Greetings Founders, and welcome to your regularly-scheduled CardLife DevBlog! It’s been another good week in the studio, with plenty of exciting new content coming your way in the coming weeks and months. In the shorter term though, we’re releasing an update today - so where better to start than the patch notes;

Patch Notes

You asked for it, and we’re pleased to deliver it - today the in-game map makes an appearance in CardLife. You can hit M to see the map, including a handy grid to let you meet up with your friends via coordinates. The compass also appears this week - It’s a craftable item, and will display your character’s position, as well as an on-screen compass. This will also let you add pins to the map to help with exploration and navigation. There are a few other addition too, so here’s the full list;

Features

• Different creature spawn combinations
• Creatures can now spawn at night
• New creature eye effects
• Random AI attack cooldowns
• UI - health bar displayed for the enemy the last enemy attacked
• In-game map 
• New Accessory : Compass

Improvements

• Building and Torch visibility improvement
• Creature spawn improvements
• Material Balance Changes
• Increase bush collision to improve targeting
• The sun should rise in the east and set in the west
• All crafting recipes displayed when crafting slots are empty

Bug Fixes

• You could kill a prototype golem with just a wooden sword if you are backing away
• When crafting armour pieces, the displayed amount in the white info message was wrong
• Maximising the CTD window did not close the the maximised window
• Creatures had a massive kick when they attack making it hard to fight them on slopes
• Custom made crates returning to their default form when the user rejoins a server
• When going back to the main menu the server name didn't always appear below the Continue button
• Placing a tool over the same kind of tool visually cleared the durability
• When error occurs during loading screen no error message was displayed, instead the game froze
• The breast plate customisation could not follow its own shape
• If you placed an ore structure in your building it could cause the basic (Wood or Stone) structures to disappear visually

Balance Changes

• Slightly lowered stone costs for majority of items
• Lowered ore to ingot ratio from 3:1 to 2:1
• Rebalanced all copper/iron costs due to above change (You may see copper/iron cost numbers go up but the actual resources required is less due to new ore/ingot ratio)
• Increased iron costs relative to copper costs for all items
• Slightly increase wood/stone armor costs to be in line with new copper/iron costs

New Pickups!

Thor’s been working on a new batch of pickups for a couple of weeks, and the results are looking good! Here’s an image with some of the new in-game goodies you can expect to find in CardLife in the future - please note these are NOT in the update we’ve just released;

You can see lots of different accessories there, each giving your character a new stat boost - we'll have more on exactly what each item does as development continues. This is just one element of a huge update we’re working on, and once our plans are finalised, we’ll have lots of content to unveil, so stay tuned to the dev blog folks!

Combat Health Bar

Alessio has been continuing to work on adding depth to the combat system this week, with the addition of a new health bar to go above the player's HUD. It will display the health of the last enemy that was hit, and will remain on screen until either the enemy is defeated, the player escapes to a certain distance, or a long time elapses between hits.

The goal of this is to put the combat HUD in a readable and convenient format, and with creature cooldowns coming too, this side of CardLife is about to get a lot deeper.

Building Lodding

Cian has been working on the building lodding this week, which is sure to be a popular fix. For those who don’t know, ‘lodding’ refers to the level of detail (LOD) of an object, which can scale up or down according to the player’s distance from an object. So for example, a huge, elaborate castle (if you’re reading this Maffie, we love it!) will eventually shrink to a dot on the horizon. This saves a lot of memory, and as optimisations go this should go a long way to improving the performance, particularly on the busy official servers. The elaborate builds on server 1 will be able to be enjoyed by far more people this way, so it’s a fix we’re really excited to implement.

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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, Reddit, Discord, and our very own Forums.

Cheers,

Sam, Community Manager