May — October Dev Update
Hello everyone! It has been quite a while since our last development update. This is not without good reason. For those of you who are in our Telegram channel, you would be aware that the development of Nestables has still been proceeding but the work being done hasn’t lent itself to being ‘shown off’ in our regular updates.
In the past few months, Enjin have announced the Enjin Blockchain. There was additional information published today on the migration of existing Ethereum based NFT’s across to their new blockchain. All of Nestable’s current NFTs are based on Ethereum for the originally ENJ currency. We are currently assessing these changes and looking at how it will be integrated into Nestables.
Development Progress
The tea station and compost bin can now be upgraded with “upgrade tokens”. These tokens are created in the furnace from raw gold. Upgrading the tea station allows for additional tea slots. Alternatively, they can also be used to increase the capacity of the compost bin, allowing for a greater amount of compost to be generated from the same amount of work. As previously announced, they will continue to be used to upgrade fridge sizes as well.
Compost turning and foraging is now semi — automatic, with the Nestables approaching these tasks the same as farming currently, where they will move onto the next compost turn or forage automatically. This work has involved some changes to the Nestables AI where the Nestable will see out new opportunities to do the same task.
Implemented research and unlearn tokens. A research token can be used to upgrade a single research topic by one point. An unlearn token can be used to convert a single research branch into research tokens. These tokens are awarded when the Nestable becomes an adult. Both are awarded when the Nestable becomes an adult, the amount depends on the number of rolls the juvenile nestable earns during childhood.
Buildings made in the building editor now act as decorations, increasing all rating regeneration and resilience for any nearby nestable. The more expensive the building is, the greater the effect.
Changes have been made to how Nestables inherit a colour pattern from their parent. The system has been improved so that the colour patterns properly mix and there is slightly more randomisation given to the assigned patterns.
New Shaders
One of the larger aspects of development work over the past few months has been the move to a new shaders system for the game. Updating our Unity version required the replacement of our old system and has brought about a number of potential improvements. Here are some before and after images of the new shaders in action.
Overall, the new shaders allow for a more realistic feel to Nestables while keeping the fun cartoony style of the game. Their introduction has also allowed us to update the areas of the map that are currently unexplored with a fog, to make it clearer that those areas can be discovered through researching:
Bug Fixes & Smaller Tweaks
- Added selection arrows to Fridge UI so you can toggle between which Nestable is selected when you add food to their fridge
- Add logic to game system for tracking multiple fridges and fix an error with different food slots
- Add logic to game system for changing Nestable selection directly from Inventory UI
- Update inventory UI (add nestable selection change arrows to it)
- Nestables can now be selected directly from the dressing, inventory and other UIs
- Fix issue with Breeding UI traits panel text and image overlapping
- All of the UI has been updated and scaled to fit the following aspect ratios: 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10. This should allow the UI to transfer across any device and stretch correctly.
- A lot of other fixes, UI upgrades, balance tweaks, QOL improvements and performance optimizations.
