Monthly Treeverse Update #3
Monthly Treeverse Update #3
The third 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 have been thinking about creating a website for a while. However, we are going to wait until our art direction is complete as this ties in with the Treeverse branding—meaning we don’t have to revamp 2 months later when it’s complete. After the website is complete, we will include more information about game design and tokenomics when we are ready to share those.
Concept Art Update
Treeverse is still in pre-production and we are aiming to have art direction complete in the next few months. Our art team is incredibly creative, and we’d like to leverage that to create the best art possible. During this time our full-time art team will be exploring concepts to design the world of Treeverse, we have already started last month and the team has grown since then. This is super important and sets the visuals for the game, we won’t rush it.
Some words from our Art Director:
“The art team is continuing with the exploration of the world of Treeverse. Since last month, we have further confirmed the direction and some of the elements that will be in the world. From this month's update, you can see the refined version of our main splash art, which really shows the scale of the world tree. We are also exploring the player characters, as well as the enemies which the player might be facing (Golem, wood rhino and tree spirit). The art team really wants to focus on the design and setting of the world, making sure everything feels natural and that they belong in this setting. Our goal is to tell the story not through exposition, but through everything you see on the screen. We also started doing some in-game perspective exploration which will help define what the player might eventually see in a final product.”
Animation / VFX
Since we are still in the art direction phase, there is no reason for us to go out of our way to create animations and VFX for the game. However, we are creating an internal prototype with our main character resembling “Garen” from League Of Legends, and here is some of the work done for it.
Engineering Update
The engineering team have made some great progress to help us internally prototype our game, creating the basic combat framework for our game with a data-driven approach that allows game designers to quickly adjust parameters to change the feel of the combat.
We initially started this prototyping with a networked version of our game, however found that the speed of development is greatly hindered when multiplayer is involved. In order to greatly speed up production speed, we pivoted the front end developers to create a prototype repository which is a single player version of the game, purely designed to help us iterate faster, and improve our core game mechanics until we found exactly what we want it to feel like. This has sped up development by up to 5x. Here is what the team achieved on the front end.
We have a player that can run around, attack and kill monsters, cast spells and abilities. All of this is parameter based so designers can adjust the properties to change the feel of the game and start iterating rapidly. We can add new behaviours by simply creating new abilities and weapons and new enemies by using our AI system. This should really help with iterating this coming month. Below is a short breakdown of the systems.
Implemented customisable and modular AI system
Defining transitions between states
Actions that can be performed
Character System
4 abilities - A copy of “Garen” from league of legends as a base to start with
Auto attacking system
Customisable properties system
Game designers can quickly adjust properties of a player and enemies to change the feel of the game
Damage calculation service
Combat feel is largely defined by this. It’s a parameter based service that can be adjusted freely by designers to explore combat and find the right balance for different entities in the game
Our current backend server has all the basic necessary setup and framework to support most of the features we want in our game, but we want to go above and beyond this.
Whilst the front end developers are working with designers to iterate gameplay, we’ve started exploring the use of ECS(Entity component system) instead of OOP (Object oriented programming). The major benefit beside performance is how decoupled systems become from one another, allowing the addition of new systems into a game without breaking others, and providing extremely predictable data structure modification, helping reduce bugs.
As an MMORPG, launch of the game is just the first milestone, beyond this the code base needs to stay robust and easy to work on for many years to come so we can constantly add new systems and content to the game. Our research indicates that using an ECS-centric approach can help achieve this so the backend team will be spending the prototype and iteration period to test out this alternative approach for our game servers, to determine its viability.
Treasury
Our stable coin position is still sitting at $8M, Ethereum has been on a downtrend for the last month but we still have over $10M+ for our treasury in total.
Timeless
We recently announced that we are creating Timeless in many different formats, and we have already begun with a pixel sprite sheet. These will be non-dilutive and an extra piece of utility for holders. More updates on these will be shared on our Twitter.
Open Positions
We are actively looking for people in the positions listed below:
Lead Developer
Unity Developers x 4
C# developers
Database Engineer
Lead 3D Artist
Senior Environment Artist
3D Animator / Rigger
If you are interested in any of the roles, have the right experience and excel at what you do, contact vacancies@endlessclouds.xyz. For more information on the artist roles, check out some of these roles on our Artstation page.
Going Forward
As previously said in the last monthly update, the current plan for the next few months is mainly prototyping. This allows us to understand how our internal team works together and the time certain tasks may take. Reminder: Treeverse is being built by Endless Clouds and not by an external studio.
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.