Greetings all,

This is the first official Devblog since our launch on Steam and boy have we learnt a lot in the past week or so? This blog post will give you an idea of what's coming to the game, including the new Skeleton monster, dual wield and an update on how development of our new Offline Single Player mode is going.

Since launch CardLife's launch into Steam Early Access our code team has been busy implementing our new Photon Cloud Servers and the Single Player Offline mode, which has left the art team free to begin creating new visual effects and new monsters to launch in-game in the coming months. The first of which we'd like to reveal this week; say hello to the Skeleton or we call him internally 'Skele'.



The Skeleton will be another magic monster in-game like the Golem and Dryad. This character will be like the aforementioned monsters in terms of its behaviour and it's aggro distance and will drop a new crafting material - the Skull. Unfortunately we won't be able to get him in for Halloween due to current development priorities, but we did want to share our vision of Skele with you during the spookiest time of year.

The Skeleton is also the first character in CardLife to have a death animation as well, which is currently work in progress. Matt, our animator, is working on new death animations for all characters in-game to give kills a bit more oomph but don't worry we'll still incorporate that poof of cardboard as drops emerge.



We've always had a small number of the CardLife community (that's you guys) asking for a way to play offline without having to maintain an active connection with servers while you play. That demand skyrocketed for this functionality as soon as we were available on Steam and as soon as we saw that we diverted some of our coders to begin work on that functionality straight away. The good news is that work on the Offline Single Player feature is almost complete and it's currently being tested by our QA team.

Here's how it'll work:

• The first time you log into CardLife, we check that your account owns CardLife as the final part of the installation process. You need to be online for this but you would need to be online anyway to download the game :)
  
• Next time you launch the game, you don't need to be online at all. You can be on a bus with a laptop and no wifi, and you'll still be able to play Single Player
  
• From then on single player has no network stuff regardless of whether you have internet or not, zero lag (at least zero network lag).

If all goes well with testing, we believe that Offline Single Player will launch in-game towards the end of next week, but we'll communicate the exact date to closer to the time.

We have spoken a lot about servers on this week when we launched our new Cloud Photon Servers which gave players hosting their own servers and playing in Single Player better pings and more stable connections. Today we have made this transition with our Official Servers as well:

• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-01
  
• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-02
  
• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-03
  
• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-04
  
• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-05
  
• EU-PVP-Official-CardLife-06
  
• NA-W-PVP-Official-CardLife-07
  
• NA-W-PVP-Official-CardLife-08
  
• NA-E-PVP-Official-CardLife-09
  
• NA-E-PVP-Official-CardLife-10
  
• Asia-PVP-Official-CardLife-11
  
• OC-PVP-Official-CardLife-12

Formerly all of our servers were based in Ireland which meant that if you weren't in the EU you experienced a heightened chance of disconnections and a high latency. Now that shouldn't be as much of an issue as it was before.

Obviously, some EU players may experience much higher latency to their server of choice when formerly this wasn't the case. In those specific cases we'll be happy to transfer across any items that you have in your inventory that you want to take with you to an Official Server which is closer to your playing position. Just get in touch with our support team via this link https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us with information on what server you were playing on, what server you have moved to, what items you want to take with you (pending verification), and of course your display name.

Did you know that we first hinted at Dual Wielding way back in DevBlog 8? Well, that is the next big feature we're currently neck deep in. The art team has already finalised how the animations will work when you, say, block a parry with your shield in your left hand while you commence a sword strike with your right, or carry a torch in a cave while digging with a pick-axe. By freeing up your hand for additional actions we're aiming to add a bit more complexity to combat and world interaction. The next step is the code team to implement this system in-game which we suspect will be completed and in-game soon. No promises of course as this is still in development, but it's looking good at the moment.

To give you an idea of how dual-wielding will affect the game animations, check out the attack pattern of the new Skeleton:



One of the most common suggestions we get from players is that they want more functionality in the Connect The Dots editor. Our art team is currently looking at that in detail at the moment with the goal of adding functionality that offers a lot of creative freedom without being complex to use. We've been looking at every art software you can possibly imagine in this pursuit and we'll share news of these added tools soon. We've also made some tweaks to the way your character looks during character creation to allow your edits to be much more easily visible with additional shadowing as well. This small yet impactful tweak will go live in our next major update.



As always let us know your thoughts about this week's Devblog and CardLife in general via Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Discord and our Official Forum. We want to make the best game we can and we can not do that without your support.

Thanks,
Andy - Comms Manager

Hello everyone!

Today we have launched an update to improve our Network Infrastructure and provide a better game experience for players all around the world!

We have set up cloud servers in several regions which will reduce the time it takes to send information. There are still some further optimisations planned for the future as we work on our official dedicated servers but see below for further information on how we are currently solving lag within the game

Previously, players would need to send data back and forth from their current location to our game servers in Ireland. This would increase the amount of lag that a player will experience. Now, we have set up several game servers in regions around the world which will allow players to experience improved online performance.

The changes that we have made should dramatically decrease the amount of lag that players experience in game when hosting their own single player game or when hosting a multiplayer game.

It is important to note that if you join a multiplayer server that is not within your region, you may experience increased lag.

Our official dedicated game servers are still based in Ireland. This means that the changes we’ve made will not affect your lag within the official dedicated servers. In the future we are going to need to change some of our current dedicated servers location to provide better support worldwide. We will share more information on these changes very soon

A few members of the team have been working very hard to release an offline mode. Progress is going really well and we are still looking to release the offline mode as soon as possible.

This was an issue we felt where an IP was banned within this particular region. We have adjusted our server locations and this should now be fixed for users specifically in Russia. Though if you are experiencing this issue and not in Russia, do also please try loading the game and let us know if this latest update has addressed this issue.

We are a studio which has a major focus in user generated content This can be seen from our work with Robocraft and with the systems we have in place for CardLife. We are always looking to involve the community with our development, be it providing feedback to improve game mechanics or seeing the amazing characters that you have all designed in game!

We’ve had interest from players who would like to see the game available in their language and have offered to help us translate the game. If you would like to help us with localisation, please do get in touch via the following URL and you’ll hear from us very soon!

https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us

One of the issues in developing a game in Early Access is that we may come across times where some progress by the player is lost. This is a part of the development journey and can sometimes become unavoidable. It is wise to continue to update players that there is always a chance of this as the game is still heavily in development.

With our changes to databases and also the changes we made to improve latency for players around the world, one of the issues that has been raised internally is that some players may lose some items placed within their chest. We apologize in advance for this and hope that it only affects a small number of players. Rest assured we are doing our best to avoid these issues in the future and trying to protect the progress of our players.

If you have found that you have lost some items during this update, please get in touch with us via the support site below with information including your display name and the server you are on.

https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us

We have made some core changes to the code to fix a memory leak that was reported. This memory leak within the server would ultimately result in us needing to reset a server due to the sheer amount of data that was being sent. By reset, we mean turning it off and on, NOT a server wipe. Your buildings and progress when a server “resets” will remain when you log in.

The changes we are making to our official dedicated servers will mean that the game will reset servers less often.

We thank everyone for their support, patience and feedback over the last week! It has been incredible and we’ve learnt so much from every one of you. Please do let us know if you see better network performance with this update or even if you don't see any change! We need your feedback to make sure that we are continuing to move forward in development to create a better experience for all players.

All the best,
Chris

Hey all,

CardLife servers will be unavailable from 2pm to 4pm (UTC+1) today as we implement Cloud Photon servers. Click here to see the downtime in more timezones.

Maintenance will take 2 hours but may be longer if we run into any issues.

We hope that the introduction of Cloud Photon servers will lead to fewer server disconnections by players worldwide and better network performance overall, but we will only be able to confirm this once the update is launched.

UPDATE: We are having to extend maintenance by a further 30 minutes in order to complete the introduction of the Photon Cloud infrastructure. We'll let you know as soon as we're back online again.

UPDATE # 2: Servers are now back up, but we are seeing issues with HP and stamina where HP is at 100 and Stamina is at 0. We are doing our best to address this and fix the issue as soon as possible!

Greetings everyone, we’ve had a great launch week for CardLife but we’re still seeing players report lag in both single player and multiplayer modes. The good news is that we have started preparations to fix the lag this week and progress is going well.

Currently in-game even if you are hosting a private server or Single Player game, your server or client needs to check in with a service we use called Photon to verify the actions you’re doing on a server. This Photon server is situated Amazon Web Services data centre in Dublin, Ireland.

Obviously, this can cause big lag spikes as not everyone is located in Europe. Over the past 4 days we’ve had players from almost every country on the planet playing CardLife which while very exciting, has led to poor network performance the further away you are from our office. We are going to fix that by moving to a cloud-based Photon solution which automatically routes all traffic to the nearest server to you with server locations on every major continent on the planet. This will mean that even if you’re playing in North America, Russia, Africa, Asia or Oceanic regions you will not suffer the crippling lag that some players have reported to us during Single Player and host Multiplayer servers.

To put this more simply, cloud-based servers will improve base level network performance for Single Player and Hosted Multiplayer servers. This solution is set to go live towards the end of next week, pending successful tests. So that’s big network fix number 1, sorted.

Big network fix number 2 is related to players failing to connect to servers. We’ve had over 110 Steam Reviews since we launched on Tuesday and a considerable percentage of those report that they can’t connect to servers or even see a server list. We believe this problem is related to player location and some territories failing to connect to our Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. We are currently implementing a solution to this which involves players being routed to a separate server provider automatically if you fail to connect to AWS. We’re currently trialling this solution with some members of the community and if you are from Russian territories and would like to help us with these tests, please send a ticket to our support team (https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us) and we’ll send you more instructions on how you can assist.

Again if all those things line up and work correctly we will be adding that to the CardLife server infrastructure next week.

Additionally as confirmed in a blog post earlier this week, we are currently working on implementing a 100% offline Single Player mode to CardLife. This will minimise lag completely when you play as the actions you do in-game will be 100% resolved by your client. Many of you have requested this option in CardLife and we’re happy to report that we’ll be looking to deliver it by the end of the month if development goes well.

We want to say a big thank you to all those who are being patient with us while we resolve the kinks in our server infrastructure. Rest assured we are working on getting everyone who has purchased CardLife playing as soon as we can.

Hi everyone, An update has just gone live which includes the changes to the hunger system

We have significantly reduced the amount of hunger that is used when a player is running and have increased the amount of hunger that you replenish when eating berries.



Hello everyone,

CardLife launched on Steam yesterday and we've had some lovely comments, some constructive criticism and have had a few bugs reported! As we've stated on the main Steam store page, this is the very next step of our development journey and we are embracing all comments to make a great game!

Initially we realise that there have been some issues with our servers in select regions, most notably in Russia as they ban IP addresses for AWS which is the system we are currently using. We are currently thinking about offering ways for players to connect to CardLife via a alternate server provider. We hope to share good news with you on that front, next week

We have seen lots of reports from players having issues connecting, or seeing increased lag in single player mode and additionally a lot of players who prefer to play offline. We are confirming that we are currently working on a mode which will allow players to play single player offline.

Development for Offline Mode is still in an investigatory phase but it's clear there is demand out there for it, so we'll be delivering that as soon as humanly possible. It's going to be a big job so we don't have a time-frame for its introduction yet, but when we do we'll update you all as soon as we can

We are also working on improving our network infrastructure to decrease lag for those playing online. This is a priority for us to improve the experience of players wherever they are based.

We appreciate the patience of our players who have come across some of these issues. Do know that we are all working very hard to take on your feedback to make the best game we can.

Hunger currently decreases way too fast so we want to make some changes to this system! The first change is that we will significantly reduce the amount of hunger that is used for when a player is running. We will also be increasing the amount of hunger you receive from eating berries.

Of course more changes and refinements to the core game experience will come, we appreciate the initial wave of feedback from all players during our first day on sale!

Each week we want to highlight the best screenshots made by the community! All you need to do is post a screenshot on Steam using the screenshot button (Default is F12). These can include a complex structure that you have built or seen, a cool looking weapon or even an image which has a cool story attached to it!

So far we've had some great screenshots come in from the community!

The first is a incredible structure seen by HaynezC, We're not sure if they built this, or saw it on their travels. but it is still very impressive!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1534556062
Squischi has made the Keyblade!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1534811420
Blue has made a ripped elf man with a creepy face:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1535189736
Kasu-chan (InuKasuka) has made an adorable cat person!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1535096888
At Freejam, we support User generated content and with CardLife the potential is incredible. Users have made some amazing pieces of art and we've not even touched on the modding functionality of CardLife. If you created or have seen something amazing within our servers you should share it with us and the rest of the community in either the CardLife Steam forums or the official website forums.

That's it for now! Expect a new build with the hunger fixes to be deployed tomorrow.

We'll share with you more news of the changes to our network infrastructure and progress of our offline mode when we can.

Greetings everyone!

The time has come! Our survival game with an awesome and innovative crafting system is now available on Steam Early Access. We started our journey over two years ago with a core team and have expanded into a 25 person team. Every single one of us has been humbled by the response from our founders and content creators who were given review codes weeks ago.



CardLife is out now and costs $19.99 / £15.49 / €16.79 from Steam or our official website. As part of our launch into Early Access, we have wiped official servers. Those who previously hosted multiplayer servers or played on single player will keep their structures and progress.

Additionally, those who are founders should now have received an email which tells them how to transfer their account to a Steam account. Do make sure to check your junk email just in case!



Over the last month we have been fixing bugs and improving the core game experience. We hope that you enjoy the game and continue to provide us with feedback and suggestions as we take the next big step on our journey.

There are just a few questions that we feel our players will ask, see below for just a few answers to some of them:

Yes, we will be working on translation very soon. Make sure to add the game to your wishlist as we’d create an update which will let you know when the game has been translated.

Yes! We are currently at a 20 person limit on our official dedicated servers. As we increase performance we plan to increase that number as soon as possible

It is just four days until we release in Steam Early Access! Make sure you have added the game to your Steam Wishlist!

We already have an amazing community of players who have joined us during the last couple of years in development and are looking forward to growing that number with those of you who are purchasing the game via Steam.

We have a more detailed Dev blog which goes through the process of display names and transferring to a Steam Account. If you a re a Founder, you can read more about that by clicking the link below.

We had stopped selling the Founders Edition from our website in preparation for our imminent Steam launch. Players who purchase the game after October 9th will become Vanguards (until the next stage of development). Founders will keep their Founder title within game but will also receive the unique crafting recipes from the Vanguard edition.

Those crafting recipes are:

The Vanguard Lamp Post
Light the way and provide another layer of visual flair to your buildings

The Vanguard Statue
A special statue which is a cardboard recreation of the Vanguard ship in Robocraft.

Check them out below:


Those of you who would like to see what ship this was inspired from, we have an image below of the Vanguard ship within Robocraft.



When the game launches on October 9th, we will welcome the Vanguards with open arms! We know you're going to make some incredible things.



We partnered up with Gamepedia to create the official CardLife Wiki. There are already 329 pages so far and we need your help to improve upon it! Visit the Wiki now, contribute and we will be giving out prizes to the top contributors after the first month.

https://cardlife.gamepedia.com/CardLife_Wiki

In order to prepare for our Steam release we are preparing our servers to be down for maintenance at some time on Monday, 8th October. During this time we will be resetting the servers, which unfortunately means that any building that you have created will be removed, terrain will be reset and any items in your inventory will also be removed.

We are hoping that this will be the last time that we will reset the servers. However there may be a time in the future when a technical issue may require a reset. But we will do our very best to maintain them from now on to protect your buildings on our official dedicated servers.

Stay tuned to our twitter account @CardLifeGame to be kept up to date on when the servers will be back up and running.

The team has spent the last four weeks squashing as many bugs as possible. During this time we have not focused on introducing new features to CardLife as we wanted to release the most stable and polished version on October 9th. During this time we eliminated over 200 bugs but below are a list of the ones that we felt you’d be interested in seeing addressed as part of our most recent patch.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug where Creatures are glitching through Doors
  
• Fixed a bug where crafting a large stack of new projectiles, after running out of the previous set, causes them to be unusable.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused caves to be pitch black when the cave contained light sources.
  
• Fixed a bug where the sloped fence foundation and sloped fence had the wrong sprite.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused the health and stamina bars to incorrectly update.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused players combat animations to not appear correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused players who disconnect from the server to lose mouse functionality on the Main Menu.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused Cobalt items to not fully appear in the crafting menu in Creative Mode.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused the game to crash due to being out of memory.
  
• Fixed a bug which displayed an error message reading “str [ok]” when disconnecting from server instead of the expected error message (“You have been disconnected from the server”)
  
• Fixed an issue where players were able to see low level detail on the environment from up close (instead of only happening to terrain in the distance).
  
• Fixed a bug which caused items to lose enchantments if dragged straight from the enchanting table to the equipment slot.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused newly set key bindings to not update on some crafting tables.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused your selected mods to be forgotten when you log out and back in.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused some creatures to stay in a 'T' pose instead of animating correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Direwolf Pelt which caused it not to tile when applied to items.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused items not to properly craft if you typed in an amount to craft (instead of using the mouse to click the '+')
  
• Fixed a bug which caused creatures to stop attacking you if you turned your back to them.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused the creature UI not to appear above your health bar if shot from range.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused the creature names to be invisible if they were in front of water.
  
• Fixed an issue which caused the animation of the crossbow reloading to finish before you could actually fire the crossbow.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused the crossbow recoil to change depending on the direction you faced.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused terrain drops not to fall to the ground when digging upwards.
  
• Fixed a bug which sometimes caused users to not to be able to place stairs opposite doors.
  
• Fixed a bug with crafting which would accidentally cancel the crafting queue if you hit 'I'.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused you to hear all the games audio at once when leaving and rejoining a server.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused stats which were being hovered over to stay on screen even after closing the inventory.
  
• Fixed a bug where pressing 'F' whilst having a drawn bow would not reset the bow to idle.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused you to place terrain you had selected when clicking resume on escape menu.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused creatures to slide towards you from long distances if you turned towards them after running away.
  
• Fixed a bug which made the chat expander extremely hard to select.
  Fixed a bug which caused your shadow to react erratically when holding a torch.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused your hotbar to scroll when scrolling through the journal.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused your hotbar to scroll when scrolling through crafting tables.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused the user's client to crash if they walked on to specific tiles in the world.
  
• Fixed a bug when eating food which caused the game to say '2x Food' was consumed instead of 1.
  
• Fixed an issue where an invisible barrier was blocking players in certain locations in the world.
  
• Fixed a bug with scrollbars in the Permissions Console.
  
• Fixed a bug which displayed (str) near some menus in permissions console for players given permission to edit.
  
• Fixed a bug for players who maximised the size of the Connect the Dots screen, as they could not minimise it after.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused creatures breathing loops to sometimes stay active after despawning.

FEATURES:

• We have implemented an interest management system which will only load structures, terrain and creatures within a certain distance of you, improving performance.
  
• Multiple customisations of the same item will now each save as unique items, instead of overwriting the original customisation.
  
• We have made a significant improvement to the infrastructure of AI which will make them more reactive and will improve performance. This is our first step towards better AI in CardLife and further improvements are planned.
  
• Infinite Servers: We have implemented a new feature which will cause buildings to decay over time, if the user does not log in within a certain period the building will be destroyed and the items will become lootable.

We posted about the Infinite servers in the last blog. You can read more about that by clicking the link below:

http://cardlifegame.com/index.php/devblog/247-dev-blog-93-reactive-world

IMPROVEMENTS:

• Made changes to the name field on the Connect the Dots screen to make it more readable.
  
• Made the right hand side of the Permissions panel display a “Coming Soon" message as that panel currently has no functionality.
  
• All equippable items now have run animations.
  
• We have added in an “inventory is full” message.
  
• Improved frame rate performance for players near large structures.
  
• Reduced the long hang players were experiencing when returning to main menu
  
• Improved available space for some items which had restrictive Connect the Dots screens.
  
• Improved the hitboxes for sliders in escape menu

We’d like to issue a MASSIVE thank you to all founders who have joined us over the last two years and to those who are looking forward to joining us on October the 9th. Your support has been invaluable helping us to refine the CardLife experience and we hope that you enjoy playing the game. Steam is the next leg of our development journey and we have a ton of plans to continue to improve and add to the game.

Remember, you can share your thoughts on the game within the forums, on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

All the best,
Chris

Good day everyone!

What happens when a world's resources are depleted? Or if entire mountains are destroyed? What about abandoned structures that are left half finished? CardLife’s Reactive World system will tackle some of those questions. Game Director Rich has shared details on how this will work in game currently, and the plan for the future:

The following explanation is only relevant to official multiplayer servers - this does not affect singleplayer or player hosted servers.

The intention for the official gameplay servers on CardLife is that they last forever and the server that you pick becomes a persistent home for your character. Obviously this leads to certain challenges in terms of performance and resource management. Let me explain - the world is a finite place and over its lifetime could potentially house 10000’s of players. Each one of those players can edit the terrain, place structures and mine ores. If we did nothing eventually the server would run out of ores, have millions of terrain edits and have millions of buildings - this would be bad for both players trying to find materials and the performance would be really poor.

So, we need a way of cleaning up the servers over time so they don’t become unplayable without actually affecting normal gameplay. This would entail 3 things:

• Removing old structures of players who no longer play
  
• Replenishing the ores in the world
  
• Resetting edits in the world

This is where our Reactive World comes in - which if you have ever read the planned features on our homepage says:

”From earthquakes that reshape the world to game changing events that awaken the toughest monsters. Every edit has a consequence.”

But what does that actually mean? As we continue development, the Reactive World system will be introduced via several phases.

For our first phase we want to implement a system that triggers in-game natural disasters like earthquakes that causes old unmaintained structures (i.e. buildings owned by players who no longer play) to fall down leaving their contents to be salvaged by lucky treasure hunters. As part of this ores would disappear and reappear in new locations and terrain edits (i.e. tunnels, flattened mountains etc) to be reformed back to their original state as the cardboard tectonic plates shifted beneath the world.


Eventually, earthquakes will appear in game. Below is a work in progress gif



Fortunately though if a terrain edit is located nearby to a maintained structure (e.g.if you placed a torch, foundation, plank etc in your tunnel) - it would be classed as being reinforced so it wouldn’t reset. This means active players can place down structures in their mines or flatten a mountain and build a house on top of it and it would not be removed/reset. But if a player stopped playing, eventually their structures would decay and fall down and then their terrain edits would reset - just like a mine in real life - the internal structures that were reinforcing it would rot and decay over time and eventually the mine would collapse.

But materials decay at different rates and this is also the case in CardLife. So if you stop playing - your wooden house will fall down before your iron house does - which also reflects the amount of effort required to acquire the tougher building materials. Not to mention they will be tougher for when we implement base raiding. The current decay rates are as follows:



These are the current desired values right now but we may need to change them depending on client/server performance.

Although it is worth noting if you give someone permission to your structure (using the permissions console) - the timer will also reset when they log in as well. We will also be adding the decay rates to the tooltips of the all the structures/decorations so it is signposted in-game.

At the moment though - we do not have the time to implement in-game earthquakes - so we have had to resort to writing a script that simulates the outcome of an earthquake. Then during scheduled maintenance we will run the script that removes old buildings, resets non-reinforced edits and replenishes ores. We will then add natural disasters in a future update post Steam. Obviously this is a big change - but an absolutely necessary one and the intention is that if you are an active player - it won't actually change your gameplay much.

Once again to be clear - this only affects official multiplayer servers - although players will eventually have the option to turn it on for their own dedicated servers if they want too. It has no effect on singleplayer.

We are also pleased to announce that the release date for CardLife on Steam will be October 9th! The team are in the final stages of development and are focusing their efforts on polish and bug fixing to bring you the best game possible once it launches on Steam. Make sure to add it to your wishlist to be kept up to date with the release. To celebrate this major milestone we have created a brand new trailer for CardLife. Check it out below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H59fcU_cpIU

If you have not done so, make sure to add the game to your wishlist right now by going to the main steam page and clicking the "Add To Wishlist" button!

Let us know what you think of the incoming Reactive World system. If you have any questions, let us know in the forums, Twitter , Facebook and Reddit .

All the best,
Chris

Hello Everyone!

We've been documenting the development of CardLife weekly on our main website, detailing core decisions, sharing work in progress and talking with our community on important development beats. As we approach our release on Steam we understand that our community will be growing and that our Steam players may be interested in seeing these Dev Blogs.

As of today, we reached our 92nd Dev Blog after two years of development.If you want to read about our journey so far you can start from the very beginning by visiting this page:

Archive of CardLife Dev Blogs

From now on we will be posting our weekly dev blogs on Steam too! So without further ado, here is this weeks dev blog:




A new update to CardLife has gone live to our Founders users. This update introduces the Pemu and Dire Wolf which were unveiled during the last two Dev Blogs. There are also just a few more changes which improve the games overall experience

The Creative mode Mod has been live for some time and has given players the tools to create epic structures much faster than playing in the traditional survival game mode. A core suggestion from the community based on the addition of the creative mod was to reduce the time it takes to craft items. In this update, the team have done just that. Check out the short before and after gif which shows just how fast it is now to craft multitudes of items.



This should definitely speed up the efficiency of your building! Remember to share screenshots of your buildings and structures with us on social media :)

The Dire Wolf and the Pemu are now in game. A pretty tough decision however needs to be made, where should they spawn? The island of CardLife is designed to spawn players on the beach with mobs becoming more dangerous the further they venture in to the island. This is so that players can learn the fundamentals before they are attacked by a Raptor.

Our creature spawning system has been reworked to make sure that creatures spawn in suitably appropriate areas. For example

Crabs will now only spawn by the sea or on sandy areas
More agile creatures creatures spawn all over, whilst the bulkier, more cumbersome, should be less likely to spawn on the mountain tops
The changes we have made to spawning means that you should see that the world is much more populated. There should no longer be an area which looks like there are no creatures spawning.



In this update we have improved the optimisation of structures and terrains. As we expect the community to be building very complex and massive designs this optimisation process improves performance for all players. That being said, as we continue to develop the game further, optimisation will always be worked on to ensure that the game runs as smoothly as possible on the system specs that we plan to support. If you experience an increase in FPS during this update, do let us know, we want to make sure that the work we’re doing has a positive impact on the game.

The Direwolf was first unveiled in last weeks dev blog where we revealed the following information on this creature.

"These creatures will appear within the packs of wolves you see in the open world and essentially function as pack leaders. The Direwolf has more health than the standard creatures, can cause more damage per hit and will drop more meat when vanquished to account for the additional risk of taking them on. The Direwolf also drops Dire Wolf Pelt and Dire Wolf Tail when vanquished. The former is a component of the coarse hide and bed duvets recipe and the latter can be used to enchant weapons to give them additional armor penetration.”

Our brave cameraman snuck up on the Dire Wolf in its natural habitat to capture footage for our incoming trailer.



Unfortunately, he was seen…



The Dire Wolf is a dangerous creature for the unprepared, and as our intrepid cameraman discovered, a wide angle lens, a tripod and a boom mic isn’t going to protect you from a Dire Wolf attack.

As discussed in last blogs, this update brings with it the ambient effects which make the environment feel much more alive. This includes fluttering butterflies, flocking crows and vibrant fireflies. Tree’s also now drop leaves, which I am unsure we’ve actually shown before.



We’ve also fixed a dozen bugs, but the main ones that have been addressed are below:

1) Fixed an issue where the quest journal and tracking is not updating with the remapping of the keys

2) Fixed an issue where the bow ran out of durability and didn't get destroyed.

3) Fixed an issue that caused frame rate to drop significantly if you run in 1 direction for a long period of time and then turn around.

As we are preparing for our big Steam Launch, we are still in major bug busting mode to fix anything that causes the game to break severely. If you feel that you have found something, let us know as soon as possible!

Of course, while we are preparing for a Steam launch we do need to continue to inform all current founders that they will receive an email closer to launch which tells you how you can transfer your CardLife account onto a steam account. Alternatively if you want to continue not using Steam and run the game via our own launcher, we also support that too.

However, if you want to support the game further and assist us on reaching a great audience, do wishlist us on Steam. We really appreciate it and it will help us build a brilliant future for CardLife together

https://store.steampowered.com/app/920690/CardLife_Cardboard_Survival/

That’s it for this weeks Dev Blog. We hope our founders enjoy the new update, make sure to let us know of any issues or suggestions on our forums, Twitter , Facebook and Reddit .

All the best,
Chris