Hey there, Survivors!
Today, we are coming to you with a quick DevUpdate to keep you in the loop on our development progress! Let's jump into it!
Creatures
- New creature named “B.U.L.K.” concepts
BULK stands for “Bulwark Unstoppable Lifeform Kolossus” and will be one of the first monsters to truly test your abilities in combat and base defense setup. Its shell on his back and arms allows him to take the form of a living shield, luring your defenses while smaller creatures can destroy them in the meantime.
- Finalised creature “F.L.E.S.H.” concepts
FLESH stands for “Functional Living Entity for Sacrificial Hostilities”
They behave like ants, fast, disposable, and individually weak, but extremely dangerous when swarming in massive groups. As the first enemy players will face, they serve as an early stress test for defences and demand quick area control and positioning.
Work in progress FLESH 3D modeling
High Poly modeling ✅ | Low Poly ⌛| Mid Poly ⌛| Texturing ⌛
Environment
- Environment Design work in progress
We are working on some new moods and assets for the first environment you will encounter.
World
Regarding the world, some improvements were made; we have been working on navigation baking and network optimizations to make sure the game runs as fast as possible during gameplay. This is important for us, given the number of enemies you can encounter during swarm cycles.
We are also working on a new system regarding procedural generation of the forests. This new system will allow us to generate more realistic-looking vegetation placement around trees using SDFs and hierarchies while being fully customizable by our artists.
Base Building
For those of you that tested the game during the first closed playtest. You will notice a huge change in the base building mechanic. We heard your feedback and worked on a more modular, fun and creative base building system.
This new system is based on a 1x1 grid and not on a 4x4 grid anymore. This allows the player to create everything he wants, giving a lot more of creativity for base defense and decoration.
Temporary visuals
Fog Of War
We developed more visually interesting effects and introduced a new, lightweight method for handling fog of war.
Traditionally, fog of war is implemented by painting circular masks onto a texture that represents the world from a top-down view. This texture is then used to display explored areas. However, saving and transmitting this texture, especially when a player joins a game in progress, can be costly in terms of memory and bandwidth.
Our approach subdivides the world into cells. Whenever a player enters a new cell, we mark it as visited.
We then dispatch a compute shader that generates a render texture at runtime using smoothmin functions based on the center positions of the visited cells.
💾 This allows us to save and transmit only the IDs of the visited cells to each client, who can then generate the fog of war texture locally.
Would you be interested in a detailed devlog about procedural generation? This is quite a huge topic, and we could share a lot of interesting insights about it!