July Development Update

Tribal Gaming
6 min readJul 31, 2021

July has been another productive month for the team! Some members took a small break but everyone is now back and hard at work. We are genuinely surprised at the level of interest in Nestables and hope to have something to showcase to everyone before the end of the year.

Development Progress

As we covered last month, development is currently focussing on two keys areas of gameplay:

  • Interior decoration system
  • Nestable breeding + Baby Nestable system

We still have are after community thoughts on the question we post last month in the development update:

ONE QUESTION for the community. If two Nestables breed, (one Nestable belongs to you and another with a friend) which Nest does the baby Nestable belong to? Let us know in the comments below or on our Telegram!

Building Selection + House Interior Design

We showed some early images of the interior design system last month for Nestables. There has been significant progress on this with the addition of:

  • Functioning UI
  • Improved shader system to add greater depth to the rooms
  • Fully implemented object placing
  • Improvements to changing wall colours / textures and floors

All of the models from last month have also been touched up to provide crisper lines and improved shapes. In the future, we plan for players to be able to create their own furniture models to incorporate into the game and potentially sell on the marketplace as NFTs. This should dramatically increase the quality, quantity and personalisation for the game.

The addition of shaders to add shadow / more depth have really increased the level of detail for the interiors. Down the bottom of the image above, you can see the icons for the furniture. We are now able to auto-generate these images which opens up a whole array of possibilities into the future, especially for user-generated content. It also saves us a considerable amount of time.

Next month, we hope to have a video ready to show everyone the interior system in action!

Finally, UI has been completed to allow users to allocate the purpose of a building. There will be three options to choose from as shown below:

Once the type of building is selected, players will then allocate a Nestable responsible for that building.

We want your ideas!

A key aim for Nestable has always been to allow players the maximum amount of customisation and personalisation for their Nests. We would love the community to suggest themes for sets that players will use to decorate the interior of their homes. Currently we have:

  • Default theme — Furniture that will be used for a tutorial
  • Country theme
  • Bohemian theme
  • Modern theme

Fill out the form below to suggest your ideas!

Nestable Breeding + Baby Nestable System

In our previous post, we updated the community on breeding mechanics for Nestables — with a few slight tweaks to the system that we have announced previously. Work continued this month on implementing a roll system to determine which traits a Nestable has based on its parents, along with making sure that trait mixing would work for all potential scenarios.

Today we will take you through an animated gif story of the progress so far. This will give you an overview of the basic system — clearly there is still work to be done on the UI, gameplay and polish.

#1 — Users will click on the Egg to see a countdown until the Nestable can hatch. In the future, eggs will be looked after in the Nursery.
#2 — The traits of the two parent Nestables are displayed. Users click roll to decide which traits will carry across to the younger Nestables. The Nestable with the higher roll carries across their trait.
#3 — The outcome of the first roll is displayed. Another roll then occurs to determine if the trait level is decreased or increased. A 1 roll decreases the trait strength by 1, 2–5 has no effect, 6 increases the trait strength by 1. The second trait rolls then occur.
#4 — The process is repeated for the second trait. A third roll is for Founder’s Nestables only to see if the Productivity Master Trait is carried across to the baby Nestable.
#5 — Just like that, we have a baby Nestable!

There are also a variety of other permutations from this system which we have worked through this month so that there are no potential bugs!

A trait mutation is where the baby Nestable has a trait that neither parents hold. This will allow us to introduce new traits in the future. A mutation occurs if there are two draw rolls in a row.
A special trait will only carry across if both parents have the same trait and roll a 6 each.

Development this month also saw the completion of the UI for the making teas — which will be integrated with the breeding system soon.

Astounding Reaction to Pre-Alpha

Back in March we released our pre-alpha as free-to-play for everyone, regardless of if they had access to a Founder’s Nestable or Token. We have been extremely surprised at the size of community interest in this extremely early version of the game. As a project, we have made quite a deliberate decision not to advertise Nestables until we have a finished version of the game that everyone can play for free. To this extent, we really only do one tweet a month to advertise the publishing of the development update. Still, thousands of people have downloaded and played the free pre-alpha.

We understand that other games have been integrating a variety of blockchain aspects into their projects. At this stage, we are happy with the level of blockchain integration that Nestables has. The priority has always been to have the widest level of adoption possible and a free-to-play approach for this. There is no intention to sell land or integrate other blockchains into Nestables. Enjin do a remarkable job at achieving mass adoption of their projects by designing them in a way that anyone can use them. This is demonstrated by what they have achieved in the blockchain world so far with their wallet and other user friendly initiatives such as the marketplace. We have previously talked in earlier Medium posts about creating an internal currency called Cubits — which will allow players to purchase cosmetics and other items from the official Nestables store. This is still something that we are exploring and will update the community as required. Clearly, since Nestables was first announced, there has been significant changes in blockchain technologies, so the potential for expanding the use of Cubits is there.

There is clearly considerable interest in blockchain gaming / NFTs currently and we are working hard on delivering Nestables as soon as possible without compromising on the level of quality or vision of the game that we have.

We are excited to keep you as a community informed of our development progress. Until the next post, you can stay tuned with our progress via our Telegram & Twitter and don’t forget to clap if you have liked what you have read above!

~ Tribal Gaming

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