April Development Update
Development work this April has continued to see the game coming together and many more people finding out about Nestables!
Development Progress
Compost UI and Mechanics
Last month we showed off a variety of new areas of gameplay including composting. As of this month, the compost system is fully operational, with the creation of UI and gameplay mechanics for it.
Compost material will be collected from a variety of different sources ingame. Initially, players will collect compost material from mushroom biomes where clumps of fungi and mushrooms will randomly spawn in the biome. The player can task their Nestable with collecting these mushroom clumps to add to the compost bin. In the future, a variety of other materials will be added to the compost system.
Compost will take a few days to be made in the bin. To get the maximum output from your compost bin, you must task your Nestable with turning it twice. There will be an ideal time window for turning the compost. Failing to turn the compost when required will result in less compost being generated. The compost can then be applied to your trees to get extra fruitings from them!
Updated UI
There has been quite a bit of updated UI added into Nestables this month.
The Nestable selection UI is now looking better than ever! Seeing this is one of the first bits of UI that players will see, it was important to set the tone for the quality of the game. This UI will be used when the player wants to add another Nestable to their Nest from their Enjin Wallet or when the user is just starting out and has to choose one of three Nestables to start playing with.
The shop UI has also been updated this month, bringing it inline with our other UI and implementing feedback that we received during the pre-alpha. We hope that the new layout will be significantly easier to navigate than the previous version and also much quicker to locate items. The drop-down menus will offer a variety of ways to narrow down your item searching.
Interaction and Animation Refactor
The final code refactor has been started — this time focussing on interactions and animations. Those that have used the pre-alpha would have noticed some issues with getting their Nestable to interact with the object you wanted sometimes. This work will improve a variety of different gameplay areas:
- Ability to select multiple farming plots for harvest in one go
- Some feedback to the player when tasking the Nestable with an activity (for example, highlighting the object that has been clicked on)
- Better interactions between Nestables if many of them are are using the same item at one time (for example, multiple Nestables using the slide toy that we showcased last month)
We will have some in-game footage to showcase these improvements next month!
JumpNet, Efinity and Nestables Integration
Unless you were living under a rock, chances are you would have seen the very exciting announcement of JumpNet this month — Enjin’s first scaling solution.
These scaling solutions are critical for Nestables, especially with our intention of being free-to-play so that as many people as possible can join in. JumpNet offers the first glimpse at how this will be possible. However, there are still a lot of finer but very important details to be worked out on how JumpNet will integrate with Nestables and existing items that have been minted.
For more on this, I highly recommend reading an article written by another Enjin Early Adopter, the amazing Cliff Cawley from Lost Relics.
Nestables Marketplace
Late last year, we showcased some early designs for the Nestables marketplace. The marketplace will be an important part of the game, allowing people to sell / rent / buy Nestables, sell / buy blueprints, wearables, skins and more.
While Enjin already has a marketplace, the Nestables Marketplace is designed just for Nestables. This will mean that it has many features to make it much easier to find items to buy and sell. After 4–5 months of steady work, the marketplace is nearly ready to be launched.
We understand that there won’t be much trading until we transition across to JumpNet / Efinity but think it is important to get the marketplace live so that people can see exactly how awesome it will be, get feedback from the community and fix any bugs. This will allow for a much smoother launch when everyone can trade without expensive gas fees.
The marketplace will not exchange fiat for ENJ on launch — but this is something that we will add later. Here is a small preview:
