Five weeks. Five weeks. It’s only five short weeks until we give you the first chance to play Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder. It’s scary and exciting at the same time!
So we’re participating in the Steam Summer Demo Festival, which starts on the 16th of June.
This week we’re finishing the last feature needed for the demo: the tutorial. It’s also the first time we’re implementing the voice lines for Clayton. Fun to see and hear the fellow come to life. For testing the tutorial, I am recruiting the few people in the company who haven’t played CD2 yet. The tutorial has to be quick, non-intrusive and explicit in teaching the essentials to a new player, be they complete noobs or pro gamers.
So starting from next week it’s polish, bug fix, polish, bug fix and polish some more. Everything needs to be done better and iterated upon until we’re satisfied.
The demo will contain the first biome and a subset of the tools – pickaxe, revolver, dynamite and the scanner. It will have multiplayer on Steam. Also we’re doing an in-game bug reporting tool so we can have instant feedback from the players, following the example from SubNautica. EasyJira is an useful plugin for this.
In other news, our topworld is taking shape. Justus found a way to bake our mountains into the skybox – basically allowing us to have any amount of detail in the background without any performance losses. Another useful plugin we found is PolyFew, which automatically creates LODs for game objects, as shown in this video.
We have started internal testing on progression and balance now that we have all the content in. Another fun moment this week was having crossplay between PSVR, Quest, Rift and Steam builds. Photon worked right out of the box on PSVR once we got the basic porting done.
That’s the news from the mines this week!
-Kharan (Jaakko Asikainen)
Random development quote: “Tää on hyvä kun joku muu hoitaa grumpyn old manin roolia“.
