Hello Nomads,
As was mentioned in our Thursday blog post the development of Planet Nomads has come to the usual schedule of of monthly feature-plan.
Golden Manager - Complete Rewiring of Planet Nomads Continues
A significant work-time was spent on the Golden Manager, which is a complete rework of how the game code works internally - we are aiming for a module-based code, which enables a seamless addition of features in the future.
It is a somewhat painful period, because on the outside it may seem as no progress is being made, yet the benefits will be tenfold. Especially modders will appreciate the systematic approach used with the Golden Manager. We are trying to approach the dev work as if we were modders ourselves already.
Alpha Nomads are hungry for new updates and content to be added to the alpha. The thing is, everything's changed. It will take time to get the current developer version of Planet Nomads to the level of alpha and then to start building atop of that again.
Visual Sugarcoating of the Sky
Not everyone have their hands tied with the Golden Manager however! We've created a realistic atmospheric scattering. It takes into account the position of the player and the sun angle, so we can realistically portray sunset or sunrise and everything in between, whether you are looking from the ground or from space. We can also change the wave-length of the sunlight, allowing for colorful skies quite different from the Earth experience.
It takes some imagination to see the power of the atmosphere in these static images, but wait till you see it in the game, Nomads.
Visual Sugarcoating of the Ground
Another improvement comes with the upcoming triplanar PBR shader we're going to use on ground textures. It works on spherical planets and uses vertex paint for better blending between voxels. We'll use texture array from Unity 5.4 in addition to our noise textures and distance-based tiling and the final result looks way better than the current ground known from alpha.
Again, the newly gained plasticity and roughness of the terrain is best experienced in the game.
Game Design, Survival, Crafting, Skills
Besides technical improvements, we realize we are first and foremost creating a game and are constantly overthinking how Planet Nomads should play, then confronting all the ideas in team meetings.
Everything is still subject to change, but for now we have settled on activity-based skills which improve as you build, craft, mine and explore and gets reset when you die - in order to minimize exploiting death as a teleportation system.
There will be multiple quality tiers for tools, building blocks and armor, and a special node-based upgrading of equipment. These ideas are still maturing and we'll present them in more detail as we have them.
If all goes well, we'll be showing you a cave system and more diverse topography in the Nomadic Journals next week.