Greetings Founders, and welcome to your regularly-scheduled CardLife DevBlog! It’s been a busy and positive week in the studio, with all our new players coming together to really pack out our servers.

We’re loving seeing the new constructions springing up, including this really impressive castle Rich found on server 1 over the weekend;

That’s an incredible achievement, and we really love seeing what you’ve made so keep them coming!

Balance Pass: Patch Notes

We’ve been addressing balance this week, with Rich taking a look at the material costs for building. The main change has been to the amount of wood needed to create a building - it was a little too high, so we’ve scaled it down slightly. That patch is being put out this afternoon, so here’s the patch notes;

• Increased wood drops from trees
• Reduced wood cost for structures and structure decorations

Map Latest

The map and compass have been far and away the most requested new feature for CardLife, so the team have been continuing work on it, hoping to get it released as soon as we can. Mike’s been polishing a new in-game visual map, and Renato has been incorporating a fog of war effect - exploration is an important part of the CardLife experience after all, so we don’t want the map to totally take that away. It’ll still allow players to find each other with use of the compass though, even through the fog - organising to meet at the south of the map, or at the centre, for example.

New Animations

Matt’s been working on the Lizard Man this week, with some cool new attack animations and a run being developed;

The Lizard man is an interesting one to develop, being a completely fictional creature gives a lot of scope for interpretation, and as a top-heavy biped there are plenty of interesting reference points involved. The hulking frame incorporates the movement of, say, a gorilla, while some of the more incidental touches come from real-life lizards - like the swish of the tail, or the bob of the head.

Combat Cooldowns

Combat is one of the areas of CardLife that we’re keen to concentrate on as we move further through development. What we have at the moment is fairly bare-bones, so we’re looking to introduce a little more complexity. Cooldowns for creature attacks is a big part of that, and Alessio has been working on the code to be able to implement those this week. Once that’s in place, Rich will be taking a look at the individual creatures to give them distinctive rhythms and attack patterns.

Creature’s cooldowns can either be consistent, or set within a range. It should server to make combat a little more unpredictable and a little deeper, and it’s a relatively small change that we’re excited to introduce to CardLife!

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

As always if you have any feedback, questions or comments please feel free to contact us at any of our social portals: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and our very own Forums.

Cheers,

Sam, Community Manager