Monthly Treeverse Update #7
The seventh 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 are already on our 7th Monthly Update! Our website is now out. As said before, this was created to link users to a page where they can understand more about Treeverse at a glance & introduce the team to you. In the future, it will be revamped. It also includes our new Substack page where you can sign up for important news like pre-alpha/alpha updates and more! The best thing you can do for us is to share the website to get as many people as you know to check out Treeverse. We will do the rest of the work :).
Concept Art Update
We released our first small clip of gameplay today, and it’s hit over 200K views on Twitter with immense support. If you’ve been following the monthly updates, you can see how it’s come together from the golem concept art, in-game screenshots and cel-shaded characters.
Some words from Scott, our Art Director:
“For the month of June, the art team had been working hard to prepare for the upcoming reveal of some of the dungeon level and combat gameplay. We are using everything we have developed so far to try to create a small representation of what the game might look like when finished.
The art direction of Treeverse has three overarching goals:1) We want the world to be pleasant to stay in.
2) We want the visuals to be informed by the story.
3) All visual design should service our gameplay well.By creating a working level with gameplay and combat, we can verify if we are on the right track to achieving these goals.
This is a large endeavour which involves upgrading all of our current art assets and palace holders to a release level of polish, this is an important step before scaling up the project to start producing all other aspects of the game.
Hopefully, you will agree that we are on the right path to achieving these three goals after seeing the sneak peek of gameplay.
Meanwhile, the concept team has continued to create more art in preparation for the rest of the production pipeline to follow.”
Engineering Update
This month, we continued working on the authoring layer, built some tools to improve the workflow of creating monsters and abilities in Unity, and revamped the combat layer into a significantly more powerful and modular layer.
Authoring Layer. As mentioned in the previous update, we needed a way to be able to convert game objects placed in the unity scene into entities at runtime. This layer allows us to do just that and still make use of Unity’s drag and drop mechanisms to aid with level design and creation. With Unity finally releasing the Entities 0.51 experimental package which is compatible with Unity 2021 LTS, I suspect we will also revamp/rework this layer and make use of the powerful authoring system included in the Unity entities package.
We started work on different UI systems, namely the combat HUD and Dungeon Menu.
Started Working on some tooling inside of Unity. Our previous workflow of creating monsters, and abilities and then preparing them to be converted into entities at runtime was somewhat difficult, so we built some tools to make the process much friendlier and easier to work with.
One of the core features of our game is the combat experience. The combat we have in mind is dynamic, thrilling and action-packed. In order to achieve this, we need to be able to create any type of abilities that our designers have in mind. To facilitate this we reworked the entire combat layer into a much neater, modular and more powerful system. This should allow us to create virtually any type of ability we need, and so far has been able to do so. It’s also open to extension, so makes it really easy to capture all sorts of quirky edge case abilities should we require them. The new ability system is based on a tree structure of what we call “effects”. These effects are chained together in order to create complex and interesting abilities. The devs are also working on a visual tool that allows designers to create abilities in a visual format which really makes life easier when working with tree structures. Once we iron out the kinks in the ability system and iterate the process a few times, it would be a great pleasure to demonstrate the process. I suspect we can do that in the August monthly update if everything goes smoothly.
Going into July, the focus will be mainly on UI, AI and Combat-related. We are also starting with profiling and working on performance optimisations. With the release of Entities experimental 0.51 we are also going to start research and development into how we can slowly phase out GameObjects and use native unity entities instead.
Game Design
Some words from our producer, Robert:
“After finalizing our combat experience and minimal combat loop from last month, the month of June was to dive deeper into the combat systems. We designed the framework of our active & passive ability system.
We also started designing the tempo of our dungeon raid so we can provide the best experience for our mobile users. Combat play testing has begun this month, including single-player PvE, multiplayer PvE, and even testing the waters of multiplayer PvP. We all had a great time with internal play testing and we are certain that you guys will love it just as we do too!
Last, we started constructing our future version release plans. As we start working on our minimal systems loop, more game design-related content will be released in future monthly blog posts. So stayed tuned for the future blog post updates if you want to understand more about our game systems!”
Open Positions
We are actively looking for people in the positions listed below:
3D Artist
Animator
Systems Designer
Level Designer
Combat Designer
C# Unity Dev
Lead Engineer
Environment Artist
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 are aiming for a private pre-alpha release to get feedback from users on our combat system. More details will be out closer to release. On another note, our team size has increased and our team in Taiwan are relocating to a larger office starting January 2023.
Our focus in July is to further iterate on our combat system and unify our art, design and development team to work on the same codebase.
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.