Dear UMes 🤗
As the main development direction is about reconstructing the UI, to be more moddable and compatible with lua, which is also a big job, in the meantime, our UMes took a little detour doing their dev tasks. Which resulted with UMeLand finally taking colours and players can now see the discovered world, via Horizon Mist (as now a placeholder name).
List Of Discussed Topics
Colour Me UMeLand
Lua Modding In Works
Blinking Eyes.
Currently Working On
What Next
Colour Me UMeLand
With recent works, UMeLand finally started looking more like a world map, rather than a soulless desert of an early development. Saying all that, the implementation is rather basic at the current state, yet far from desired results. And certain shortcut development paths have been taken, to achieve given results, while preserving the development time.
The primary idea was, to add a bit more life to the world, where previously the terrain was brownish soil, without the concrete texturing. In the future plans and in the ideal scenario, the map editor will allow players to paint textures on the terrain. But analysing the amount of required work to add this feature, while at lower priority, another alternative option was taken into consideration. That is procedural terrain painting.
How the current texturing of the terrain works is, that the shader samples the height of the terrain and applies the relevant texture, depending on the terrain altitude. In simplicity, the terrain altitude below 100m is brownish, white the terrain above around 200m is white like snow. And in between there is grass, with some transition in between layers (ecotones). Additionally, there are rock textures on high steep cliffs. This solution is relatively simple and sufficient for current development progression. And the results look far better than the brown terrain. :)
Horizon Mist / Haze
Horizon Mist, or Haze, is an alternative term to a Fog Of War (FOW), which is typically used in action, or RTS games. For the purpose of UMeFate as a life simulator, FOW term doesn’t fit here. Therefore, a more suitable name is required. Currently, the closest suitable proposed term are Horizon Mist, or Horizon Haze, with some variations. This has been discussed briefly on the discord. The term surely will be coined over development time.
So what Horizon Mist / Haze do and how do they work? It is basically a blanket, which hides most of the terrain. As the player discovers more of the UMeLand, the known area is expanding. While currently players can see other UMes activities, in the future UMes and players will have restricted view and hearing range. Hence, even if the terrain is discovered, it won’t necessarily mean that the player will see other UMes, if they are too far and beyond viewing distance.
Interestingly, this is a unique feature for the life sim game genre. Life sim games typically don't have such mechanics. But as a game dev of UMeFate, I am very inspired by RTS games. Especially when I worked on Sanctuary: Shattered Sun RTS. And I really want to see something similar in an open world life simulator.
In fact, UMeFate had this mechanic very early in development, during the prototype stage of UMeFate. Or I would say the prototype of the mechanic itself. But over the development progression, this mechanic stopped working correctly and eventually was removed. Now it has been reimplemented from the ground up, with better integration. That was an actually fun side quest.
On the side note, Horizon Mist / Haze is controlled via lua. So it is now a part of the modding utility.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning that for split-screen of up to 4 players, each player has their own independent Horizon Mist / Haze. So players don’t know what other players have already discovered. But there are considerations in the future, to add the ability to share that knowledge between UMes and players, via gameplay mechanics and socialising. UMes not controlled by players, will most likely have different kinds of memory mechanics. That is for technical reasons.
Blinking Eyes.
Another small addition to give more sparkly life to the world, is the mechanics of blinking eyes. It is a very simplistic feature, which actually makes UMes like if the blink periodically. The frequency and period varies between UMes. There is no modding support for this feature, as these characters (made by my lovely GF) are placeholders and are planned to be replaced in the future.
Currently Working On
Currently reworking the UI. As mentioned earlier, this is a large task. The goal is to make it more functional as a mod, so the future improvements tasks will be smoother. Also, to allow faster iterations and testing.
While discussed in one of the previous posts, the option was to keep working on the current UI. But the further improvement and bug fixing, would move even further away from making the UI more moddable and flexible. So there is another cost to the development and its choices. Especially when deciding what and how to allow for modding and what not.
Like when early this year of 2025 it was decided, to put work on making split screen functionality. Even in early development of UMeFate, that alone required significant changes. But all now works with split screen in mind, and follows the design workflow. Not regretting the decision and the time it took. All appears to be paying off in time.
Here is some blog reading about early split screen work.
https://antyversum.com/2025/03/31/umefate-4-players-split-screen-teaser-45/
https://antyversum.com/2025/04/11/umefate-map-editor-splitscreen-timelapse-46/
What Next
Unless something more important jumps in, UI is literally the last major step before starting work on AI and autonomy.
Finish UI rework. This is required to unlock the path to UMes autonomy and their needs systems.
Bug fixes. Last UMeFate update on Steam has resulted in a list of valuable bug reports and the feedback from our lovely play testers.
Release build update to Steam with all relevant changes.
Start work on autonomy. This feature is far more complex and can start with many ways. So, for now, it won’t be detailed until closer to the date of actual work.
Some hopefully exciting testing features with autonomy and players interactions.
And that's all for today's update. 🙂
Until the next one 👋