Just want to provide a quick update on what we’ve been working on and our current plans for the next launch of the game.

Buildings

One of the things we’ve struggled with over the past 6–8 months is the building system. It’s one of the most important aspects of the game and something we’ve put a huge amount of thought into. I must admit that the hex grid tends to make everything much more difficult, but hopefully we can do

To see where we’ve arrived at, it helps to look at a bit of the history of the designs we’ve gone through. …

This story’s distribution setting is on. Learn more

Hello everyone! This blog post is just a quick follow up to the last one. I wanted to share some new game models with you and also our experiments with a new biome!

With game’s like Minecraft the mood of the game doesn’t materially change when you move from biome to biome. In BitCraft we want players to feel that different parts of the world have a totally different atmosphere. We think this’ll make exploration a lot more exciting and interesting. …

It’s been a long time! Sorry for the lack of updates. We’ve been hard at work for the last couple of months and we’ve got some great new stuff to show!

I won’t be able to cover all of the changes that we’ve made to BitCraft in a single blog post, but I do want to hit some of the major highlights.

New Visual Style

The most exciting new update is that we’ve totally revamped the visual style of the game. We’ve totally changed the look and feel of the game and I think it looks 10 times better. …

Today’s the day! We’re launching the BitCraft Alpha! We’re very excited to be opening up the game to the very first founding players. We’ve been working non-stop for over a year on the project and we plan to be improving the game for years to come!

The Alpha

I just want to give a quick rundown of the game features before you all have at it.

The World

The BitCraft world is a procedurally generated Hex tile grid. …

The big ticket feature for this week was incremental terrain loading! Previously as you moved around in the BitCraft world the terrain would be loaded in chunks. What this meant was that as you moved around it looked like you could reach the end of the world, only to have more world abruptly pop into existence.

Aside from this being not very performant and causing dropped frames, it was also a terrible user experienced. As of this week we’ve banished it!

Now when you move around in the world, the terrain will load in a bit at a time so that it doesn’t look like you’re approaching the edge of the…

Hello again! I apologize for the delayed blog post! We’ve had a busy past two weekends. I have a few fun things to share though in this post!

The short version of the past two weeks has been bug fixes and performance improvements. Hooray! I know it’s not the most exciting stuff but these are things that are absolutely critical for launching the game. These are some of the more tricky things that we’ve pushed out until now, so they took quite a bit of dev time.

The long version continues below.

Updates to Combat

Combat now works much more smoothly than it did two weeks ago. At this point we’ve also added in a lot of important things to combat such as the following. …

Just a quick update this week! Unfortunately, I don’t have a visual update this week. Our major focuses this week were finding a 3D artist to work on the environment in models, improving the combat system and adding in ladders.

Hiring an Artist

We’re currently looking for a 3D environment artist to improve some of our visuals and to create models for our world!

Please send a message to contact@clockworklabs.io or message me on Discord if you’re interested or would like to recommend an artist!

Combat

We spent a fair bit of time fixing up the bugs in the combat system this week. Enemies now spawn in “dungeons” of a sort. Essentially what this means is that they now spawn in clusters in certain areas of the map. We’ve also added an auto-attacking mechanic so you no longer have to repeated click on an enemy to attack. A lot of the combat stuff needs work, so this will be a focus between now and launch. …

Hello again everybody! This weeks post is about one fun feature and one necessary feature. The fun feature is, as promised, combat!

Combat

When we came up with the original BitCraft design we actually didn’t plan on adding any combat features at all. BitCraft was always meant to be more of an economics and city building game, centered around crafting, mining, and building.

But essentially in the end we can’t resist adding some thrilling fights into the BitCraft world. Overtime felt that the atmosphere of the game would be even better if we had creatures around the BitCraft world. …