Stairway to the build

Author: Salireths

With more and more systems being gradually completed, a path forward reveals. The next build is not behind the mountains any more, but there is still a descent towards the valley ahead. This valley is all about making gameplay-related content and 3D-artwork, and finalizing everything we've been hard at work for all this time.

Take a look at the roadmap graph (separate IMGUR link for high res), this will be a new way to preview how things are moving along, in addition to our regular patreon posts, of course. There is nothing technical about it, in fact it's styled after Knowledge Trees - the core progression system of our game. It's not the most detailed overview, but it's small enough to be readable

⚫ Hexagonal nodes represent groups of tasks that logically fall into the same category. Dark nodes with white lines are for tasks that we will yet need to work on before they can be featured in the build.

🟡 The golden-colored nodes are groups of tasks that are somewhat 50% done, or being worked on right now. Those nodes can also be considered build-worthy for the upcoming early-alpha builds, but they definitely greatly lack in features that we'd prefer them having.

🟢 The green colored nodes and arrows represent the completed systems. It's not 100% completion, as there is always more work to be done, but it's definitely good enough for making it go into the build.

⭐ Amount of stars represents an estimated difficulty and time-investment that was required (for green nodes), or will be required (for white nodes) to complete those nodes.

➡ Arrows represent the relationships between nodes, their dependencies. Start reading it from the "ALPHA" node (the big hexagon on the right side), then follow where the arrows are pointing from - those are the requirements for the build. Then you can follow and check the requirements of the requirements, and so on.

Please note, this is the roadmap towards the next early-alpha and alpha builds, not a finished game.
This also does not mean we will make a build only after everything is done (green), that's why we separate early-alpha, as it will be possible to release early builds when tasks neighboring the "alpha" node get partially completed (yellow) as well.

Lastly there are some important tasks that are omitted from the graph - for example VFX, sound design and creature NPCs - those will be worked on much later, perhaps on our journeys towards the beta build, but that is something for other times...

What was added this month

Aside from the roadmap, there is more things to show you! This month was quite productive for system design. We want to change the format a bit: less text, more images and GIFs.

ALL GIFS FEATURED HERE ARE AVAILABLE ON IMGUR IN A MUCH SUPERIOR VIDEO FORMAT

Base-attached movement

Features:

• Character's Location/Rotation/Velocity is relative to their movement base (object they are standing on or attached to).
• Stable movement network code when standing on moving objects.
• Support for movement (climbing) on top of other bigger characters.
• Characters can get grabbed and inserted into other characters.

Scale-independent creatures

Features:

• Seamless creature scaling up and down.
• Support for Micro/Macro situations.
• Much better collision between big and small creatures.
• Physically "correct" handling of increased mass/volume/surface.
• Small creatures can't push around big creatures.

Improved camera system

no gifs - its literally the camera in every other gif

Features:

• Layering of different camera modifiers and effects.
• Easy, (more or less) seamless control of camera.
• Moddable camera effects.

Improved interaction system

Features:

• Same system at heart with a new interface.
• Self-interactions literally by aiming at self.
• Convenient quick access menu.

Item and action modules

Features:

• Actions and items using same functionality (less redundancy).
• Items and actions can now store any data.
• Typesafe and efficient variable storage.
• Unified replication via network.
• Unified save storage to filesystem.