Progress
We’ve made some great progress on bringing the Alpha arenas into the Beta! As of this newsletter, we’re finished with the Forest and Ruins arenas, and Riverside is about halfway there. We were pleasantly surprised at how nicely the overworld location we picked for Ruins resembles the original arena from certain angles!
Since Riverside’s playable area doesn’t have flat terrain like the others, it’s taken longer to ensure it’s as close to the version in the Alpha as possible. We were able to use the original terrain as a reference, though there’s still some room for error. It might not be as exact of a replica as the others, but we want it to be as close as possible. Of all the arenas, Riverside is certain to have the most noticeably different background terrain. This is exciting since it has a lot of room for improvement from the original!
Last week, we created both the 2D layout and 3D greybox of the map for Red Letter mode (an unrevealed game mode for the Beta). It was a pretty great turnaround time, and we had a lot of fun putting it together!
We've made improvements for ensuring that game modes update more reliably over the network, organized what logic runs on the server vs. what runs on the clients, and implemented some interactable mechanics for Red Letter mode. Some of these required changes to their code in order to work with multiplayer. By making those changes we also made it easier for most other objects to now work with multiplayer. A few basic effects for a Red Letter mechanic have been built in a flexible way that should make it very easy for designers to tweak different values and balance them.
For multiplayer, we’re currently testing an important stability milestone that should make gameplay more reliable, even with bad internet connections. Of course the work is ongoing, and we’ll have more improvements in the future.
Right now we’re working on what we're calling "seamless multiplayer," meaning you can join another person’s game while you are actively playing in yours — rather than having to go back to the menu to join your friends. This is a bit more challenging, but will be great for the smoothness of the experience.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Logic: The programming side of any feature. For example, “cooking logic” would be the base level programming for the cooking mechanic.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.
Server: When multiple players are in the same game, the server is a separate machine that makes sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on April 5.
