June Development Update
Things are starting to come together! The past month has seen a solid amount of progress for Nestables with many different aspects of the project coming together. Let’s dive into the June dev update!
Development Progress
Building Editor
This month has seen the start of some polish being applied to the current game features. The building editor in particular has seen a variety of changes to make it more user-friendly. We have applied a new texture mapping for the building editor to make the paints apply better to building parts. This has made a noticeable difference, making the application of paints more consistent.
To give a greater range of flexibility for the paints, we have introduced a colour selector similar to our wearables system. This added level of customisation brings a whole new array of possibilities to the building editor.
Other changes include options to be able to completely wipe the building area, responsive part controls (which make it much easier to edit smaller parts) and some other ease of use changes.
Stay tuned this month for potentially a small surprise in this area!
Other Development Progress
We have now synced the wearables to our API, meaning that when you login to the game, it will now check what wearables are stored in your Enjin Wallet.
Offline game progress is now fully functional. This is a very important step for us as it brings us much closer to be able to do internal testing before the alpha. This feature allows for the Cubes to continue to work while the user isn’t logged into the game. For example, crops will continue to grow, progress would continue on research tasks and materials like wood are still collected.
This month we also implemented two new toys into the game to give a bit more variety for the upcoming alpha. These include a trampoline and coits.
Notes For Nestables
Our fantastic sound designer and composer, Adam Frost, has another update for us:
In last month’s update we revealed a couple of pieces of music that I had written and produced for Nestables. Apparently the response was decent enough that I am back again to share something new with you. So here goes…
This month’s offering is a little different in that the music is an excerpt from a work-in-progress, still at a rough-ish stage, so it will be interesting to hear some feedback from the Nestables community.
We decided that with two pieces already in the bag, this would be a good time to experiment a little with the overall mood and tone of the soundtrack. This piece has quite a different instrumentation from those in last month’s update. Most notable is the addition of some fairly prominent strings, sampled playing in a spiccato style (a technique in which the bow is bounced on the string), along with a handful of electronically generated sounds that contribute some rhythmic and textural flourishes to the arrangement.
During the passage you’ll hear in the video, a couple of new instruments enter the arrangement (some more subtly than others) every four bars. Unlike the two tracks from last month, none of the instruments are ‘doubling up’ (i.e. playing the same part of the music in unison) — they all contribute their own different figures, and hopefully each adds something to the cumulative rhythmic and melodic interest. The string part enters early, at the forefront of the mix, and has a key role in underpinning both the rhythm and the harmony of the piece. The melody becomes fully fleshed out with the addition of a pair of xylophones four bars later. The low-end is provided by a plain and simple string bass, and a choppy bongo beat helps to keep everything bouncing along throughout.
Social Media and Community Engagement
This month we moved to posting regular updates, recaps and facts on Nestables via our Twitter. This was something the community requested — so hopefully we have met your expectations! The intention is to keep promoting Nestables, raise awareness and hopefully improve marketplace prices.
Our new regular posting saw an increase in tweet impressions of 142.2% with a steady increase in followers over the course of the month. If this is something you would like us to keep doing, let us know in the comments below, via Twitter or our Telegram.
Nestables Alpha
If you have have closely read the development update above, you would realise that we are not far from an alpha at all. In fact, I am confident that within a month we will have a specific date for the start of the closed alpha. The first alpha will be for those who hold a Nestables Founder’s token. The intention will be to get feedback on the current gameplay, balancing and bug reports.
