Project Updates for Loftia - A cozy MMO game set in a relaxing solarpunk world on BackerKit Page 6

💌 Dev Update #7: Cooking stations, updated crops and new tools! 👩‍🍳🍰🌽🔨
over 2 years ago – Thu, Jul 04, 2024 at 12:40:39 AM

Welcome to yet another dev update Loftians!! 🤗 Grab a cozy beverage and come have a read of everything our team has worked on during June! We also want to thank everyone who voted on our rain barrel bot and sun designs on our last devlog! Rain barrel bot #2 was a clear favorite and we can't wait to bring him to life in the near future! ☀️🌧

Now onto our devlog for this past month, our artists have been a bit hungry - we've been cooking up a storm with new concepts and upgraded art assets for cooking stations and farming crops!

We know how excited everyone is about cooking, so we've spent some time brainstorming various ways that cooking can come to life in the game. Here are some of the initial cooking stations we designed:

Just a few of our cooking station concepts 👩‍🍳

We also spent time researching into many sustainable cooking methods and how we can best translate those techniques through gameplay, and one of the most unique and interesting innovations we came across is the Smog Free Tower by designed by Daan Roosegaarde. The 7-meter tall SMOG FREE TOWER uses patented positive ionisation technology to produce smog free air in public spaces, allowing people to breathe and experience clean air. It is equipped with environment-friendly technology, cleans 30,000 m3 per hour and uses a small amount of green electricity.

"It's like a giant vacuum cleaner," explains Roosegaarde. The sucking tower absorbs the smog from the volume of a football stadium within one and a half days and creates - depending on the air circulation - up to 70% clean air.

Inspired by this technology, we thought about how this concept of air recycling can be applied to smoke as well, which lead to the design of our very own smoke recycling cooking station:

The top funnel and canisters represents a smoke recycler!

We'll be continuing to iterate on this design and integrating this concept in our gameplay, so stay tuned for another update on this soon! In the meantime, let us know what you think of this design and what kind of basic recipes you would expect to cook in the beginning! 🤔

But what's cooking without ingredients to cook with? Our artists have also been improving the look and aesthetic of our farming related assets. Starting with seed packets! We've changed the way our seed bag looks so that it fits more in line with our overall theme. These 2D versions will be used in the game UI, such as your inventory.

Likewise, we've also improved on our 2D icons for these various fruits and veggies:

As well as the fully grown version of these crops:

And finally, this means we've also improved upon the 3D models! This screenshot below showcases a before and after version of our tomato crop. We've made the model more aligned with the toy-like aesthetic of our game, with brighter colors and rounder shapes.

Our tomatoes are looking big and juicy now 🍅

Tools 🔨

In Loftia, tools will be one of the main ways for players to interact with the 3D space around them. Some activities like harvesting crops, salvaging for resources and going on group adventures will be gated by having the proper tool equipped, paving the way for different layers of progression for each feature. A main priority for us though is to make sure that players have a satisfying and joyful experience with tools, which is why we're focusing on iterating on animations, timings and the feeling of impact.

These are some of initial animation concepts that we designed:

A first concept pass of our tool animations

We want our animations to feel satisfying and appropriate, but also with a tinge of playfulness and silliness - we're a cute cozy game after all! The process of animating takes a lot of time and iterations though, it's a very specific skill that we'd love to shed more light on in our future devlogs as we make further progress. But we do have a few early examples of what we've built so far down below - so keep reading to find out!

The tools themselves is also an aspect that our art and design team have collaborated closely to create. The most basic motions that the player will be able to perform include salvaging, foraging and farming. Here are some of the initial tool designs we have in mind for these activities:

Our watering can is a recycled teapot! 🫖

As for how players will equip tools, we're experimenting with a simple tool wheel that will allow you to quickly and easily switch between different tools:

A test of our hammer tool for salvaging -- the animation and model is of course just placeholder! Previously, salvaging was handled in salvage nodes where you simply interact with the node on the ground with a key press to pick it up. Adding in a tool that you are actually swinging and aiming makes it feel way more engaging as you gather up resources.

Animation and models are just placeholders!

Engineering ⚙️

In engineering land, our focus for the last month has been around core game systems -- iterating and refining how they work. Everything here is hugely work in progress, of course! We often use temporary or placeholder art assets in our first pass when working on things, as the art team is finishing making things beautiful on their end.

First up, we added some nice snapping set ups on crop planters for irrigation systems:

And then, some exploration of a really neat drip-water irrigation system to give your growing plants just the water they need, a little bit at a time.

How cool are our drip irrigation systems!

We also refactored (changed!) our quest system based on what we learned from building out a quick questline for our last milestone. Before, we simply had Quests and Quest Parts, and have now added in a middle layer, a Quest Step. This will let us group bunches of Quest Parts into a Step for better clarity and organization for the player. We also updated a whole bunch of the ways you interact with the Quest system -- triggering next stages of things in dialogue, checking whether various parts of your quests are completed. It is all easier and more streamlined than it was before.

The last big item to talk about is our Daily Cycle -- we have hooked things up so that time will pass during the game, and the world can change and crops can grow based on each interval passing. Right now, we have morning, afternoon, evening and night time, but the system is set up to let us super easily configure exactly what we have. Each day, we get new weather affecting Loftia, which currently lasts for the whole day. Sounds pretty simple and straightforward, right? Not when you are dealing with multiple servers across multiple times zones, starting up and shutting down all the time, having to coordinate and make sure they are all running the same weather and time of day at once!

Community 🌱

Just last week our Community Manager Sai held a beginners crochet class live stream for those interested in learning how to crochet - thank you to everyone who attended! If you weren't able to catch the stream, we have a recording of it on our YouTube.

We have even more fun events and activities planned for our community in June - including another fun art event 🎨 -so make sure to join our Discord server to come hang out with us and other Loftians!

Bug of the month 🐞

Who needs a hammer when you can be the hammer?

Love from the Loftia Team 💛

✨ Instagram ✨ Twitter ✨ TikTok ✨ Discord ✨

💌 Dev Update #6: The sun, moon and stars! ☀️🌙✨
over 2 years ago – Sat, Jun 01, 2024 at 05:43:16 AM

Hello Loftians, welcome to another dev update!! We can't believe we're already closing in on the midpoint of the year. We hope everyone in the northern hemisphere is looking forward to the warm, summery months to come, while folks in the southern hemisphere are snuggling up for the cooler, crisp days. And while seasons don't officially exist in Loftia yet, our team has been working hard to build the many environments of our cozy world - and that includes the starry sky above us! Keep on reading to find out what we've been up to 🤗

Art 🎨

This month our artists have become a little obsessed with the sky! From the moon, to the sun, to the stars, we've been exploring ways to make our experience in Loftia aesthetically pleasing no matter which direction you look.

For our sun, we've come up with a few different concepts. Let us know which sun you like the best in the comments below!

And of course if there's a sun, then there's a moon. Do you notice anything special? 👀

That moon crater looks oddly familiar...

And finally, we have the stars. We've always dreamed of having Loftia's night sky be filled with dazzling sparkles with a story to tell. So we've created some cute constellations to twinkle above us. We'd love to design a few of these with our community in the future too!

What other constellations should we add?

That's not all we have for art though! On the 3D side, we've been continuing to turn our concepts into beautiful assets for the game, and one recent addition we're particularly proud of is our new rain barrel! Rain barrels collect and store rainwater from rooftops via gutters and downspouts, allowing the water to be used for later - a great way to conserve water resources and be more sustainable.

We decided to go an extra mile and create some extra adorable rain water barrel bots that will assist you with your farming needs. Here are a few concepts of these bots!

And here's the 3D render of one of them! We can't wait to bring more of these eco-friendly bots to life!

Game design 🎮

We’ve spent the last month working on our core gameplay loop - exploring systems and mechanics to solidify a successful testing experience that will build the framework for Loftia in the future. These are early, compact looks at how the player is going to move through the game: farming, gathering, crafting, upgrading tools, unlocking new areas and setting their own goals as they go. With your feedback, this will help us determine if what we’re doing is going to work.

The design team’s approach to that is to build a “first act” of sorts, kicking off the major individual features that guide the player for a couple of hours, up until unlocking the first new area. This first act is meant to be a starting scope for Alpha, which we’re also aiming to expand upon as we evaluate its playtime and effectiveness. As with any game’s design, we’re taking inspiration from the genre’s standards, while also bringing in ideas and constraints unique to our own theme and goals. The core of our work is finding ways for every feature and concept to connect, make sense, and come together in the world of Loftia.

Farming may not be the best life choice for everyone but hay, it’s in our genes! 👨🏼‍🌾 Farming is going to be one of the core gameplay activities in Loftia. We believe the act of caring fits nicely with Loftia’s worldbuilding, and we want to make sure we capture that familiar cozy feeling while also trying to provide an experience that ties into our solarpunk aesthetic; from the tools you use to the upgrades you make, and how the crops grow over time! When the crops are ready to pull, how do we want it to look? How will we even know when they’re ready? For that, we’re toying with the idea of a 4-phase day-night cycle in the world of Loftia: Sunrise, Day, Sunset, and Night. After so much time has passed, your crops will be ready for harvest. This day-night cycle affects the world around you just as much as it affects your crops and gardens. Do certain shops close earlier? Are some of the NPCs somewhere they aren’t normally? Is there maybe a cute little activity you can do with friends based on the time of day? What sort of critters do you think you’ll find at sunrise or sunset? 👀

We’re also testing some major things on core gameplay actions: we know Loftia has plenty of technological-looking workstations and systems, but collecting resources is mostly going to be done via active tools in 3D space. Whether that’s watering your crops, pummelling a scrap pile to dust with a hammer, or using some pruners to carefully gather wild plants, every little detail needs to be conceptualized, detailed and iterated upon until it reaches a fine level of quality. At its core, we wanted to emphasize that it remains familiar and fun. Maybe we’ll have some more sneaky peeps on some of that in the next blog post 👀

These cute little doodles are courtesy of our lead game designer, Felipe!

Feedback Forum - NPCs 💬

Our feedback forums have been a massive success and a joy for the team to read. You all have the best ideas and getting to hear your thoughts is invaluable to our team. This month we talked about a variety of topics with you all, but NPCs was a HUGE hit! Thanks to your feedback, we have been exploring the pros and cons of the gaming world's characters and hearing from you all what you liked best. While we can't implement every feature that has been request or remove every discontent, the feedback you have given us has been hugely instrumental as we continue to develop our beloved Loftian characters.

Lore

So how exactly did Loftia come about? What makes it special? When is the game set? Well, we can't answer all those questions just yet, but what we can tell you is that our team has been hard at work fleshing out in more detail the big story of Loftia... you'll have to let the anticipation excite your curiosity. What are you theories about Loftia? We'd love to hear them!

Engineering 🛠

While our design team is hard at work coming up with new gameplay for us to build, we took a good chunk of this last month to work on general technical infrastructure and technical debt. What is technical debt? It is kind of just like real debt -- sometimes, it makes sense to take a shortcut to get something working quickly, like for the important demo build we were creating last month! But code that isn't designed to last and expand will cause more and more problems over time, slowing down development - similar to interest piling up on real debt. So, it is always good to take some time whenever it is available to burn down that debt, refactoring things to make them sustainable for the long term.

For example, some of the animations we had set up for player emotes like waving, actions like sprinting and gliding, and more were all set up individually, without using a common unified system. Each time, we would have to handle things like network prediction, linking the animations to inputs, restoring the prior character state after the animation finishes, etc. That's a lot of stuff to handle, each and every time you want to build a new feature! Luckily, Unreal provides the Gameplay Ability System for cases just like this, and we were able to implement it and shift a bunch of stuff to use this framework. Now, we just plug in what we need, and let the system handle the rest - faster to build on, more reliable, and easier for designers to understand. Making GAS work well in our system takes more work than implementing any one or two of these animations, but will save us a lot of time in the long run.

We also worked on a bunch of more general technical infrastructure pieces, such as:

Upgrading to Unreal 5.4, check out all the cool new stuff it can do!
Implement Cross-Server Chat - before, you could only talk with other players within the same server instance. Now, you can chat with your buddies even while you are at your player island home and they are off on an adventure!
Refactor a lot of hard-references in code to soft-references, reducing our memory footprint and overall load times.
Drag-and-drop of inventory items
Menu enhancements - better volume controls, mute in background
Accessibility Controls - Toggle sprint
Ability to have crafting recipes locked, and then unlocked for the player by acquiring the recipe.

Please note that the UI/UX here is not final

The most exciting news we have, though, is all our new faces! Two new full time engineers started over the last few weeks, and we have some fantastic interns joining us for the summer, to learn how we build games. We can't wait to share with you all the cool things they come up with!