Dev Diary #164 - Special ylands and Leaderboards

[Aleš Ulm 1725]

Hey there, fellow ylanders!

Here we are with yet another portion of 1.6 goodies and today we‘ll talk about both something for Creators and something nice you‘ll experience in the new Exploration.

So what is it that the Creators may like? Let‘s say that you are making a small cool action game where the goal is to score as many points as possible. That‘s great but what‘s the point in having such a game when you can‘t store the best scores and show it to players to make them try harder, to give them more incentive? So in 1.6 we plan to introduce something we call Global leaderboards. Regardless of how many instances of your game are running at the same time, they can all store and retrieve (and show) ... well... global leaderboards.  We are looking forward to seeing players compete with each other and we might even have a competition in future about getting the highest score in selected games! Also, if you‘re a Creator, you really shouldn‘t miss the next Dev Diary where we‘re going to talk about something really great that we‘re going to introduce with 1.6 (hype intended).

Before I get to introduce a new Exploration feature, I would like to quickly address some questions from the last Dev Diary we posted. Firstly blueprints - in the new Exploration you will be able to use blueprint camera only on ylands where you have appropriate privileges. Our plans, however, are to do a big blueprint upgrade in 1.7 because we feel they hold a great potential we have only barely touched. We will be able to provide more information about this sometime after 1.6 is released. There has also been a question asked about setting specific Exploration ylands as PvP/PvE only. We looked into this and while we understand that this is an important setting to have we ran into some non-trivial issues when looking for ways to do this properly and so this will be in some form present in 1.7.

 

 

And the cool new 1.6 feature for today? Well, we have been working on a system that allows us to present you, the players, with much more than an yland when you sail to a new location. With 1.6 you will be able to come across specific locations, custom-made, non-generated scenes. What does it mean? Imagine you sail to an uncharted yland on the regional map and instead of the ylands you‘re used to you come across something very unique - like a small floating outpost. This can be pretty much anything and the great thing is that we can keep adding these „random encounter scenes“ without having to update the game. We believe this will enhance the greatly the exploration aspect of the game. 

The question some of you will very likely ask is - if you can make custom ylands and expose them to players in Exploration, can I do that as well? Can I create my own yland (city ... or anything else) in the Editor and then have it in Exploration? The short answer would be: not... yet . But we are getting there and it is something that definitely deserves it‘s own Dev Diary.

That‘s it for this week, I‘ll talk to you next Thursday and until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!

[Gobbokirk 18]

Sounds cool, yet another reason to set sail

[spiritchaser28 920]

I am all for more encounters! Hope they include some of the items that cannot be found yet in the game. 

[jchob 354]

holy moly, this is interesting ?

No sleep for the team, we want that now eh eh ?

[empeorgame3(2) 15]

Wow this is better and making exploration more lively.?

[empeorgame3(2) 15]

I vote up it

[Hezim 7]

finally the dev show some love for exploration keep adding these cool features.

would be cool to add some sort of danger in sea like pirate ship or megalodon.

Btw is there any plans of adding exploration to mobile?