This week we have done a lot of play, functionality and usability testing for Dual Wielding and Machine Crafting. We ended up making bigger changes than we anticipated to ensure that the 1st pass would be a respectable presentation of the new features. We needed a little more time to provide a better balanced game and decided to postpone the update again. But it’s close.

The good news is that the Day Night cycle has been sneaked into the coming update.

The World Wrapping is almost complete and many of the game functions work across the wrapped boundaries seamlessly. This will be released next.

Code

We’ve added Special Materials for use by the more exotic materials you will come across in the game. These add multi texture scrolling, flip book animation and blending effects.

The World Wrapping has progressed with the majority of the features now working. The sun and moon cycles are now in game with the first pass lighting similar to the old Day Night cycles. This functionality will soon be exposed into the World Builder so that each world can have custom lighting.

The Dual Wielding has been iterated and it is now much more usable. We are continuing to polish and fix issue with the Machines. Work on the Trading, Buying + Selling Plinths and Currency are all progressing.

The GUI has been continuing to add more features, including some of the Beacon management screens.

We added an in game option to control the V-sync rate, including unlimited. The engine work has been adding support for texture arrays to replace the atlases we are using for the blocks. This should reduce the amount of textures space we need and be a bit quicker. (It’ll also hopefully help with some of the Mac OS X rendering issues players have been experiencing.)

Design

This week has been mainly about tweaking the crafting balance, and getting the beginning of the crafting progression right. We all played the game in the office last Friday while enjoying our usual Friday beer, and the information from that was very helpful for the next set of changes. In parallel with this, resource generation balance has been through a couple of iterations, although that is still pretty early.

In addition there has been ongoing work in support of dual wielding and the GUI, as well as more design work on the damage system.

Art

This week the art team has been supporting the dual release and machine crafting. We’ve also been giving feedback to the new day/night cycle lighting that’s being ported and iterated from JavaScript to C++.

We’ve created a new asset to go into the Machine Crafting release - the Crafting Table. You craft this basic wooden work table before progressing to the workbench and machine crafting. We’ve also modelled the stone lance.

Concepting has continued on wearables exploration, a wearables beast set, ammo designs for the slingbow and lance and the ground basher creature’s progression.

We’ve also designed a new creature with the working title of the Hunter. As the name suggests this is a dangerous creature that stalks the player walking on it’s hands and has sinister ethereal elements.