It's been a while since my last update so I'm going to cram everything I've been doing for the last few months into one big one!

Posted by Quade81 on May 5th, 2015

Music

Let's start with the soundtrack. Caeludum's composer Ronny Mraz has posted the first two tracks and is working away to have a few more done to be used in the first demo sometime this month. I am very happy with the way they are turning out. He is well on his way to creating an amazingly epic orchestral soundtrack. Here are the first two tracks.



Visual Improvements I've done a lot to improve the visuals lately. I added a skybox, some post effects, and a few other tweaks here and there, but I won't go into too much detail because what you really care about is how it looks right? Here is an old shot compared to a new one. You may notice the map size changed. The larger one will still be available, but I decided to switch to a smaller one for testing to increase load speed since it isn't optimized yet.

Terraforming

My last update was all about adding terraforming. I've posted plenty of pics of it already so you may have seen it, but it is in and functioning as intended. It still needs some tweaking, but right now you can raise and lower the terrain and it determines the land type by elevation and latitude.

Trees

I've added new visuals for the trees to give the world a little more life. Originally they were all going to function the same, but I've decided that that is boring. It's not implemented yet, but in the future some tree types will be a food source and the type of trees nearby will effect what kind of homes your followers will build.

Most of them will probably be reworked at some point but I'm happy enough with them that they will suffice for the demo. Here are some close up shots of each of the new trees.

Homes

I've changed my idea of scale so instead of a single home representing a whole village, it will now just be a single home. What type of home your followers build will be influenced by what resources they have nearby. Here are the ones I've added so far.

And finally I'd like to provide some info on...

The Demo

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do for a demo but I knew I wanted to get one out as soon as I could. I didn't want to use gameplay while it was missing a bunch of features, because I feel like that wouldn't be fun and I don't want that to be anyone's first experience with Caeludum. So what I'm going to do is showcase one of the secondary modes I planned on adding that will be more of a sandbox world builder. You will be able to use most of the features I have implemented to design your own worlds. In the future I want to add the ability to turn the world you've designed on a 3D globe into a flat map. Now that I'm thinking about it that sounds like a pretty cool feature to have in game also :) I'm not going to set a date, but I am shooting for the middle of this month. So I have no doubt it will be out by the end of May lol.

Sorry it took me so long to provide another update. Hopefully the amount of information here and the demo announcement will make up for that.

If you have any comments you can leave them here or contact me on Twitter @Quade81. Also if you're on Reddit check out /r/Caeludum.

- Tyler Hiemke