed performance improvements. He has fixed the major issues such as falling through the world and some pretty ugly clipping and is now working on the feel of the character as he walks around the world - which we call Edge Stepping. This is the feature that means you don’t have to jump over every single piece of card which becomes very tedious after a while. Once this is all wrapped up we will be pushing this live as soon as possible as we want as many people to try it out.
Ongoing Work: Building Update
We have also been working on some major updates to the building system including unionisation (for more info see DevBlog 42), a new placement grid and more excitedly the ability to add a door to your structure to keep those pesky wolves and bears out. We have also nearly completed the work on storage chests and beds which will give you the ability to store your precious items and the chance to set your spawn point for when you die.
Big News Coming Soon!
As I mentioned above we are planning a big announcement in the next few weeks. It’s all good news and will hopefully be the catalyst for the game and community to start growing. I also just wanted to say a massive Thank You to everyone who has downloaded the game and help us get this far. We’ve come a long way from a little log cabin on a flat terrain to the huge editable world we have today.
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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,