Devlog #60! Procedural Fall Realms, Huge Game Update, Racing Improvements!
Hey there everyone and welcome to another Devlog! 60 is a big number, and we’ve got some big updates for you to mark the occasion.
As usual, you can catch the Founders AMA here, featuring some great questions from Arty — one of our most prominent builders — go explore his latest realm it is full of surprises and innovative uses of the tools available.
Right, on the the development :)
Procedural Fall Realms
This one has been a while in the making, and thats because its a tricky problem to solve!
An issue that became apparent with the introduction of the leaderboard rewards for the Don’t Fall Realms was that a small group of players had absolutely perfected the two maps, making it very difficult for new players to have a chance to get on the leaderboard. One proposed solution was that we don’t reward players that had already won, but that obviously isn’t the right solution. To make sure new players get a chance without disqualifying players for being good and putting in the effort we came up with a new idea — a new map every week will give everyone a fresh start. This way the speedrunners can keep using the skills they perfected, and new players have a chance to compete since the track is unknown to both parties.
To make the creation of this track low-cost, so as to not affect the reward pool, and as fair as possible, we have been research and developing a procedural generation algorithm to generate challenging Don’t Fall Realms automatically.
You can see an early version below, where the length of the track is chosen and modules are assembled automatically. You can see this process being repeated a few times, with different results each time. This functionality will also be useful for allowing builders to create procedurally generated levels in the future — we cant wait to get this into the Don’t Fall rotation and builder tools.
Racing Improvements
We’ve been listening to all of your feedback over the last few weeks and we hope have been responding in a more than timely manner… coming from a gaming background we’re all too familiar with games that take literally months for any new content, features and to respond to feedback from their community.
In the video you can see a few of these new features:
Firstly, you can now see the names of the players in a race you are joining, as well as their level — super useful for figuring out the calibre of your opponents!
Secondly, you will notice a rearview mirror button at the top of the HUD — this allows you to look behind you whilst racing and see how much distance you’ve managed to put between yourself and your rivals — an awesome feature thats been requested many times.
And finally, you can see when people have dropped out of your race for one reason or another, which is an unfortunate occurence and results in their getting no XP or rewards.
Huge Game Update
Along with all the features we’ve shown above, the next game update is a big one! Here’s the changelog of things to look out for:
◦ Add notification pop-ups to races
◦ Add ability to look backwards in races
◦ Allow race results to be shared to user stories
◦ Display player names before race-start
◦ Fix racing bug resulting in speed boosts during certain collision scenarios
◦ Add placeholder mesh displayed when loading female ReadyPlayerMe models
◦ Display player level on name label
◦ Add pinch-to-zoom to photo-mode
◦ Allow items to be equiped directly from their inventory preview panel
◦ Show remaining time for daily quests in rewards centre
◦ Fix rewards centre animations
◦ Improve camera behavior on zoom-in
◦ Fix checkpoints behavior in builder-realms
◦ Fix bug resulting in chat messages being sent on letter input
◦ Fix chat input text color
◦ Improve handling of player shadows
◦ Hide previously visible UI in photo-mode
◦ Increase flying speed
◦ Fix some buttons not being pressable in multi-touch scenarios
◦ Fix picture frames not displaying info when using local textures
◦ Fix picture frames showing “Open externally” button even when there is no link defined
• RN-integrated:
◦ Fix crash when attempting to quit a realm after finishing a race
◦ Add various Analytics events
We look forward to your feedback on all these improvements when they launch!
About REALM
Leading mobile Metaverse with a purpose. Empowering players, creators & brands to participate in generating the future of entertainment in a co-owned virtual universe.
REALM players and creators are rewarded as they engage with the platform. The native REALM builder tool allows anyone, with no coding experience, to build personalised microverses, tell their story, and trade NTFs on the REALM Marketplace. Creators and brands can bring to life unique music, art, games, and anything else they can imagine into their realms.
