Proven Lands - Developer Log #1

After the announcement from yesterday about Proven Lands being funded the games developer also has a new update on the games website with more information.

After the first excitement about the investment settled down, the paperwork roles in. Despite the tiny team and the indie glory, it’s a company that has to pay taxes and all that.

Jeffrey and I are constantly working on the concepts. We build concept stripes like those below - for the 3D artists. We’ve been working on the flora and alien houses lately. Prior to that on drones and a few other things.

At the same time I do some magic on the voxel engine. For instance, today I added the new flying islands with grass and trees. We have a view distance of 16 km at an altitude of 20 m now, which is important to me – I’d like to give us all the feeling of being lost on a planet. But we’ll see how it’ll end. However, right at this moment you can already run around, dig, destroy, build stuff (without trying to be Blockscape or EverQuest Next, obviously), pick up or place things. Looking back at the failures of StarForge (5/10 on Steam), I always felt like we only need a voxel engine to show manipulation (digging, mining), damage (combat) or unforeseen events (meteor crash?) — but not for the purpose of house building. Less is often better than more. So as soon as I’ve fixed a few major issues and when it looks cool, I’ll throw in in-game screens and video updates.

More information.

Voxel engine: I want a fantasy game with isometric camera, where all nowadays spiffy 3D effects can be recreated via an advanced voxel engine (ahead of its time). Especially those DX11 SFX visible from a birds eye view. Realistic destructible environments, awesome fire, breathtaking smoke and mesmerizing mist and lighting + shadows, complete with a "sprite" system where 3D models and animations are converted on install into voxel clouds with voxel selection sets for wearable stuff like clothing and weapons.

I wrote to a voxel engine programmer, you can find him on the net trying to sell his engine to publishers and studios and he wrote back the biggest obstacle of nowadays voxel engines - the true ones showing real pixels as voxels - is the destructible environments, it would simply require a future CPU to calculate destroyable parts/blasting parts off of the voxel world..