Monthly Treeverse Update #19
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Monthly Treeverse Update #19
The nineteenth 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!
Number 19! Our physical Treeverse Care Package should be dropping next month, so keep an eye out for that as it will be in limited supply. One of the things I, Loop, am excited to share with you guys is the expanding lore of Treeverse. There are a lot of things set, including on the art side, that are purposefully being left out of the monthly updates for now—that will be launching in a series of puzzles and challenges starting next month.
And if you’ve noticed, this Substack has now been renamed to “Endless Cloud Updates”. Endless Clouds is the studio behind Treeverse. Alongside our Treeverse monthly updates, any important news like upcoming alpha/beta releases or cool announcements will now be published here.
That leads to our next exciting thing: Capsule Heroes! What is that? You find out JULY 6TH - 7PM UTC/2PM CT/8PM BST. Be there.
Art Update
By Scott
For this month, the art team is adding additional concepts to the ancient civilization designs. We believe this area holds the potential for adding a lot of depth through visual storytelling and infusing a deeper sense of mystery into the world of Treeverse. You can see some of the concepts below.
Meanwhile, the 3D team is establishing bases for some of the NPCs and creating a framework to build future NPCs. Due to the vast scale of the project, we anticipate that the world will be populated with a large number of NPCs. This number is too great for the art team to handle individually, so by setting up these base frameworks, we can work efficiently. This approach allows us to create a variety of appearances using the same base model.
Additionally, the environment team is diligently setting up a system to expedite the expansion of our map. This effort includes developing a terrain editor and planning for the modularization of our overworld. We will have more to share on this for future updates.
And one more VFX for you:
Engineering And Design
by Aizea
Fire (Pyrol): Intensity and Honour
Water (Harda): Adaptability and Balance
Earth (Tir): Solidity and Perseverance
Air (Agar): Mobility and Freedom
We have different tribes in our game world, and each of them has a culture that embodies the spirit of the elements.
Combat is an essential part of Treeverse. Considering the 4 main elements in our game which represent specific attributes and core values, along with tribes that embody them, we started with a small subset of weapons, one for each tribe.
We want the game's combat to be purposeful and readable, it shouldn’t be littered with too much chaos, but rather everything should have its reason for existing, contributing to a distinct playstyle for players to choose purposefully.
Players are free to experience them all, however, only a select few are capable of mastering them all.
We’ve continued developing the code base this month. Previously most of our UI was scratched together just to get things done as fast as possible. We’ve started implementing basic versions of our UI menus and panels. You can see some of these below. We are going for a flat, subtle look, that favours functionality and readability.
Small quality of life improvement for damage numbers, much more readable:
We continued working on our quests and player interaction system. It can be considered to be in V1 now and can handle most of the core things we need. It’s not too different functionally from the last monthly update, but the workflow has been significantly improved. Mostly the changes come from refactoring and updating data structures used to sync data between the server and client, as well as how the data is referenced inside of the quest graph itself. Auto-triggered interactions were done as well. We’ve also finished the first set of quests that represent our tutorial mode. We will revisit them in the future once we have our Upgrade systems in place.
We added party vs party PvP mode and a new deathmatch mode as well, with each team having a specific number of lives. Whichever team loses all their lives first, loses. This can be an interesting game mode when the party sizes are not balanced. We added controller support, just to make playtesting a bit more fun whilst developing the game as well. We have almost finished the implementation of our database integration this month as well. We could probably have account systems and character customisation setup finished within a week or so.
We’ve finished the block outs of our main towns in the game, and the first step of integration of them in our game world. It’s cool to be able to spawn into the different towns and run around, giving a good sense of the size of the game world.
Last month, we went pretty hard in the development of things, we had to tackle a lot of technical debt. We reduced some of that debt, whilst simultaneously adding features. We spent a considerable amount of time ensuring our game builds on a mobile, dedicated server and even desktop builds. These have now been resolved and work mostly fine. It’s evident we need to set up our CI/CD pipeline again for a smoother dev experience so we will work on that next month.
Finally, we’ve managed to start working with an extremely talented and experienced Unity DOTS developer as a consultant. This will help us elevate our code base significantly.
Going Forward
We hope to form a small user testing group from people in the community to help us test our multiplayer combat and early versions of our starter quests by the end of July/start of August, and for the purpose of keeping a regular schedule of user-centric feedback loop in our development cycle. Expect for us to reach out to some of you before then!
And don’t forget about July 6th for Capsule Heroes.
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.
Monthly Treeverse Update #19
Inmensas ganas de que el proyecto ya salga,me encanta lo que están creando,le tengo mucha fe🙏