Introduction

Hello survivors of the night! How have you been? It's been six months since our last blog post. Just over a half a year. We took a good long break from creating these blogs as it put a lot of added stress onto our development and at the end of the day, Nightfall is still a hobby project. COVID and the world tumbling into chaos also did not help us. Since our last post, we really got hit a bit harder than we were expecting and most of us had to take some serious time off in order to make the money we needed to survive and for our own mental health. But… enough with the negative! We're back and as of writing this blog post things are really shaping up!

We recently crossed over the one year mark for Nightfall. We've been working on this game for over 365 days and we are still humbled each day by the support you all show us. Our community over on Discord are some of the best people we've ever interacted with and we could not be more thankful for them. Shoutout to you guys! We've received a few messages asking what happened to the blog posts and we apologize for our silence here. I really recommend checking out our Discord as we are super active there and post all the time. We also recently upped our streaming game over on Twitch and now stream development and other fun things multiple times a week! Come check it out if you haven't already!

This Blog post is going to cover some tough decisions we made over the past six months, what we're working on now, and where we're headed for this new year of 2021 (which hopefully will be way less cursed than 2020). If you're reading one of our blogs for the first time, we highly recommend you go back and read all of the other entries for more context of what our game is all about. We'll also put a short blurb here for you to learn about the game, so if you're a veteran of Nightfall, feel free to skip that part. With all that said, let's get started!

What is Nightfall?

Nightfall is a 3D block-based, fantasy/horror game that takes place in a nearly infinite world of blocks. The player is pitted against both the harsh nature of the environment and the horrors that lurk in the dark. When night falls, the world becomes much more dangerous. Will you spend the night cowering in fear or try to gear up and face the danger. Nightfall's monsters are not limited to just the run of the mill “zombie” type enemy. Eldritch type monstrosities hide just out of view waiting for you to stray too far from the light. You'll have to fend off creatures like Harvesters who are looking to skewer you or Walkers who dwarf you in size. While these creatures are trying to devour you or swallow your souls, there are plenty of other things you can do. Nightfall features infinite generation in ALL directions (including up and down) and you'll be able to explore a vast variety of biomes both above and below ground. You'll also be able to hunt for treasure, mine ores, farm crops dependent on seasons, explore procedural dungeons, kill challenging bosses, play mini-games, equip various accessories, build whatever you can imagine, and much much more. If you enjoy games like Minecraft, Terraria, Castle Miner Z, – or other block-based pioneers – you will without a doubt enjoy our project as we attempt to push the limits of what a block-based game can offer.

The Big Merge

The Big Merge… Those of you in our Discord will be very familiar with these three words, but part of the reason our blog posts slowed was that we realized we were going to hit a major wall if we did not improve our engine. While we had created something very robust, our engine had its shortcomings and as we began to pick up our pace and pour content into the game we realized we needed to go back and fix things. We faced an ultimatum of either giving up or back tracking and fixing a lot of the issues at the game's core. We chose the latter. One of our developers, Jacob, went back and stripped our engine down to its core. He vastly improved the way world generation worked and made the game run a billion times faster. He, alongside another one of our developers, Shelby, rewrote large portions of the base server code of the game to improve the multiplayer experience and overall speed/quality of our engine. This was a major time suck and part of the reason why we got quiet everywhere except Discord and Twitter. However, this was well worth it. The game now runs so much better than before and the only downside is that we have a lot of things to move over to the new system and some need to be rewritten.

Where we're at…

This is the stage of the merge we are currently in. While some things – like blocks – were able to be moved directly to the new engine with little to no change, other systems had to be rewritten entirely – Nightfall's player inventory being one of these systems. We are currently in the process of fixing the inventory and rewriting the parts that need to be changed but this is something that has slowed us down. Knowing that it will be worth it in the long run is what keeps us going. Additionally, we had a lot of problems with crashing using Unity 2020. There were some errors on Unity's side of things that made it more difficult than we thought it would be to move over some of our old code. We are finally on what we hope is the other side of those issues and so we will now be able to continue the final parts of the merge. We're hoping to have a lot of this content rewritten and re-added to the game by the end of early 2021. We'll also be working on new features at the same time! Some of these features will be covered in this blog post and we'll also talk about somethings we worked on during the merge process.

While the merge was tedious, rewriting core systems like movement allowed us to explore some new mechanics…

New Movement (Slides and Rolls!)

You heard that right! We added two new ways to move around that will bring around fundamental changes for how the character traverses the world and partakes in combat! Before I start to talk about these, I feel like its necessary to say that both of these GIFs were taken DURING the merge process and so almost all of the textures/skyboxes shown here were placeholders we used during that. All of our art is now back to what it normally is and we're no longer using these placeholder assets.

The first of the new movement mechanics is rolling. Currently you can roll by pressing your middle mouse button. This roll is a quick way to dodge if someone is swinging a sword at you or a boss or monster is getting ready to stomp on you. Obviously there's other applications to rolling than those two but you can see just how useful of a mechanic this is! Sliding works in a similar manner and is triggered by sprinting and pressing “Ctrl”. You can slide into one block spaces and we plan to make it so if you do this you'll automatically start crawling. If you slide and stop moving you'll come up automatically crouching, and if you slide and continue your momentum you'll stay standing up and keep on running.

Both of these new forms of movement will prove to be important parts of mastering both PvP and travel in Nightfall. However, it would be a bit overpowered if we let you roll and slide infinitely over and over. To combat this, performing one of these two moves will take up a bit of your stamina. After rolling or sliding 2-3 times, you'll need to wait for your stamina to regenerate before attempting to do so again.

Visual Improvements

Nightfall has undergone a lot of visual improvements since our last blog post. We are currently in the process of overhauling our lighting system to be entirely custom and based on a Euclidian flood-fill algorithm. Basically those fancy words mean that Nightfall's lighting is going to look a hell of a lot better soon! One of our developers, “KdotJPG”, has been working on this for awhile now and we're excited to see some of it in game soon. One of the things KdotJPG created was a custom solution for Ambient Occlusion (or AO) in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP). This is a super cool thing and you can see it in the image above. We still need to reimport this to the new merge build but it will be added in alongside the new lighting changes soon!

Caves

Cave generation has also seen some serious improvement since our previous blog post. KdotJPG has been hard at work at re-doing the noise behind our caves and they are now in much better shape than they were before. You can explore winding caverns or dig strip mines – whatever you prefer! We're also working on some more independent generation types inside of caves like larger pockets and ravines that will appear more commonly depending on the biome. The noise of caves also changes if you enter an underground biome or a different part of the world! This screenshot does not feature any ores to allow you to get a better look at the way caves carve through the world. You can ignore the test inventory on the right side ?. We've also been adding other features to Nightfall's underground like…

Stones

Different stone types! There are now nine different types of stone that spawn underground – Chalk, Travertine, Rhyolite, Slate, Limestone, Marble, Dolomite, Granite, and Schist! All of these stones can be found in caves and most will spawn in large portions. They'll have lots of different forms that you can make using the carver to give you a nice palette of stones to build with. Some of these blocks, like Slate and Chalk, will spawn in smaller veins as these have other use than just building. We'll save that information for another blog post though!

Ores

You may have seen the reveal of some of these ores on our Twitter, but we've got some never before seen renders to share with you in this blog post! Ores have seen a major overhaul since our last blog post and many of them now have proper models/textures. In the image above you can see Coal, Iron, Copper, Gold, and of course – Chrysocolla! Ores will be scattered throughout the underground and you'll be able to find different ores depending on what biome or tier of the underground that you are mining in! We'll go into more detail on what each of these ores does and where they can be found in the next part of this post!

Coal

Coal is a pretty basic ore that can be found in Normal, Hot, and Cold biomes underground. It is used as an early game fuel source and will also have use in providing lighting for the player. It is fairly common and found throughout all levels of the tier one underground. There really isn't too much to say about coal. It is fairly simplistic and an easy material to wrap your head around.

Iron

Iron! Things get a bit more exciting with Iron Ore! Iron Ore can be found in the underground of normal biomes. It is found almost top to bottom of the tier one underground and is used in a lot of basic recipes. It can be made into tools and basic armor and is a natural step in early game progression. It is also used in crafting a lot of the basic workstations/materials you may need early on in the game. Iron is a bit more uncommon than coal and spawns in much smaller veins. This is definitely a resource you should prioritize looking for if you want to quickly fortify your player and base. Iron also has many different decoration blocks and items that can be crafted from it.

Copper

Copper Ore is a bit different than Iron! It can be found in normal tier one underground systems. While found about as commonly and in similarly sized veins as Iron, Copper can not be used to directly create tools and armor. When combined with Tin, Copper can be used to make one of the earliest obtainable alloys – Bronze. Bronze is a good step up from Iron and a bit stronger. Copper is also used in the recipes of anything electronic and will likely someday be used in wiring and steampunk type machinery which is something we hope to explore in Nightfall! Copper can also be turned into blocks for decoration and other functions.

Gold

Gold is a rarer material found in the lower levels of the tier one underground. It can be found in both normal and hot climates. Gold will be useable for tools and armor although the quality of the material widely varies. It is valuable resource that will also have some magical qualities. Gold can be used in various decorative block/item recipes and also will have use when it comes to crafting accessories. Further uses of gold will be shared in future blog posts.

Chrysocolla

What has turned out to be our most iconic ore, Chrysocolla is both the rarest and strongest of the ores that can be found among all of the different climates of the tier one underground systems. Chrysocolla can be used to create armor and tools powerful enough for the player to break the Deepstone at the bottom of tier one to enter the tier two underground below. Chrysocolla is by far the most difficult ore to find and can only be found at the lowest depths of tier one. It will be tricky to uncover but its glow will shine through the cracks of the stone to help players locate it. Forging Chrysocolla into tools and armor is an important step for a player to become powerful enough to handle some of the initial horrors of the night.

Chrysocolla was one of our favorite ores to make and it is still far from what we hope it's final appearance will look like. We plan to use custom shaders to make the inner cracks of the ore seem to glow and move but for now this is what we've settled with. The process of making Chrysocolla was actually really cool and we used a custom noise generator created by KdotJPG to design the outer appearance of the block. We plan to use a generator like this to randomize the cracks in future versions of this ore.

Other Ores…

All of these ores that we just covered are only some of the ores you can find in Nightfall. We have a lot of other ores planned for the normal tier one underground as well as some of the other biomes and tier two of the underground. We even sneakily mentioned one or two in this post! However, the ores that we showed off have more finished models and textures and we thought we'd share them with you today to give you a better look at their purpose and art in game! ?

Crystals

Ores are not the only thing you can find underground! Crystals can also be found scattered throughout the tiers of Nightfall's underground. These are something you may have seen us working on during our Twitch streams! Crystals will have a few uses depending on what type you find. Most crystals will be encrusted onto armor or tools to provide you with special benefits almost like enchantments. Other crystals will be useable in creating decorative blocks! Some even have some secret magical uses for things like opening rifts or creating wands! We'll share more about the uses of Crystals in future blog posts! Come join us on Twitch to help design these Crystals and suggest more uses for them!

Generation Improvements (Badlands' Spikes)

Over the past six months, we've also made big strides in the kind of generation that we can make with the world. For this blog post, we thought we would share a specific triumph of the Badlands' spikes! The Badlands now feature full on spikes that jut diagonally out of the ground and tower over the player. It is crazy to think that these spikes once looked like the image below.

I think that the Badlands now look quite a bit like the original concept art that we designed back in October of 2019 and its exciting to think that we've reached these kinds of generational capabilities. The future of the Badlands is bright and we look forward to experimenting with the additions of things like geysers and skeletons of giant creatures to continue to flesh out this biome.

Smelteries

A couple of posts ago we shared some of our Smeltery models and explained that they will be used to both smelt ores and create alloys. Since then, we've finished the UI and have a better idea of how these will work in game! Pictured below are the UI mockups for both the Tier 2 and Heart of the Sun Smeltery. We're also ready to tell you about some of the benefits that come along with upgrading your Smeltery. The starter Tier 1 Smeltery will only have the default option of using a fuel item to smelt an ore or item and receive a singular output in return. When you upgrade this to a Tier 2 Smeltery, you'll unlock the ability to create alloys by mixing two items or metals to receive a strengthened and unified product. For example, by mixing Tin and Copper ingots here, you'll be able to make Bronze! The Tier 2 Smeltery upgrade allows you to smelt alloys and ores that require hotter temperatures by allowing for fluid based fuels! You can see how this might work pictured below!

We're excited to get these Smelteries in game and to begin exploring the different alloys and ingots you can create using these workstations. We'll keep you posted on our progress with this in future update posts!

Armor

Something we recently started exploring is Armor! This has been a very long and tedious process as we were not entirely sure what direction we wanted to take it in. We've finally found our groove though and James has really done a great job of creating the look and feel of our Armor. We are not entirely done yet but here are the mostly finished designs of a helmet and work-in-progress chestplate. These are part of the basic Iron armor set and you can see them in the renders pictured above and below.

You may have noticed that there are two different helmets in the first render. This is on purpose! The helmet on the right is the basic Iron Helmet that the player can craft. The other helmet featured on the left is the Royal Iron Helmet. This helmet will not be craftable and will only be obtainable through drops or loot in the world. We plan to have lots of armor sets that are available in this way. Some will be better than others but in this case the Royal Iron Helmet is exactly the same as the Iron Helmet in terms of strength and durability – just cooler!

We have a lot of plans for armor in Nightfall, but figuring out this initial first set is our biggest priority. Once we've created a baseline, it will be much easier to create more unique sets in the future and won't take us as long to model the base. We also want to take a different approach with armor in Nightfall in that not all armor will be craftable. Some armor sets will be found through things like monster drops, fishing, dungeons, and other ways we aren't ready to spoil! Progression will not be purely mining based and it will be up to the player to figure out how they want to improve their character's defense. We'll be working on armor sets more on our Twitch! Come watch it live and suggest ideas for armor and new sets!

Gliders

As you may have seen on Twitter or Discord, we've started working on some new ways to traverse the world of Nightfall! One of these ways is with Gliders! Gliders will be findable or craftable and the player can either hold the glider in their hand or attach it to their back slot. If worn on the back, the glider's will appear in closed form attached to the players back. Then, you can jump off of cliffs or high heights and unfurl your glider to coast safely to the ground. We also want to add updrafts to give you boosts back up into the sky! We're brainstorming ways to do this (like geysers or wind) that we'll talk more about in the future. If you don't want to use up your back equipment slot, you can also just hold your glider in your hand and right-click to unfurl it/use it. We're excited for all the applications gliders will have in-game whether it be fast transportation or traversing future sky biomes.

Streams

A brief pause from new content to talk about something else we've been doing recently… STREAMING! We've been way more active on our twitch lately – https://www.twitch.tv/venatus_games​​ – than ever before! If you're not already following… you should! We have an art stream almost every Sunday and sometimes additional art streams during the week. We also plan to stream some programming and gameplay in the future! Speaking of gameplay, on Saturdays we have community game night where you can come play games with us – the devs! We've been doing game nights like Among Us and Jackbox Games but we plan to someday use these community nights to play Nightfall with members of the community! We also have a blast on stream interacting with you and answering questions. It's a great time to get direct and live answers from us about the game and you can even suggest features for us to add! Streaming is a great way for us to cover some of our monthly art/development bills and we really appreciate all of you who have subbed, followed, cheered, or come out to show support! Thank you so much! <3

Checking in on Alpha…

Okay! What a lot of you have probably been looking forward to… Here is the segment where we talk about the current status of Nightfall and how close we are to finishing our checklist of things we'd like to include in the initial release of Nightfall's alpha. While we still do not have a release date for you, I can tell you that our tentative and current internal goal is to have something that is playable for Patreon Supporters and active members of our Discord by the end of 2021. Here is our status on some of the things we would like to include in that release.

- Dynamic Trees

We actually started to work on dynamic trees right before the big merge. Currently, these had to take a back burner while we work on fixing some issues with reimporting biomes but if all goes well we will be working on our custom tree system again soon!

- The Underground

The underground has seen massive leaps and bounds. All ores for the normal tier one underground are functioning and spawning where they are supposed to. We also have a really nice new cave system with proper cave generation noise. We've fleshed out he underground with some stone types and are even testing some underground biomes for Tier 2! We've also done some work on blocks for both the hot and cold type undergrounds as well!

- Workstations

Workstations are the next big thing we want to tackle after we finish rewriting/importing the inventory system. This is a priority of ours and all of the workstations we want to include in Alpha are textured, modeled, and almost all of them now have UI.

- Enemy AI

Nothing worth noting in this blog post.

- Hunger/Thirst

Hunger and Thirst were both implemented into the game in their early forms but now need to be fixed/reimported because of the merge. This is something we will do after fixing the inventory. We'll be working on food/cooking once that is complete.

- Proper Lighting/Night Improvements

KdotJPG is currently in the process of writing our custom lighting solution and this will also radically change our Day/Night cycle and make massive improvements to the look and feel of Nightfall. We are really excited to share our progress on this soon.

- Water Physics

Although nothing specifically about water physics has been worked on, the algorithm we are using to handle lighting can be adapted to help us create flowing water and its behavior. We expect to be working on this after lighting is completed.

Overall, this is good progress on our alpha checklist. This makes our goal of releasing something to supporters by the end of 2021 seem feasible, but you never know what could happen. 2020 has been a crazy year and we don't want to jinx everyone with another apocalypse.

Anything else?

We are working on some other exciting things outside of this list as well! Currently, Gavin and myself are working on fishing mechanics and adding them to the game. Expect to see more about this in a coming update. We're also working on some things like clouds, re-adding our old movement capabilities/new ones, multi-blockspace blocks, and more! We also have basic account creation/username selection set up and are working on character customization and profiles. Stay tuned on our Discord/Twitter to hear more about these things as we continue to work on them. We'll also reveal more information during our livestreams on Twitch.

Music

Our incredible composer Jaykoa is back working on the Nightfall original soundtrack. You can expect to hear more pieces of our OST super soon! ?

Click here to listen to all of the songs we've already released!

Discord, Patreon, and Social Media

Discord

https://discord.gg/2BKtNks

Use the link above to head on over to our Discord. This is the absolute BEST way to communicate with myself, any of the Developers, and the community. We have dedicated areas for you to suggest features, give feedback, learn more, and most importantly - ASK QUESTIONS (and get an answer too!) This is the easiest way of supporting us and is totally free! We are so happy to see so many of you already taking advantage of this by joining, talking to each other, suggesting features, and grilling us with questions! It's been great! While we've been silent in posting blogs – WE HAVE STILL BEEN ACTIVE HERE! This is the best place to stay up to date with the game!

**I know I mention Discord in every blog post, but seriously, this is a great place to get to know us better! You can earn in-game profile tags, suggest features directly, and we do different things throughout the week for you to participate in like Feedback Friday with more to come in the future! You're missing out if you haven't hopped in yet! ❤️

YouTube

Check out our YouTube channel for other pieces of Nightfall's OST. We are also working on a video Devlog coming out hopefully next month!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0eFml5-iRYt6mgG2k2LTw

Click the link above to head over and subscribe so you don't miss future videos!

Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/vgnightfall

While we don't require it by any means, Patreon is a great way to support us directly. You can pledge to monetarily support us monthly here. We do have various tiers of support that each provide unique rewards like special roles on our Discord server, access to even more direct communication with Developers, and of course, eventual early access to the game to help us test. One of the tiers even lets you work with us directly to add a creature to the game! You'll also get bonus development content and an even closer peek into our development process directly through Patreon and Discord when you subscribe! We've already posted a lot of extra content on our Patreon!

Thank you to our current Patreon supporters:

Patreon+ - BOWSER0897

Patreon+ - Ceaturtle

If you don't like Patreon, you can also choose to support us directly with one-time payments through PayPal.

You can donate through PayPal by clicking here.

Thank you to those of you who have chosen to do this in the past or through Patreon.

Twitter

https://twitter.com/venatus_games

Our Twitter is a great way to keep track of weekly updates to Nightfall! We post screenshots, GIFs, videos, art, job positions, and more! Twitter is free to use and an awesome way to stay up to date with all of the Nightfall news! Head on over to the link above and give us a follow to learn more!

(Closing)

And Night is Upon Us!

Here we are at the end of a long overdue blog post! If you read all the way to the bottom – thank you! We really appreciate all the support you've shown us and the excitement you have for our game really keeps us going when the world seems a bit dreary. Please continue to send us feedback and leave suggestions as we do listen and read just about all of them. A simple comment or share really helps us out right now because at the end of the day, Nightfall is still a hobby for us. We dedicate as much time as we can to this but we have a lot of other stuff that takes priority. All of your support is part of what makes this happen, and we thank you for that! I think this post has been long enough though, and it's starting to get dark. I've heard rumblings and growls that sound unfamiliar coming from the trees on the horizon. I wonder if there are new monsters on their way here… I better get going. Stay tuned for more updates on Nightfall soon!

With love,

Jack and the Venatus Team