Realm DevLog #5: Platforming, Joystick Controls, and Textures

Realm
3 min readNov 26, 2021

A Quick Recap

It’s been a historical week for Realm. In case you need to catch up on what the buzz has been all about, check out some of our recent posts and recaps. Long story short, the world is beginning to get wind of what we’ve been building, our community is growing steadily, and the sentiment is quite strong! Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing, read on for this week’s Dev Logs.

A Starry Night’s View in the Metropolis

Platforms & Loot!

Platform games are one of the oldest and most fundamental styles in gaming, and also one of the most fun. We’re excited to show you the first version of what platforming will look like in Realm; this is just one of many mini-games that we are currently building for you to enjoy and customize. These videos are set in the Metropolis, and the same game mechanics can be built out in anyone’s Realm with any Style!

In order to get these mechanics right, we started off by creating simple cubes to check how far and high the players can jump and then experimenting with different arrangements and challenges. We have created platforming challenges where people will be able to collect loot which gets increasingly more rare and valuable the further they get.

Touch-Joystick Controls

Player controls are fundamental to any game. As we are a mobile-first platform, we started with touch joysticks to enable you to gradually transition between walking, running and jumping, making even one-handed use feel fine-grained and intuitive.

Controlling third person characters on mobile does not always feel great, and it is quite challenging to create a versatile control system that feels both effective and intuitive. We have been putting particular care into creating smooth, one and two-handed, portrait and vertical joystick controls which can make a big difference in how satisfying the game feels to play. We’re excited for you to use these controls to explore the Metaverse!

Textures

Example of a custom texture in Realm

There’s a lot that goes into building immersive digital worlds; some of these components are often under appreciated, such as textures. Creating textures is one of the many key workflows that our engineers and designers take on. These textures being life to the Metaverse and are a big part of what gives Realm such a unique feel and style!

In order to achieve this, we create tile-able sculpted textures, using ZBrush as our main tool to bring to life the base textures. We need these textures to blend in nicely, so after the first sculpting is done we export a quick normal and test it out and see how it might look in the game engine. This saves us time on future steps when we start to get in some color.

We then bring in additional color and style variation to create numerous options for beautification and custom design. We are hard at work developing our own materials and models so you can create and customize the best Realms. We want the metaverse to be a vibrant and diverse place, and with your help we will achieve it.

Pre Alpha

We’ve had plenty of signups for our Pre-Alpha Launch and are excited to put this product in your hands. If you’d like to be amongst the first to have exclusive early access to the Realm Metaverse, signup here.

About Realm

Realm is a mobile-first, play-to-earn, social impact driven Metaverse that allows gamers, players and artists to create their own personalized NFT microverse. Creators can bring unique music, art, and games into their realms. Whole living worlds can be minted as an ERC-1155 NFT and traded on the OpenSea Marketplace. Alternatively, players can discover, trade, collect and view NFTs in the environments and experiences their creators imagined.

Website | Twitter | Telegram | Telegram ANN | Discord | Instagram

--

--