Greetings Founders, and welcome to your regularly-scheduled CardLife DevBlog! We’ve been working hard ahead of the next major update, and have plenty of news to share from the studio;
Introducing Armor
Mike’s been busy this week, working on a very exciting addition to the game - armor for the players. With the first iterations of armor coming in the next update, it’s been great to get a look at how it will appear in-game.
This shot displays several different versions of the ‘Squire’ armor - the heavy armor set available in the first age of CardLife. This is craftable in various material types, from wood to iron, and is of course totally customisable. Armor will be crafted in four parts - helmets, arms, legs, and torso pieces will be available.
The challenge when designing the initial look of this armor was ensuring that it both fits the era, but also brings an interesting shape to the silhouette of the piece. Too familiar and it becomes generic, too experimental and it would be visually confusing. Mike looked at medieval plate armor as part of a mood board for this item, and adding a touch of flair to the basic shape maintains the fantasy theme.
Another feature of armor, though not for the next update, is trim. Trim is another way of customising items, with other materials used to supplement the base of the item. In this example, the armor could be made of iron, but perhaps you want to add a splash of color to the ensemble. If you want to add pauldrons (the shoulder component) made of copper, this is totally possible as long as you have the materials. Again, this isn't something coming for the next update, but it's a planned feature for the future.
In other news from the art team, we’ve got a first look at some fully-textured creatures - feast your eyes on the Goblin and the Prototype Golem;
New Creature Sounds
We’ve got another cool aspect of the new creatures to share this week, with Simone delivering their first sound effects, ready to be implemented. We’ve got a huge amount of sounds to get in the game, which will go a long way towards bringing the game world to life. Using vocal filters, Simone’s been able to bring a range of sounds for the new critters. We love the Goblin's shrieking, maniacal voice;
It’s been great to watch the new wildlife in-game while we work to implement them, and the sound effects are a big part of making them feel part of the world.
Ongoing work: Underground Creatures
As reported last week, Cian’s been working on spawning creatures underground for the next update. Seeing the Goblin, the Imp and the Prototype Golem in their natural habitat will really shake up the ecosystem of the game, so this will be a big one. We’re seeing one creature reliably spawn underground now, with the others being implemented as I type this, so we’re well underway to populating that part of the environment!
PSA: Tool Cap
We have something of an announcement to make about the imminent update - we’re going to be removing certain tool recipes from the game. We’ve previously discussed this, but to get our reasoning, let’s go way back to the heady days of October ‘17 to quote Rich in Dev Blog 48;
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.
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 :)
With the coming update, the time has come for us to remove pickaxes too - every tool available in-game will be first-age. We've also slightly re-ordered the ores in CardLife, so here is the revised order;
Viking/Medieval Age: Wood / Stone / Copper / Iron
Renaissance Age: Gold / Tungsten /Cobalt
Modern Age: Titanium/ Thorium / Meteorite
Space Age: Carborundum / Mythril / Protonium
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Cheers,