Hello and welcome to the 50th CardLife DevBlog,
So as I touched on in the last few DevBlogs we had some big news to announce and a big patch to launch. Well the time has come - so let’s get to it.
Firstly, you may have noticed that I normally sign off the blog posts as ‘Co-Game Director’. Now would be a good time to introduce the other Co-Game Director Mark. Mark (Simmons) is CEO and Game Director of Freejam - the indie games developer behind the hit game Robocraft. I’ll hand over to Mark for the next few paragraphs to explain more:
Cardboard
Hi, me and Rich came up with the idea for CardLife over a year ago now. I put together a tech demo showing how cardboard could be used to create many different shapes and the potential of using it to build things with. I showed it to Rich and he shared a vision and added a ton of his ideas to it and worked hard on the design and has developed that basic tech demo into an incredible science fantasy online survival game. Together, with the amazing CardLife team we hope that this game engages players but will also encourage them to modify and change the content and code in the main game and create many experiences (MOD’s) out of cardboard that our small dev team could never do on their own. That’s why we say that “CardLife is not just a game, but a whole new cardboard way of life”
I’ll hand back to Rich now who can tell you more about who we really are and what’s in this patch.
Who are we?
Thanks Mark. So, who are we? Well, CardLife has been publicly available via cardlifegame.com for over a year now. We have been developing it without revealing who we are so we could see if we could engage new users from the idea and the gameplay alone. We wanted to see if players believed in our vision purely based on the game we wanted to make - a science fantasy survival game made from cardboard.
This has worked out perfectly for us as we have been able to slowly grow the game and receive some really great feedback (both good and bad) to help us make the game better. But we have come to a point in the development where we feel we have the base core mechanics (survival, exploring, crafting, building and combat) implemented in the game and we want to start growing the community. With this in mind we have decided it is time for us to talk about who we are - and that is Freejam, the developer’s behind the robot building game Robocraft.
We are actually a totally separate team from the Robocraft team but starting from today we are going to start talking about CardLife to the Robocraft community to see if they want to come and join us on the journey that we have all already begun. In terms of actual game development this will allow us to learn even more and make the game even better, so I am incredibly excited to see what happens.
Thank You
The above announcement is also coinciding with us releasing our biggest patch to date which I will discuss below, but I also have another announcement to discuss. I have always been very upfront that CardLife would be a pay up front game and not free-to-play. With this announcement and the release of our new patch we are also removing the ability to download the game for free - but fear not - because anyone who has created a CardLife account, as a massive ‘Thank You’ for helping us get where we are, we are going to gift you the game for free. So you can continue to play and receive updates. Obviously you will not receive the Founder’s perks as they have already purchased the game and it would be unfair to them - but you can continue to play and be a part of the CardLife community.
But don’t worry Founders - we haven’t forgotten about you. As a super special ‘Thank You’ - any bonus content we add to future CardLife packs/editions (apart from major DLC expansion packs) will also be gifted to your account for free.
New Players
I also just wanted to quickly give some information to any new people who have come here for the first time. As I just described above the game can now only be played if you purchase the Founder’s Edition (£5/$6). But I want to be very clear with what you are buying. This edition purchases the game in its current state and gives you free access to all future updates (apart from major DLC expansion packs). If you want to play the finished game - please do not buy this version - as it is still very early in development. This version of the game is really only for people who want to join us in our development and want to help us shape the game - as currently there is very little content.
Patch 41
Right with that all out of the way - let’s get to what’s changed in the game:
- You can now play the game in singleplayer, join different servers (including official ones) or start your own multiplayer session
- Dedicated servers will be coming in the future
- Official servers currently have limited capacity to 20 per server and we currently have 10 open servers (this is temporary)
- Day / Night cycle has been added along with the torch and wall torch
- You will now need to light your way as you dig deeper underground or if it’s nighttime
- Bears have been added to the game
- Bears and wolves now drop meat and pelts
- Meat can be used as a better source of food
- Pelts can be used to craft beds
- Beds and doors have been added
- Beds can be used to set your spawn point. This will automatically happen when you place them in the world
- It will always use the closest bed for your spawn point
- Doors allow you to seal your house so just you can access it
- Buildings, beds and doors can only be used by the player that placed them for now - we will be adding permission in a future update
- Storage chest model has been added
- At the moment this can only be used as a decoration but the storage functionality should be coming soon
- A new faster collision system has been implemented which should see some major performance improvement
- Caves have been added to the game - you should see more caves the deeper you dig.
- The server now saves the terrain and buildings - so if it goes down we can restore it back to its previous state
- Music now only plays at dawn and dusk and is dependent on which biome you are currently in
- Current biomes are Forest and the four underground biomes
- More coming in the future
- We have removed high tier placeholder items and reset all saved data (see DevBlog 48 for more info)
- Founders Item recipes have been added to the crafting recipes for all Founders - Thank You!
- Wolf chase behavior has been improved and their combat values have been tweaked
- Loading bar on the loading screen should now be smoother
- Improved creature spawning patterns so you shouldn’t constantly be swamped by wolves
- Building pieces now unionise so that pieces fit together seamlessly
- A building grid has been added so you can see the grid that the building pieces are aligning too
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Phew, so that’s everything. 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,