preAlpha Sandbox Map is Under Construction

First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who has supported me in the development of this project. Your support fills me with hope and drive to complete this game to the best of my abilities. I am happy to announce that we’ve began working on the preAlpha sandbox map that Patreon supporters will have access to before the game is complete. A lot of work is going into this map because I want to thank supporters by giving them an expansive and rich world to explore while we wait for the final version of the game.

This map will also be available in the final version of the game as a map that players can play around on, completely separate from the story. We’re doing a lot of experimenting and are learning a lot in regards to constructing a large-scale open world. We’re still developing this world with an image of the North in mind, so it will be reminiscent of the environment found in the final game, though it will not be representative of any area in the game. As a matter of fact, some areas of this map are based on the landscape of a local park from the real world.

As you can see from the screenshots in this post, we’re still working on sculpting the terrain, which is a rather involved task. These particular screenshots are of the preAlpha when it had it’s first sculpting pass complete. Sculpting this terrain is done in a few different steps; a base sculpting pass that you can see above is where terrain is blocked in, then a detail pass is done that adds noise to the environment, simulating erosion and creating more dynamic landscapes. The first pass has taken approximately 15 hours of work, and we’re projecting the detail pass to take around the same amount of time.

Though we still have a lot of backend work to do, such as AI writing, finishing up our menus, player character work, redesigning our inventory and sandbox building interfaces and logic, as well as character animations on top of small tweaks here and there to our weather system, a preAlpha release finally seems within grasp.



We’re also planning on changing Patreon pay tiers around as we approach launch of the preAlpha map. Don’t worry though if you fall into new a pay tier that doesn’t correspond with your original pay tier’s rewards. When we make the change, you will receive an email that notifies you of such and you will be logged as being a legacy supporter in our records. This means that you’ll still maintain the previous rewards that you were promised, in addition to any new rewards if applicable.

Thank you so much for your support! You’re all amazing.

Nvidia Ansel Support!

(Let's go ahead and preface this post with a little notice: Those are nowhere near representative of the quality of tree-like organic structures that will appear in the game. I acknowledge they look like garbage. I actually just had a fun time writing a script to randomly generate some trees since everyone has been having a giggle at the "Minecraft trees" shown in earlier development. After generating the core of the tree, I slapped some random materials that kind of look like they belong there. This is not at all representative of what will be in the final game. In fact, it took me around 5 minutes to make these where I've spent hours working on the dirt that you see covering the landscape.)

I recently came across a particular tool that Nvidia has released. By the time of this post, only 28 games, not including V:SotN, have implemented this tool. It's called Ansel, and it's pretty neat.

Players are able to press a hotkey combination (by default, ALT+F2) and activate the Ansel overlay. While in the Ansel overlay, players can use their mouse (while holding LMB) to look around and WASD keyboard controls to fly a freecam around the game world. Z and X will change the height of the camera, and you and hold SHIFT to accelerate any translational movements.

So what is the point of the freecam? Can't that be used for cheating? Yes, but that isn't what it is for. (And there is a limit as to how far away you can fly from your character.) Using Ansel, you are able to take screenshots of the game from interesting perspectives. While taking screenshots, you're also able to adjust different filters such as contrast, brightness, sketch filters, etc. All of these effects aren't applied in post processing but are actually applied to the game itself, making for better looking image adjustments.

You're also able to change the resolution of the screenshots and the type of screenshot you're taking. For example, we're able to do cool stuff like what you see below. This tool will be employed so development team members can get a better feel of the area that is shown to them so they can provide better feedback, and this will also be used to document different areas in the game. Click and drag the image to look around the 360-degree panorama. The square icon will enter fullscreen. You can also view this using an HMD.