December Update
Greetings citizens!As promised, we would like to give you all an update on where we are with our current milestone. The last time we spoke to you, we gave a brief overview of our progress as we entered into Milestone 2. You can read all about it here.
As always, you can reach out to us on our social media channels. We’re always looking to chat!
Firstly, we would like to let everyone know that we have welcomed Maria onto our team as our Audio Engineer and she will be taking care of the music and sound for The Universim. She has already begun shaping up a proper title theme song and a few tracks for the beginning ages. We hope to give you a sneak peek at these in the future!
We are also currently looking for a new part-time developer to join our ranks:
This is a technical position and requires strong programming skills. When applying, please include your portfolio (or other talent showcase) and resume. You can learn more over at the Unity forums through this link. >>Here<<
MILESTONE 2We have faced a great challenge of dealing with the time scale of The Universim, and are still reading and analysing your suggestions on our latest Community Lab. If you haven’t already, head over to the forums to participate in the discussion!
We’ve currently set that aside for now and have moved onto implementing some core features into the game. From our last chat, we had just about finished creating a wind map that will indicate wind direction on the planet. Seeing as clouds and such move along these currents, we wanted to give players some visual cues in the hope that it may offer an early warning of danger.
Since then, the wind map has been integrated quite well with the new cloud system. Here’s what it looks like:
To help gauge the temperature of the biomes, we’ve also created a new heatmap. This will be vital when exploring new planets with undiscovered biomes to avoid any…incidents. Of course, this will not be available immediately, and research will be required to unlock and use this feature in the final game. Here’s a sneak peek:
We are really excited to say that epicenters have begun to expand! We have recently added a new worker job type, builders. These workers will be responsible for constructing buildings and expanding the epicenter with houses. Depending on the priorities set for population growth, builders will continue to expand the epicenter as resources allow, first dropping the resources at the site before constructing the house and increasing the population by a set amount.
Here is a rough look at it in motion. However, we want to stress that this is still a work in progress and we will continue to polish and add proper animations as we go along:
With epicenters now expanding, we have started working on worker reproduction. One of the main methods of obtaining new workers is by reaching population milestones; whenever the epicenter reaches a certain population, it will trigger two workers to seek each other out and create a baby.
The baby will stay with the mother until it grows old enough to join the workforce and become a new available asset. Worker aging is a goal we aim to incorporate in the game, as well as the concept of families, though we will tackle that further down the road.
Also remaining in this milestone is the introduction of our first key buildings, farms and eateries. The first step will be to allow the player the option to have the epicenter construct these buildings by marking the location; this feature will also mean we will start introducing a proper UI to the game, something that we’ve been lacking for quite a while.
In our next update, we hope to have a few animations to showcase regarding this, which brings us to the end of milestone 2!
ARTWORKOur artists remain hard at work, and we would like to share some of the things they’ve been working on. One of our technical artists has created a clutter system that will allow us to populate the ground with things such as grass, rubble, and other debris based on camera position and distance:
Our models have been undergoing a scaling overhaul to make sure they look proportional to one another and the workers. This should offer a glimpse of some of those models and how the artists have been modifying them:
Lastly, here is a small look at some new concept pieces for upcoming models and features, including a preview of some new alien plant life!
And that concludes our update! We are very excited with the progress we have made so far, and are looking forward to updating you again soon as we complete milestone 2 and move onto newer challenges with milestone 3. We hope you enjoyed this update and that you will join us again in the future. And, as always, thank you for your continued support!
All the best,
The Crytivo Games Team
