Monthly Treeverse Update #4
The fourth 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!
The team has scaled from 2 full-time members to around 30+ full-time and a dozen contractors that we are working with since our initial seed round. We still aren’t finished. We understand how hard it is to build an MMORPG, and are trying our best to figure out the perfect approach to not only ship fast, but a working and good product.
Game-first is our ethos, and it always will be.
Slowly but surely you are learning more about Treeverse and our vision for what it will become. We also recently tweeted about a few well-known games that our team has worked on, these are a few. Others include Marvel Spiderman, Uncharted 4, PUBG Mobile and more. We can’t wait to tell you more about them when our new website comes along!
Concept Art Update
Our art direction is slowly being set day by day. You can slowly see the approach we are taking. Alongside this, we are exploring the lore of Treeverse with our designers. World building is super important and our concept art is a visualization of the world of Treeverse, a story on it’s own. Compared to the first update, you can see it’s finally coming together.
Some words from Scott, our Art Director:
“The current stage of art development revolves around verifying our design inside an in-game environment. As you can see from image 1, although it may not seem like much, as it is just some grass and a platform, this can help the team define what the game might look like as a final product. We are figuring out how much detail each object might have. Too much detail will distract the player from the gameplay, too little the world will look dull, it is quite a delicate balance. Once the groundwork is laid, the rest of the production will go by much quicker.
Besides the technical aspect, the concept team is continuing with world design. A super important part of MMORPG is player progression. Image 4 shows possible progression of player characters as they level up and gain more advanced equipment, and image 5 shows some of the mood and color sketches which can help the team get a better feel of the world.“
Engineering Update
The month of March for development has been heavily focused on R&D of ECS alongside development of our internal prototype.
For the prototype we’re still working on combat. It is largely driven by 3 foundational systems; Stats system, Skills system and the AI system. Although we had set the basics for some of these last month, it has required further tuning to be useable based on our game designers needs. We expect to make further improvements on them during April whilst our designers play test more and expand the requirements.
The prototype includes waves of different types of monsters ranging from basic melee monsters to the ranged monsters above who has various abilities and can cast spells.
The UI has been greatly improved to allow for a significantly improved aiming and target selection experience.
Our research for ECS looks promising, indicating it’s a viable way for us to develop a maintainable codebase that favours longevity despite the initial learning curve. MMORPGs require the constant addition of features, gameplay and events that lasts significantly longer than the initial development time for release, so it’s worth the upfront investment in using this paradigm as it will pay great dividends on a longer time horizon.
We are using an open-source framework called Svelto ECS and we’ve learnt a tremendous deal during March about how the framework works and plan to solidify our understanding further during April. Unfortunately, the documentation is somewhat lacking so we plan to create some great documentation for the open-source project using our learnings, and use it as a way to attract talent and exposure to Treeverse as well as streamlining our onboarding process for new developers. If you are interested in exactly what ECS is, keep an eye out for it as we will publish it in the upcoming weeks. If you are a developer looking to work for Treeverse, an aptitude for and competence in using Svelto ECS would probably immediately land you a job with us.
Recruiting developers and talent is always a somewhat difficult task. We have had tremendous success in hiring in all other domains, but on the tech side it’s been slower. Going forward we’re ramping up our efforts in hiring on the technical side. Armed with adequate documentation of the ECS framework and a few training sessions, we’re hopeful we can onboard developers faster.
Open Positions
We are actively looking for people in the positions listed below:
Lead Developer
Unity Developers
C# developers
Database Engineer
Lead 3D Artist
Senior Environment Artist
IT Recruiter / Recruiter
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
We still have open positions as said above. Specifically developers. Endless Clouds plans to have around 50 full-time members and then work with many contractors and external studios to get the best possible result. Separate from game design and development, we have a few big things we are working on behind the scenes. Can’t wait to share more. As a start-up, the beginning is always hard, but we will go above and beyond to prove we can create an amazing, fun to play game with blockchain integration. Let’s go!
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.