Developer Diary 2: Friends

It's been a while since the first developer diary. We wanted to let everyone know what we've been working on lately.



Infrastructure has been a huge goal of ours in the past month. Previous builds of the game couldn't save or load any data. Once you leave, poof, the world is gone! The world is now saved and loaded constantly as you move to new areas. The streaming system we've devised to accomplish this also means that the memory footprint of the game has been cut down significantly.



Hey, weren't we going to talk about friends?







It seems like a huge thing (and it is), but we've fully integrated online co-op this past month. What you're seeing here is fully functional; two players are able to run around the world and interact with it properly. Playing with friends will be important to SeedScape, or at least we greatly encourage you to do so. The goal is that the entire game can be played online; no exceptions. Our progress towards that goal is going great.



The last thing we wanted to discuss is how you can join your friends. We're taking Steam integration very seriously; our aim is for there to be absolutely no confusion about how to jump in and play with your friends. We also want to take full advantage of the Steam API. Although it's not quite ready for showing off, in our internal builds there is a list that populates right on the main menu with all of your Steam friends who are online and own SeedScape. When you click a friend in the list, you'll hear a knock. If nothing happens, this means your friend is either not currently playing SeedScape or is playing privately. The game will tell you there was no answer. If you click on a friend's name and you hear a door open after knocking, you're all set to go! You'll pop into your friend's world and be able to play and farm together.



We're going to be showing off this and more live early next month, so stay tuned for when we do our second SeedScape stream! You can follow us @DapperSwine on Twitter for information about when the stream will begin.



Thanks again for dropping in, sproutlings.