Dear fellow Cavemen,
Welcome to the second, of many, Caveworld development updates! Over the past two months, since our last development deep dive, we have made an incredible amount of progress on the art, design, and development side of Caveworld. Although we will not spoil many of the exciting things we have coming, we hope this update provides some much-needed insights on what we’ve been working on! Let’s begin.
Environment/Arena Design
For the initial release of Caveworld, we will launch with one main arena. This arena will have multiple lighting modes, allowing for seamless transitions from day to night, and will have many different areas for Cavemen to congregate. At this point, the arena is undergoing modeling and texturing by a three-person design team, dedicated full-time to turning this arena into a masterpiece. The photos below show the basic design and layout of our arena, but remain entirely untextured and uncolored. If you’re impressed with these, we cannot wait for you to see the final product. It will be magical!
Also, considering we aren’t using any pre-made assets inside Caveworld and are creating everything from scratch, every object you see is going through the same rigorous design process as our wearable items and weapons. For instance, every wooden box, barrel, hanging piece of mammoth meat, etc. is being built, modeled, textured, and colored. Hopefully this shines some light on why building Caveworld is taking a bit more time than expected. Below is a photo of one of the prehistoric dinosaur fossils that Cavemen collected during their travels. This massive item will lay around the arena, and is incredibly detailed in its design. We cannot wait to see it completed.
In-Game Items
Armors
As we continue to move forward with finalizing our environment, another group within our 10-person art team has been devoted to building out additional armor sets. Currently, we’ve finished about eight full sets, ranging from the Turtle Set to the Iron Set (viewable now on our Twitter!). However, we aim to have at least a dozen unique armors for Cavemen to wear in Caveworld’s initial release!
The photos below are some work-in-progress images of one of our favorite new sets: The Shark Set! We’ll be releasing the complete version of this set in the next few days, but as you can tell from these renderings, the level of detail is undeniable! As most of you know, our 3D team has worked on projects with Activision, EA, Dreamworks, Netflix, and more, so it shouldn’t be surprising that each of these sets takes multiple weeks to fully develop! Caveworld is striving for perfection, and we will stop at nothing to make that happen.
Weapons
Since airdropping weapons after the mint of our Crypto Cavemen Club NFTs (all the way back in September/October 2021), they took a backseat on our development priority list. We are happy to announce that this is no longer the case, and the team has once again began building the Caveworld arsenal. Two of our newest weapons are the Bow, an uncommon ranged weapon, and the Wooden Sword, a common melee weapon. Remember, the five rarities for weapons, from weakest to strongest, are: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary. Over the next month, we expect numerous new weapons to be released, and we can’t wait to show them being held by our Cavemen in the arena!
Gameplay Development
Another major development for Caveworld has come from the Unreal Engine and Development teams. Over the past month, they have been working full-time on in-game movements, perfecting the hex grid, lighting, camera angles, UI/UX, and more. One of the most recent development feats has been completing the lighting arrangement inside the arena. As all the battles will take place inside this dark cave, it’s vital for lighting and graphics to be perfect, so all of our beautiful items and armors are viewable and properly lit. Below are some photos of the unfinished hex-grid layouts and designs inside the arena!
Abilities
In addition to pure mechanics, the team has also been working on balancing dozens of different abilities. We will be writing an in-depth article about all of the Abilities in Caveworld, but for now we will explain a bit about how they work! To put it simply, abilities can either be passive or active, and will not only be applicable to Cavemen, but Pets and Items too! Let’s take a look at how abilities will affect each category.
Cavemen Abilities: Each caveman will have a personal ability tree, which will allow them access to four tiers of abilities, ranging from basic to ultimate ones! As players level up, they will be able to choose which abilities to unlock from the ability pools, which will ensure each player can build their own unique strategy. Most abilities have a unique effect and tend to be more active than passive. Some can be activated only once at the players discretion, but others can be activated multiple times during a battle. Not to mention, some can only be activated when a specific condition is met. Players will be able to choose which abilities they want to have before each battle, and when or how to perform those abilities during battle.
Pet Abilities: Each pet has one or two abilities that can help their Caveman perform during battle. All pet abilities are passive, can appear as auras or boosts, and may be conditional based on what occurs during battle. This means that players will not need to manage the abilities during the game, but instead can feel confident that their pets are helping them in the best way possible.
Item abilities: In addition to their main stats, items can also have special abilities. However, similar to how pet abilities work, these abilities will be passive and will not require players to manually activate them during battle.
Overall, the combination of abilities from all of these categories will be able to create some amazing combos and will allow for endless different dynamics within each battle! Here are some examples of abilities from the 4 tiers:
Tier 1 Example: Beehive — Throw a beehive ticking bomb on a hex within 5 range. It explodes after 2 turns, dealing 70 damage and stun to all targets on the beehive tile and all adjacent tiles.
Tier 2 Example: Spikes — Return 20% damage of total incoming damage when getting hit.
Tier 3 Example: Ring of Fire — Spawn a ring of fire around all the adjacent tile. Deals damage to all characters who are standing on any adjacent tile.
Tier 4 Example: Doom — Tag this effect on an enemy, and they have only four turns before they die. However, you go down to 1 HP. Use this wisely!
More Information
If you are not a part of our Discord community, we highly recommend it, as we are constantly dropping great alpha to our community. Simply visit discord.gg/caveworld to join, it’s free! To find links to purchase Crypto Cavemen NFTs (our in-game characters) or $CAVE coin (our in-game token) visit our Linktree: http://linktr.ee/Caveworld!
As always, thank you to every Caveman who has remained on this journey with us. We know development has taken a bit longer than expected, but we appreciate your patience, and hope you are as excited as we are about the progress that has been made. The Cavemen family is one like no other, and we are so excited for what the next few weeks/months will bring!
