Greetings MyDream Journal Readers!
We’re back from our GDC + PAX East + SXSW convention tour, thank you to everybody who stopped by and checked out MyDream!
Its been a little while since the last journal update, and we have plenty to talk about, including a Giveaway Campaign, New World Types, Placement Preview updates, early Dynamic Water testing, Item Placement preview upgrades, and Tech upgrades!
YouTube Giveaway Campaign
To help us share more about the game with more players, we’re working on building up our YouTube channel. We’re looking to hit at least 2500 YouTube Subscribers by April 10th, and we’ll be giving out a minimum of 100 Steam Early Access Keys if we reach our goal! Spread the word, tell your friends and family about it: http://mydream.vbulletin.net/forum/main-forum/336-giveaway-campaign-youtube-subscribers
A Whole New World (or two)
We’ve added a few new World types to MyDream and we’ve opened up access to most of the worlds we already had around worlds. We understand that they aren’t very clearly labeled, so to help with this we’ve got a list of the different world types below to detail what the worlds are all about!
- *NEW* Dream World - This world has some features for all the biomes we’ve got, along with dynamic and fantastical terrain generation to make for a truly otherworldly experience!
- *NEW* Water Test World - This is a modified Flatlands world with one fancy new feature, which is the ability to generate water by placing an Ice Block in the world! This is still in a very early state, as we haven’t fully implemented the system, but the very basics of water are now available to play with.
- Megaworld and Class M - Megaworld is what the Mountain type world used to be, and will have similar properties and characteristics to previous worlds made as Mountains type. Class M is essentially a Megaworld without any trees, which allow it to perform far more effectively on all systems.
- Alpha 002 - This is the equivalent of what used to be Desert type worlds. Flatlands with some rocky formations protruding out of the ground, along with some grassy patches, which adds some intrigue to the area without much effect on performance.
- Grass 004 - This is the equivalent of the Grasslands type world. If you haven’t seen it yet, we have new grass in the game and it looks pretty sweet!
- Flats 2 - This is the equivalent of the Flatlands type world. Flatlands has the highest performance of all the world types, and is ideal for low-end systems.
- Oasis 2, Oasis Simple, and Oasis High - Oasis worlds have been split up a bit. Oasis 2 is more of the original Oasis-type world, including caves and caverns that had recently been removed for performance. The Oasis Simple type world is the result of that adjustment, and has similar surface features but without the caves in the world, and performs the best of the Oasis type worlds. Oasis High is a taller version of the Oasis world type which also has caves to it.
- *WARNING* Alpha 001 & Grass World 3 are deprecated world types. It is highly recommended to not use the world types to try to create a world. We’ll be removing access to these in the next update.
Intuitive Placement Previews
We’ve added some new features to the Item Previews! Objects with a directional consideration (like the movement arc for Doors or targeting direction of a Dragon Turret) now have an arrow indicating how they’ll be oriented when they are placed in the world. All previews work with F and R (Flip and Rotate) to further assist the placement process. Additionally we’ve recolored the placement objects accordingly: Most blocks and objects are cyan, traps are magenta, doors are blue, plants are green, and Light Orbs are the color they emit.
Tech Upgrades
In order to keep making progress with MyDream in adding features and improving performance, we’ve made a massive tech leap. We’ve gone from using DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, and switched the project over from Unity 4 to Unity 5! This is mostly invisible to users with a computer configured for DX11 or higher, aside from the already-noticeable performance improvements.
That’s it for this week!