Patch 0.2.1.1 is now available for testing on the public test version.
Main features
Hang gliders
Equipment
More tutorial quests
Performance improvements & more graphics options
Gameplay
Added hang gliders (put them in your action bar and use them with right mouse button while the slot is selected to glide over the world)
Tailoring: Added recipes for cloth armor and for hang glider
Added equipment with stats like stamina and intellect, increasing your health and damage done. Secondary stats (critical hit, haste, dexterity, and willpower) do not work yet.
Added more tutorial quests that involve visiting planet(s) and crafting
All enemies now can drop random equipment
Items received from quests, crafting and world drops can be enhanced, up to +5
Equipment will be bound to the character when equipped, with some items being bound on pickup
NPCs should now despawn and respawn after being defeated
Mana now regenerates slowly when hunger is 0
Items that are bound to the character can now be destroyed (in the future, all other items can be dropped or traded with other players, but that is not yet implemented)
Graphics
Added shadow quality settings
Potential performance improvements
Technical
Fixed bags in inventory window not displayed correctly when bags were in non-consecutive slots
Fixed diffuse lighting when shadows are turned off
Added support for projected textures (currently unused)
Fixed post processing scaling
[PT] Alpha 0.2.1
Patch 0.2.1 is now available for testing on the public test version.
Main features
New weapon type: Sword
Tutorial quests
Performance improvements
Gameplay
New weapon type: Sword
New abilities
[Sword] Strike: Strikes the target, the player gains a stack of Furious, stacking up to 3
[Sword] Smash: Smashes the target, once for every stack of Furious, consuming all stacks
[Fire Staff] Flaming explosion: AoE, dealing 100% of the remaining damage of the target's burning effect + some additional damage to all enemies within 20 meters
You now automatically gain weapon experience for the weapon type currently equipped whenever you gain experience
Some quests now reward items
Added tutorial quests (partly)
New items and crafting recipes, especially bags for more inventory storage
Graphics
Universe now rendered in the background of the loading screen
Added option to render post processing effects in a lower resolution, resulting in about 25% and 50% more FPS for 0.5x and 0.25x, respectively
Fixed some self-shadowing issues
Particle effects
Changed wind elemental effect
New effect for Flaming explosion
User interface
Added automatic positioning of UI windows
Added abilities window (default key: J)
Added inventory window with character equipment and multiple bags
Added some filter options for crafting recipes
Improved ability tooltips
Added error messages when too far away, no target, not enough mana etc.
Technical
Fixed some edge cases of smooth ambient lighting
Added support for multiple ambient light colors
Improved light update delay
Shader performance optimizations
Fixed particle timing issue
Fixed damage amount displayed not being accurate in some cases
Fixed aborting casts not working properly
Fixed NPCs not turning towards the player when in melee range
Fixed NPC melee range not correct in some cases
Devlog #8: Pricing
Hello everyone! Today I'd like to talk about some decisions we had to make concerning pricing of the game.
We had to find a way to increase sales to speed up the development because the current sales (and wishlist additions) were not high enough to meet our goal of a December 2019 release that we promised. We therefore considered some options:
First of all, we could lower the price to increase the number of sold units. However, there are a lot of other cheap games on Steam and given that I alone invested something north of $250,000 (*1) worth of work into making this game already, I simply could not give it away for less than the current price of $8.99 (with the exception of discounts of course).
So the second option was to increase the price. We requested Valve to set it to $24.99, hoping this will make the game stand out a little bit more from all the other voxel games since we use a custom-made engine with very sophisticated optimizations to support orders of magnitude more blocks visible at the same time compared to other games. To be exact, it is something between 32x and 128x as many, depending on how exactly you compare it (*2). This is one thing that you will most likely not find in any other game because there are not that many people who could do these optimizations (mainly people who write graphics engines) and of those, probably no one will invest thousands of hours to make a game like this because they got a job that likely comes with a six-figure salary.
We know that the price increase is quite high, and as much as we would love to sell it to you for less than that, our top priority is developing the game so you enjoy it for many, many hours and we hope that this step helps us achieving that goal.
We also got feedback from friends who told us that they ignore games under $10, simply because there are a lot of bad or small games in that price range. We want people to know that this is not a small game and we will not rest until all the features mentioned in the description are implemented. In fact, we want to develop this game to a point where we can raise the price to $45 or more because you will spend hundreds of hours filled with fun and excitement in the game.
Footnotes:
Based upon the number of hours it took to develop the game and a reasonable salary in Germany.
512m render distance with 250m sea level compared to Minecraft with 256m render distance and 64m sea level gives 4x the number of blocks in X- and Z-direction and about 8x the number of blocks in Y-direction, for a total of 4*4*8 = 128x the number of blocks.
Devlog #7: Landing on the planets
Developer's log, stardate 18072.3: We may have discovered a new way to land on the planets. Our chief programmer is currently working on getting this done.
If you've watched Star Trek, you probably know they invented the teleporter because landings were too expensive to shoot back in the 1960's. I face a similar problem with Cube Universe: Teleporting to the planet and back to the ship is quite easy, but landing on the planet is challenging.
I had some time late at night while trying to fall asleep and thought about that idea. Was it possible at all? Landing on spherical planets, but with a block terrain? No Man's Sky had this feature, but they didn't use cubes. I recently discovered Seeds of Andromeda, but they used a different approach to deal with the distortions when mapping a rectangular grid onto a spherical planet. From what I understood, they used six faces of a cube and mapped them onto a sphere. But no matter how you do this, you will end up with problems at the edges, where three faces meet. And you will also end up with the problem that voxels need to get bigger the further they are away from the center of the planet.
Those problems were the reason to simply use a rectangular world, then mapped to the sphere that represents the planet when you look at it from the universe. Because of this though, you cannot simply fly to the planet and land without any kind of transition, i.e. a loading screen. Additionally, landing a big spaceship on a planet is quite a challenge, too.
Anyway, back to what came to my mind when I was awake, listening to the sounds of the night, staring into the sky and watching the stars as I thought about what would have happened if I just had said yes when I met... wait, that's not the story I want to tell here... Computer, delete the last paragraph.
So landing a big spaceship was not an option, but what about a small shuttlecraft? You could just hop into it, leave your spaceship and fly down to the planet. And all the way back. It is almost impossible to do this without any loading screen, but at least you will be able to fly down to the planet and land on a spot based on where you entered the atmosphere.
There are a few major things that have to be implemented in order for this to work:
Transitioning from the spaceship to the universe (and the other way around), probably the easiest part although the universe and the spaceship use different coordinate systems.
Level of detail system: When entering the atmosphere, you will spawn above the terrain's building height after the loading screen, meaning you will have to fly about 2 km down to the actual surface. In this time, you should see the surface, so there has to be some kind of LoD system in place since rendering the normal blocks is not feasible.
A shuttle is pretty fast and the voxel world doesn't load fast enough for collision detection while flying at high speeds. In most of the cases, this should not be a problem because you are slower when near to the ground, but if you fly at a height of 1 km, you may glitch through flying islands and tall buildings. Those are not implemented yet, but when they are, this may be a problem. There is probably a solution for this, maybe limiting horizontal speeds to something about 50 m/s (180 km/h, ~112 mph), while vertical speeds can exceed 150 m/s (540 km/h, 336 mph).
Additionally, there have to be markers so you know where to go to. And other small things may also take a lot of time to implement in total.
All of this combined is a big challenge, but I feel ready for it and I see no other way, because being able to teleport kind of ruins the game. Why build a base when you have your ship that you can teleport to quite easily? And how do you make dying feel like a bad thing when you can just teleport to your last location, even if you respawn at your base or on the ship? So clearly, teleporting has to be removed and replaced by landing on the planet.
Devlog #6: Working on update Alpha 0.2.1
Hi there! I just wanted to post an update on what I've been working on for the past weeks and some ideas I had regarding combat and other things.
UI: A lot of small improvements and additions, e.g. windows are now placed next to each other automatically, you can filter crafting recipes for materials available/increases skill level/not learned, a new inventory window including character equipment slots and multiple bags.
Some quests now award items.
Tutorial quests, currently only one where you have to choose a weapon, but more will be added, e.g. beam down to the planet, gather some ores to get a flashlight for cave exploration/night, etc.
Some improvements to the ambient lighting, including support for multiple light colors for light sources like torches or lava.
I finally decided on whether to support one-handed weapons: You will be able to use them, but the weapon in your main hand will determine your main specialization. You will be able to use a sword with something like a healing orb to deal damage and heal your allies simultaneously, or a fire staff with a sword to... well... you could use that in melee combat, but that wouldn't make much sense. The other way around though, you could empower your sword with electricity when carrying a nature staff in your offhand.
The loading screen looks better: The universe is now rendered as a background animation instead of just a black screen.
A lot of optimizations have been done to improve performance etc.
Weapon levels: Weapons will level with you character. Whenever your character gets experience, you will get the same amount on your weapon type, but it only needs 10% of your character's experience for a level. The weapon level determines the talents and abilities available on the weapon type and can't be higher than your character's level.
Animations: I'm still waiting for my graphics designer (who only works in his free time on this) to create at least one animation. Unfortunately, he has more experience in creating textures and marketing, but I'm already looking for a more experienced animator since I don't have the time to learn animating.
Unfortunately, all of this is not finished enough to be released as a new update, not even on the test branch - I'd need support for abilities based on the current weapon type, but as soon as that is implemented, there will be a new patch on the public test branch.
Devlog #5: What's next?
Hi everyone!
I just want to let you know that I'm working on some more major updates and therefore there will be less frequent updates in the near future. But now, let's talk about the plans for the next months and what needs to be done in order to implement them:
Animations
I have to confess, I procrastinated that part, simply because I had no one who could create animations - now that I have someone, they will be added soon.
Armor, weapons & hang gliders
These are things I can probably add in a short period of time. I need to improve the inventory for that and I want to add multiple bags slots, so you can craft or otherwise obtain bags for storing more items. I also need to add a way to first obtain different weapons (basically what a class selection would be in other games), for which I want to use kind of tutorial quests, which will replace the text tutorial with a little bit more interactive tutorial. With the different weapons will also come more abilities and a way to reorder them in the ability bar.
Enemy abilities
The enemies in the game currently only have an auto-attack. I want them to have different abilities, like ice creatures that unleash a blast of icy water or wind elementals that create little tornadoes that you have to avoid for obvious reasons (they hurt). I'm not sure when I'll find the time for that.
Quests
I have a lot of ideas for quests, but unfortunately, all of them require some other things to be implemented first. For example, I have ideas for quests that send you to lunar planets to gather Mithril ore and learn new recipes for Mithril armor from the blacksmith who sent you there.
I also want to have a quest line in the mushroom biome on the luminous planets, where you have some guards that got sick and you have to kill glowing dragon flies for their wings that have healing powers. With those, you can heal the guards and one of them tells you that an evil alchemist made them sick, so you have the quest to kill him.
In the snowy regions, there can be aggressive snowmen that drop magical snow (or something else) which starts a quest that sends you to a village to find someone who knows something about that snow. In the end, it leads to a dungeon with an evil ice witch who turned the villagers into snowmen.
Those are only a few ideas, but they all require villages or at least houses to make some kind of sense - and for that, I have to work on the structure editor, which I haven't gotten to yet.
The luminous planet
The luminous planet has most of the textures, but it needs some NPCs. Additional to those NPCs that our graphics designer can create, I need to improve the AI of the enemies so they not only find a path to the player but also can fly at a kind of constant height above the ground, which is useful for enemies like giant dragon flies.
Dungeons
On the technical side, the features mentioned above, especially villages, basically form the base for dungeons. I only need to add a way to have multiple instances of the world, but that's not a big challenge. And of course I need to add some mechanics for the bosses.
And now, regarding the system requirements...
System requirements
I just tested the game on a second PC with different graphics cards and adjusted the minimum and recommended system requirements accordingly. My test system is an old Core 2 Quad Q9650 and a GTX 560 Ti and it worked in 1080p with 30 FPS at minimum settings. I can see a lot of room for improvement in disabling some of the post-processing effects like ambient occlusion etc., but unfortunately, this requires a lot of work and I simply don't have the time for it at the moment.
As you can see, there is a lot of work ahead and I'm trying to add those things as fast as possible, but I can't do more than work on this all day, so I have to ask for patience. I hope you can understand that.
If you read this far, you probably like the game, so I'd like to ask you to share it with your friends/followers. It always helps to have more people who play the game and give feedback.
May the stars shine brightly upon you!
Alpha 0.2.0.38
Version 0.2.0.38 is now live and adds the following (including the changes previously made on the public test version):
Gameplay
Added critical hits (with 10% chance)
Damage amount now displayed on screen
Fixed fire ticking damage not added correctly
Added sprinting with double-pressing forward (if you don't want to hold shift all the time)
Added flashing yellow screen border on low hunger
Added flashing red border when receiving damage (can be turned off in settings)
Added/fixed local (planet) and say chat
Added craft all button
Graphics
Added support for blocks glowing in the dark - currently only used by mushroom gills and luminous planks
Higher render distances up to 1024m are now available in the settings, but they require a very high-end PC
Added render scale option (SSAA), currently does not work well for stars when set to greater than 1
Added specular lighting
Added smooth ambient lighting (needs to be activated in the settings if you've previously started the game, lighting may not work correctly at chunk borders yet). The options "smooth", "smoother", and "smoothest" determine the resolution at which the ambient lighting is rendered, but the result does not differ in most cases.
Fixed ambient lighting update sometimes turning the whole chunk dark when blocks are placed or removed
More fixes for ambient lighting rendering
Technical
Improved loading and unloading times
Fixed NPCs not correctly cancelling the interaction with the player when a quest is accepted/completed
Fixed damage amount not "random enough"
Added sliders for field of view, music volume, and environment volume
Optimized shadows (not sure if it's actually faster, but it's definitely not slower)
The universe seed is now saved in a separate file to make it possible to fix savegames in case something goes horribly wrong (e.g. PC crash due to overheating).
[PT] Alpha 0.2.0.37
We've just released a new version on the public test (PT) branch:
Gameplay
Added critical hits (with 10% chance)
Damage amount now displayed on screen
Fixed fire ticking damage not added correctly
Graphics
Added support for blocks glowing in the dark - currently only used by mushroom gills and luminous planks
Higher render distances up to 1024m are now available in the settings, but they require a very high-end PC
Added render scale option (SSAA), currently does not work well for stars when set to greater than 1
Fixed ambient lighting update sometimes turning the whole chunk dark when blocks are placed or removed
More fixes for ambient lighting rendering
Technical
Improved loading and unloading times
Fixed NPCs not correctly cancelling the interaction with the player when a quest is accepted/completed
Fixed damage amount not "random enough"
[PT] Alpha 0.2.0.36
We've just released a new version on the public test (PT) branch:
Added smooth ambient lighting (needs to be activated in the settings if you've previously started the game, lighting may not work correctly at chunk borders yet). The options "smooth", "smoother", and "smoothest" determine the resolution at which the ambient lighting is rendered, but the result does not differ in most cases.
Added sprinting with double-pressing forward (if you don't want to hold shift all the time)
Added flashing yellow screen border on low hunger
Added/fixed local (planet) and say chat
Added sliders for field of view, music volume, and environment volume
Optimized shadows (not sure if it's actually faster, but it's definitely not slower)
The universe seed is now saved in a separate file to make it possible to fix savegames in case something goes horribly wrong (e.g. PC crash due to overheating).
Smooth lighting before & after:
Free demo now available & Patchnotes
A free demo is now available! It includes the whole game, but is limited to 3 hours per character.
We may add more restrictions for multiplayer servers in the future, for example not being able to use certain chat features to reduce spamming.
Additionally, the game has been updated to version Alpha 0.2.0.32.
Patchnotes for Update Alpha 0.2.0.32
Added a map option to show day and night on the planet
Added settings for field of view and music/environment volume
Fixed switching tabs in universe map
Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented the game from loading on minimum viewing distance
