Monthly Treeverse Update #18
The eighteenth 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!
As mentioned in the last update, we have started to ramp up art production for Treeverse! Turn our Twitter notifications on and keep up to date on Discord.
Oh, and we have something cool coming next month too. Stay tuned for that!
Art Update
By Scott
For this month, we have a coast environment that we are working on that will host a number of quests and activities. Please remember that all these are works in progress and are subject to change.
Some of the NPC that you will be interactive with include Nicolo and Pytir, which are shown below. Here is our lore designer Shen in the background of the NPCs.
Since players come from different parts of the world, we also want to create characters that come from different backgrounds and places in the game world. At the beginning of your journey, you will meet your trusted NPCs, such as First Mate Nicolo Gamdias, to who we gave a more East Asian vibe because he comes from the easternmost islands in the lore. He is what we call a carefree person. He enjoys life and jokes around. But don't let his light-hearted personality fool you, he can also be very strict and picky when it comes to serious matters. In addition to being First Mate, he is also a talented carpenter and inventor, so we give him a saw-like tool as his primary weapon.
And let's not forget our talented royal minstrel. After all, what's a journey without music? Meet Pytir Glossny, once the royal minstrel of a small kingdom, now an experienced sailor after the kingdom he served was destroyed by Midland conquerors. He still considers himself a nobleman, but to tell you the truth, deep in his heart, he just craves the attention of humans. We imagine he likes to dress well at all times, even on the high seas. Since he considers the use of melee weapons to be a rather "un-elegant" way to fight, he uses his concertina to unleash the magical powers of Canali to fend off his opponents.
There are also some VFX that are in the works which you can see below.
Engineering And Design
by Aizea
Development Update
Things are heating up at Endless Clouds! I’m proud to say that our engineering team and code base are getting better by the day, and the results are finally becoming much more tangible now. It’s been a really tumultuous journey getting to this stage as an Engineering team, but as we keep progressing each day, I feel more and more confident in our team’s ability to execute and ship this game. Have a look at some in-game footage below.
Combat Editor
We’ve developed our combat editor a great deal this month, and it’s at a stage right now where it can handle a lot of abilities I’m confident enough to call it the first version of our Combat Tool. It’s a pretty simple, node-based editor that really allows us to mix and match ability effects and create a plethora of abilities without having to change the code base. After a fair number of refactors, the code base has started to get more robust for our ability system. The idea is to continuously improve it and extend it until we get to versions 2,3,4 and more. Each iteration and milestone creates a much more powerful and capable tool that will greatly enhance the gameplay experience we can provide for our players.
This month we added crowd control effects like stuns, knockbacks and more, as well as movement modification effects. We have projectile spawn nodes and gimmick spawn nodes as well. The projectile spawn node has proven to be really useful to spawn things like meteors from above, projectiles from below etc, allowing for location-based abilities.
Here is a look at crowd control effects
Here you can see the spawn projectile node
And a look at a spawn gimmick node for abilities that spawn traps
Quest Graphs
A large part of the game content and features we build will be built around capabilities and things required to complete a quest. We’ve improved our quest editor tooling. It’s not quite at V1 yet but is getting better by the day.
The main QOL improvement has been to do a lot more of the conversation-based stuff on the client side. Conversation nodes help a great deal instead of having to create 30 distinct dialogue nodes.
You can see that we have distinct things that occur during quests, and objectives for the player.
Behaviour Graphs - Utility AI
These have not changed much since last month on the xNode side of things, but the codebase responsible for it has undergone some important and much-needed changes. Behaviour graphs are used for not just Character based AI, but anything else as well like Gimmicks and Traps, that have conditional behaviour to perform.
Node Based Approach
We’re still working heavily with a node-based approach for most core features in our game (Combat, AI, Quests, and Player Interactions). From an engineering perspective, It helps us write extensible code by default, it’s super easy to delete and add new things so is perfect for writing systems that will change very often. I’m a firm believer that switching statements is ironically peak programming. Since it’s data-oriented, the level of content that can be created is also massive with just a few nodes. It is however not without its own challenges. There’s a ton of boilerplate involved, and some overlaps between player interactions and quest graphs. We’re still figuring out a lot of things.
We’re still not 100% certain it’s applicable for all use cases at the moment. From the code perspective, it’s fairly robust and easy to use and understand. We’re going to focus a lot more on the tooling side of the editor in the upcoming months to make it way easier to use and add content.
Game Modes
We improved the code used to create instanced dungeons. It’s a lot more flexible in allowing us to develop specific game modes of our choice. I think there are still many optimisations and challenges to overcome before it becomes really lovely, but we have a solid base for it now. Can’t wait to challenge many of you to these game modes.
UI Updates
We’ve started adding more refined UI into the game as well.
Engineering Philosophy
I’ve spent a great deal of time pondering how we can build software and games really fast. Ironically many of the natural things to assume are in my opinion just completely incorrect, I think that the reality of shipping products is super counter-intuitive. We aren’t completely there yet, but I can 100% confidently say we’re on the right path, and now it’s just steps in the process for us to execute our vision of this game.
The bell-curve meme is by far one of my favourite memes, that accurately describes the reality of many things, where the simple, intuitive and straightforward path is usually the best.
After the layoffs in February, we really had to do a hard reset in the way we thought about building products and executing tasks and working as a team. What you are seeing so far represents roughly 3 months of work. The months to come should be smoother as the engineers have gone through the tougher stage of the Unity DOTS learning curve, and the rest of the team has been actively introduced to the code base and project so they’ve started contributing a great deal as well.
Going Forward
At Endless Clouds, we’re completely committed to producing forever games that encourage player asset ownership. As a new studio, we’ve gone through extreme changes, which despite being tough, has really set us on the right path to eventually shipping successful, beloved titles.
We hope to consolidate many of our core systems within the next 3 months, to expand our world a great deal and to actively start testing with the community. We also plan to heavily focus on dungeons and PvP game modes to really optimise and refine our combat as early as possible. With the Ability/Combat Editor in V1 and our AI tooling almost at V1 as well, it’s fairly trivial to start adding.
We will continue working hard to ship games that we can all play and enjoy with our loved ones and friends. We would like to thank the community for their continued support and hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s update.
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.