October Development Update
October was a busy month for the team — not much visual progress to show but plenty of work has been done behind the scenes to allow for some of the final important parts of gameplay to come together.
Development Progress
Improved Fruit Trees
For those that have played the very early pre-alpha version of Nestables, you would have seen that many areas of gameplay needed to be expanded with significant depth to be added to them.
Work has been done this month on improving the Fruit tree system in Nestables. Planting trees and harvesting their produce now closer resembles what happens in real life. Once planted, the tree will start off as a sapling and over time, grow into a full size tree. Once grown, the info timer will then change to display the time until you can harvest the tree’s produce.
In the pre-alpha, once a tree’s produce was harvested, it would then be a timed event until you could harvest once again. Now, once a tree fruits, compost will need to be applied to the tree for it to fruit again. We talked a bit more about how to collect and create compost in some of our earlier development updates.
Refactoring for Future Resources
Development time over the past month has also been spent on generalising Nestable interaction and classifying the various objects that they interact with. The purpose of this is so that the Nestable AI can be expanded to new items, tasks etc without having to write specific code to allow the AI to interact with them. This will save a lot of time in the future when new content is added to the game and hopefully reduce any potential bugs from the AI.
On the left, is a very technical screenshot. You can see the more complex parts of the code in red, being replaced with the new parts in green.
Updated Seed UI + Planting System
Our old seed planting UI has been replaced this month to bring it up to standard with the rest of the game. We are slightly changing the mechanics for this as well. Now, when users click on a farm plot to plant something, users will buy the seeds directly from the market. This means that there will not be any seeds stored in the Nest inventory. The intention of this is so that players don’t have any excess seeds saved in their inventory — something that is particularly important for crop types that might be on a rotation / in the game for a limited time only.
Wood Types
In August we talked about the brand new wood types that were being added to the game to fit into our different resources per biome aim.
The code for harvesting the different types of wood has been implemented this month and we are currently waiting on new models so that the player has a visual cue as to what wood resource will be collected. The intention is to change the base mode of the wood chopping block to the type of wood that is being collected.
General Polish
Finally, we have also started polishing a number of different gameplay areas. A large proportion of Nestables has now been completed and the onboarding of a new part-time developer has presented a great opportunity to start on many of the small things that need doing!
Efinity — Polkadot Parachain Auction
Our aim for Nestables has always been to make this game free-to-play. Mass adoption of crypto gaming is critical, far too many have high and confusing barriers for entry. For this to happen, we need to be able to have Efinity. Currently, game creators are forced to work with crippling fees, inflexible smart contracts and disjointed interoperability. Adoption of today’s NFTs is still limited to die-hard crypto enthusiasts. This is why Enjin are developing Efinity — a next-generation blockchain for digital assets, built on Polkadot. You can read more about how Enjin’s Efinity will solve these problems here.
Efinity will be built on Polkadot and next month, Polkadot are having their first parachain Auction. Parachains are individual blockchains running in parallel within the Polkadot and Kusama networks.
The Polkadot architecture will be composed of as many 100 parachains that are connected to — and secured by — a central chain known as the Relay Chain.
Enjin need a parachain to be able to run Efinity. To get one, they want to enlist the support of their entire community. They are hosting a call where you can find out more:
Hopefully, they will do another one in a different timezone as well!
