Monthly Treeverse Update #14
The fourteenth 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!
We successfully launched our Treeverse Pre-Alpha end of last year. It ran for roughly 10 days and it was amazing to have people experience it and get feedback from real players.
To reiterate, this release was solely to test out the minimal combat loop of our game. Linking some clips below!
Art Update
Some words from Scott, our Art Director:
“For the art team, the month of January was about supporting the game jam teams to quickly iterate game mechanic ideas while exploring the world of Treeverse. It was also the Chinese New Year so many of our colleagues took a well-deserved break for the holidays. You can see some of the game jam assets in the video under the design section.
The art team is working closely with Loopify to diversify our approach and enrich our IPs while the design team focuses on the mechanics. From the very beginning, our goat creature, the Baafmet (temporary name) has always been one of our favourite designs; their cheeky personality and demeanours lend themselves well to breathing life into our world design.
We believe that exploring their culture, interactions and designs further help us flesh out the world of Treeverse, and inspire us to create other designs around them. Designing background information like this that players might never see can seem like a wasted effort, however, it actually informs many of the designs surrounding it and makes other related designs have greater depth and be more believable. We will be continuing to create different design explorations for different topics in Treeverse.”
Engineering Update
by Aizea
The overall feedback from pre-alpha was overwhelmingly positive. A huge thank you to everyone who played the game and provided us with all of this valuable feedback; it helps more than you can imagine.
Despite this, I firmly believe that as a company we are capable of developing at a significantly faster pace, and being able to complete one entire cycle of development (from conception to release and feedback) has taught us many things we need to improve going forward.
During January we split up into smaller groups of teams to work on the game jam. The purpose of the game jam was three-fold. The first was to address some of the inefficiencies in our development pipelines with regard to general game development and product development strategy. We’re currently in the process of modifying our development strategy from pseudo-agile to lean. The second was to work in smaller squads, requiring less cross-departmental communication and instead as more cohesive units to reduce friction in getting from 0 to 1 in terms of game feature development. Finally, the theme of the game jam was to focus on PvP combat. Our next stage of testing with the community will involve PvP and this was a great way to get started on the exploration of PvP.
Our developers worked on top of our base networking codebase which we developed alongside our pre-alpha. We will be assessing the results of our month-long game jam during February and showing off some of the creative ideas the team came up with through our Twitter.
Game Design
Some words from our Lead Game Designer, Angelo:
“Hello everyone, after almost 2 weeks of Pre-Alpha testing, we received many suggestions and bug reports which have been practical and helpful in our game production. We also received many compliments and positive evaluations from players, which have been a great encouragement for us.
Based on player feedback during the testing period, the production team is currently focusing on optimizing the player experience. In addition to level content, we have tried to design several different skill detail designs with the aim of providing a fun and balanced experience that corresponds to various game goals (such as boss fights, player vs player competitions, etc.).
As for player vs player competition, this will also be a key area of our future development. In addition to the traditional 1v1, 3v3, 5v5, and battle royale modes, we aim to develop more fun gameplay that will allow players to enjoy more laughter alongside tension in the process of competition.”
Going Forward
The game jam finishes in a few days, as we also had the Chinese New Year. We are extremely grateful to our community for all the support for the Pre-Alpha. Like always, we’re carrying on building. Every decision we make as a company is to ensure we can deliver a great product long-term.
In 2023, we will be expanding our IP and working on story-building through many different mediums to immerse players in our world. If you have been following Treeverse for a while, you know this character was called “Baafmet” previously, we will be changing the name but it’s basically to become our mascot.
Keep your eyes out for my little friend here…
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.
Thanks for insights^^ As always, a pleasure to read this monthly update 👌