Image: (c) Mingan Games 2016
AN UPDATE FROM THE DEVS
It’s Friday! It seems that another week has gone by – time is just blasting by. We got a lot of work done this week and made some important changes to the game. I’m really excited about the time ahead as we’ve got a lot of ideas for the game. I’m very excited to see how the game is going to change, evolve and develop over the next few weeks and months.
Our biggest hurdle was essentially transitioning from a singleplayer game to a multiplayer game. We spent hours and hours working on networking, optimizations and cleanups. I’m confident that the server model we’re working with now will work well. It’s drastically different from most other games as the game-logic is shared and distributed in all kinds of weird ways.
We’ll try our best to keep you updated with our progress and development.
WHAT WE DID THIS WEEK
This week we tackled the weather system – we did a complete overhaul and added some new features. We also finished up multiplayer NPC’s (animals) and optimized them a little. The weather is now procedural and includes 13 weather types:
- Sunny
- Mostly Clear
- Partly Cloudy
- Overcast
- Fog
- Snow
- Rain
- Storms with procedural thunder
- And a little bit more…
Yes, you read right. Snow. We haven’t implemented it yet but we’ve started coding the basics of procedural snow. We’re going make some shaders this week and work on how the terrain and objects are influenced by the snow. The idea is to have regions (possibly in the mountains) where it snows.
The dynamic weather allows us to also generate precipitation randomly, meaning that each storm will be unique. We also overhauled the wind system and added some new sounds to wind zones and trees. The day and night lengths were adjusted and the temperature system is now much more intensive and utilizes a few algorithms to give some cool results.
Along with all these changed we’ve started working on a seasons system where the season dynamically changes on the server – but that still has a long way to go. This coming week we’ll probably focus on some (boring) server-side code and stuff to get everything running smoothly.
We also fixed a bunch of bugs, patched some issues and obviously added more awesome content to the game. We can’t wait to bring you Life’s Fall soon!
