Monthly Treeverse Update #12
The twelfth edition of monthly Treeverse updates. Read below for some game development insights on what we’ve worked on in the last month.
An update on Treeverse. A look at our development and art team progress. We will be posting monthly for you to follow along the development of Treeverse, so make sure you subscribe!
It’s been a year of monthly updates. Not only have we been transparently showing progress on Treeverse for that time, but you have all been following along on the journey of Endless Clouds from a small team to one that sits at 60+ now on this ambitious task. And what better way to kick it off than a Pre-Alpha in Q4 2022?
Read our first article on our important-announce-substack-thingi for more details!
This form will last 2 weeks and end on 13th December 2022. Be sure to apply if you are reading this before then!
We have also released a new twitter for Timeless. Please be sure to follow along.
Concept Art Update
Some words from Scott, our Art Director:
“For this month, the team has been working hard to wrap up pre-alpha. The 3d team is testing rigorously to make sure the levels are working as intended. The work mostly involves optimization and checks that the game runs properly on a mobile device. Note that all levels are still works in progress, but by putting the levels together and running it on a phone, we will get a lot of valuable information and make sure we are on the right track. We also took the opportunity to work out the specification of how the 3d environment is built, which will be used as a guideline for all future levels.
While the art production team is working on the build, the concept team has to stay in front of the curve and prepare for assets that will be built in the future, such as the centaur concept and the ghost monster concept. The team is also refining our overall theme and visual design as our lore design provides more background on the Lore. You can see some of the explorations below.”
Engineering Update
This month we worked on unifying many of the data flows used in our application. Mainly it was about transforming inputs provided by the design team and actually using that data instead of values stored in Unity. It took significantly more work than expected to make this work as smoothly as it does now since we had to refactor a majority of the application flow.
The backend team worked on finalising the REST APIs, bug fixing, and setting up Unity cloud builds.
Server team mostly on reorganising the application flow and dependency flows. After that, they managed to finalise some of the systems that still had leftover work from the previous month. As usual, more bug fixing was necessary.
The combat team worked on fixing some core collision issues and enhancing the combat feel and UI input mechanism of our game. We play-tested a few variations of our abilities and input mechanisms and are getting closer to what we want, but it will still undergo more iterations. We squashed a bunch of bugs that come naturally as a consequence of complicated object interactions in games and are handling more edge cases. The UI indicators were improved as well.
This month will mostly be on internal playtesting before we launch pre-alpha. In pre-alpha, only critical bugs preventing players from getting into the game and testing functionality will be addressed. The team need to spend a significant amount of time getting ready for the alpha systems, and the code changes required to support our multiplayer needs.
Game Design
Some words from our Lead Game Designer, Max:
“After a month of testing and tweaking our current minimal combat loop, it is finally looking quite close to what we’re hoping to launch to our players.
Although there are still some details that we need to tweak, the combat tempo is getting there, and we hope our pre-alpha players will enjoy it. In the near future, we will be adding more strategic abilities and equipment to match our current action game. Players can choose their weapon of choice and then mix and match abilities strategically, this will make the whole game quite dynamic.
For the core framework, we envisioned better gameplay that better fits the theme of “tree”, and integrated it with the previously planned dynamic event system, where players can interact with the tree to control the entire world, influencing, and even advancing, the evolution of the world. We hope this will bring you an interesting experience.
In order to better integrate with the brand-new and unique core gameplay, we’ve had to make some modifications to the game universe and the lore. We also had our game designers start working on the next release of the system and its content with the aim of bringing players more fun and designing a more unique gaming experience.”
Going Forward
Next month the winners of the Pre-Alpha form will be contacted and given instructions for the next steps. We will also be sharing some clips from it so stay tuned! The team has already started working on Alpha. Back to work.
Disclaimer: Please note that anything written in this document should not be taken as financial advice. Endless Clouds is dedicated to producing a fun, enjoyable game that integrates NFTs. NFTs are a new and highly experimental technology and should not be bought for investment purposes.