he game is currently in alpha. This means the current state of the game is more like a concept as a finished product. You can be part of the development process and influence the development of the game. This is very exciting for me because it’s my first game I sell. During the work on Wurfel Engine I often got helpful feedback and I want to go from there and build a community around Caveland.
Future plans
Here are some basic outlines of stuff that I wish to implement during the alpha:
- Caves
- Crafting system
- More exciting fighting system
- Build system
- improved map editor experience
Map Editor
Wurfel Engine / Caveland gives the developer and the player a powerful tool: the map editor. I want to increase the user experience of it and offer some way to share the worlds you designed.
The Main Character
You play as a pioneer of the species the Ejira. It is without gender and during development we refer to it as a “it”. I want that every player can identify with the character regardless of race or gender. It also has no name.
Some technical stuff
This section is mostly interesting for people with knowledge in programming or game development.The game uses Wurfel Engine in its newest version v1.4 which source code is not available to the public. Wurfel Engine is a game engine written by me in the last three years. Wurfel Engine v1.3 is available under BSD-3 license at wurfelengine.net
The changelog for v1.4:
V1.4
- added CVar system
- added support for multiple views on completly different places on the map
- rewrote chunk handling
- improved z value of coordinate class
- improved chunk loading speed
- improved music handling
- added simple sound engine for volume control based on position
- replaced intelligent hidden surface removal by simple algorithm
- added normal map rendering- added Wurfel Engine intro screen
- added support for separate tools for left and right mouse button in map editor
- added entity selection tool to map editor tools
The CVar system allows setting variables during runtime via the console. For example you can change the gravity, the color of the fog etc. via console.This is great for development but can also help the player configure the game if some options are not available under some GUI menu.
The normal map based rendering is very fast. Because of the art style only diffuse light is used which can be calculated by a dot product. The main difference to vertex based shading is that there is another big texture which must be loaded. Textures are ca. 13 MB in file size and with normal maps the file size increases by factor 2. Here us a screenshot of the game running with the normals maps visible.
To get very fluent animations we use around 400 sprites only for the main character.
