Monthly Treeverse Update #8
Monthly Treeverse Update #8
The eighth 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!
This month we hit a milestone. We released our first combat trailer, all in-game footage with everything created in-house! It did very well publicly receiving immense support and attracting more people to Treeverse. Make no mistake, this is small in comparison to what we are building over the next few years. We are so excited to build in public with all of you.
To view a HD version of the Trailer, it’s available on our new YouTube channel - be sure to subscribe!
Concept Art Update
Over the last month, including the Combat Trailer that released yesterday, we’ve amassed 550K+ views on Treeverse footage and millions of impressions on Twitter! And people love the art direction of Treeverse; as you can see the footage is a culmination of the art we’ve shown across the last few months.
Some words from Scott, our Art Director:
“For the month of July, the art team has been focusing on raising the health of the project. After creating the trailer and the demo, we are focusing on cleaning up the structures of the art assets, naming, and file standardization. This may sound boring, but it is an important step when building a large-scale game like Treeverse.
The concept team are continuing to work hard on building the world, we are now starting to explore some interior space. The approach will be entirely different to what we had before, with a darker and more atmospheric tone (Image below). The art team will make sure we have a variety of environments to make dungeon runs more interesting.
The UI team is working to lock down our in-game aesthetic as well as some transition pages. As the art style of Treeverse becomes more solidified, the UI team is also able to be more precise with their decision choices to match what we see inside the game.”
Engineering Update
This month we implemented more UI related features, worked on the the implementation of dungeon instances, expanded our Ability graph tool and started working on our rest APIs. We also started working on performance optimisations but were stopped due to a bug in a library we were using. This has been fixed and so we can continue that this month.
Improved integration of ECS and unity Monobehaviour.
As the team becomes more experienced with ECS, we’ve started finding even better and simpler ways of communicating with monobehaviours and our ECS code.
Previously we were debugging using game objects drawn into the game, but now can simply use Unity’s built in visualisation tools like the Gizmos to draw our hitboxes for our colliders.
Implemented target selection and locking.
Especially important for mobile gameplay fluidity and ease.
Ability graph refactoring.
Introduced mechanism to allow designers to create animation cancellation windows
Introduced quantity fields to produce multiple colliders in the graph as a quality of life improvement for the designers.
Implementation of addressable.
Needed to download new packages into the game without having to update the application via the app store.
Helps organise the large number of files required in the game.
Basics of Dungeon instances setup.
As a player moves between the open world and the dungeons to fight monsters, many changes need to occur in the application. We need to change the UI and disable many of the engines that are not required in the dungeon instance.
The groundwork has been setup to allow for dynamic switching between various “instance” types. For example switching between open world, wilderness, dungeons and player homes can all use this.
Started implementation of REST APIs.
Basics of Kubernetes setup.
We’ll be using Kubernetes for container/server orchestration. We’ll start experimenting with server shards etc in the coming months, and this setup is just the start of it all.
SrDebugger added for mobile debugging and editor/runtime access of data.
In the mobile version of the game, the Unity editor tools created will not be available for modifying the values of the character and monsters etc, so we’ve implemented a version 1 of a mobile editor using SrDebugger.
Optimisation of code.
One of the best ways to improve performance is to use unity jobs and burst in our application. We updated large parts of the codebase to be compatible with jobs and burst, however due to a bug in a 3rd party library we couldn’t continue. The bug has now been resolved so we will continue working on this in the coming months.
Game Design
We are estimating mid-next month for when we can give you the dates for Pre-Alpha and Alpha. Be sure to subscribe to this newsletter to get the announcement on time.
Some words from our producer, Robert:
“After a couple of months of combat development, we have finished our own in-house ability editor tool that allows the designer and artist to iterate through different play styles and ideas. In the meantime, we have been preparing for pre-alpha, so our focus is on game design. Systems such as login system, avatar creation system, dungeon selection system, and more were all worked in the month of July. Apart from systems design, we started integrating sound into our development pipeline. We have sound designers that design the SFX of all combat, UI, and other in-game systems. BGM is also one of our main focuses in Treeverse. We believe that music can really help with creating the vibe in which players would enjoy being in our game world.
Furthermore, designers focused on level design and lore design have been working pretty hard to provide the best combat variation experience. We do our best not to have our combat feel repetitive by designing different types of level objectives and boss fights.
Our knowledge tree and recast system take our combat to another level. The knowledge tree allows players to pick a specialised profession in a certain weapon class. On the other hand, the recast system allows players to unlock and equip new abilities to the weapon. With all of these systems put together, we believe we can enrich the combat experience by providing a lot more variations and letting players try out different combinations. UI also has a fresh new look that is cleaner and fits our art style a lot better. Besides our new UI look, we have also been iterating our combat HUD and will continue to do so until we all find the best possible controls for our unique combat system. Iterating the combat HUD is extremely important because mobile combat experience is not something easy to optimize.
Last but not least, we have been iterating through many different game designs and will do our best to provide the best quality experience for the players soon. Hopefully, we can have players experience the effort put into the design in time for our pre-alpha release.”
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
Things are speeding up. Keep up to date with what we are doing and share to your friends. As time passes, we are looking to introduce the lore of Treeverse to the community through various ways even before gameplay.
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.