Caveworld Progress Update #5

Caveworld
6 min readAug 17, 2022

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Dear fellow Cavemen,

Welcome to the fifth, of many, Caveworld development updates! As we approach the one-year anniversary of minting our beloved Cavemen, we feel honored to have so many of you continuing to follow Caveworld’s progress. We continue to be stunned by, and thankful for, your patience during development. The (still growing) team at Caveworld has not wavered in its commitment to building the most disruptive mobile game in history, and we cannot wait for you all to get your hands on it. Enjoy the update!

Art & Design

Environment (yep, it’s finally done)

As discussed in previous updates and announcements, the Caveworld environment and arena is completely finished. Every asset was modeled and textured, from start to finish, by our in-house team. Although building everything from scratch takes a significant amount of time, the uniqueness and quality we’ve been able to achieve sets us apart from most other projects. With the completion of this massive undertaking, our 3D artists have moved their focus to our items and weapons for the game.

Armors

We cannot write a Caveworld update without showing you all some of the new armors being worked on! If you’ve seen the dozens of posts by Art Director, Gaarzen, in our Discord, you’d realize that we’re now approaching an astounding 15 armor sets. In fact, we finally have enough armors to pull even more of our team away to build other in-game items, like weapons, traps, and more. What do you think the names of these two armor sets will be?

Highly detailed shots of one of our newest completions: The Ocean Armor Set!
Work-in-progress armors in the modeling and texturing stages

Weapons

Although you all have seen us create a variety of melee weapons, such as maces, spears, knives, and swords, we haven’t spent much time developing our arsenal of ranged weapons, until now. We’ve started with the Bow & Arrows, and will continue with other throwable objects!

The Caveworld Fishbone Bow (Left) and Furry Bow (Right)
The Caveworld Leather Bow (Left) and Bamboo Bow (Right)

2D UI Assets

Despite already having a dedicated team to build our 2D assets, we’ve added a new hire since our last update! Content is now being finished at incredible speeds, without compromising quality. Below are are a few of our favorite new pieces:

Newly completed 2D Versions of 3D Caveworld Assets

Animation/VFX

The most exciting update comes from the animation and VFX side of the team! That’s right, after designing, modeling, texturing, and weighting dozens and dozens of assets for the past year, they are finally being brought to life in a BIG way! We started off with simple striking animations and have moved on to creating more advanced moves for Caveworld players to perform during battle. For example, for each weapon type, there are movement variations that changes how the caveman stands, moves around, and attacks. Not to mention, there are other complicated animations relating to the casting of spells, which we have started to tease on our Twitter! As the in-house animation team works through the lengthy list of animations, you all will start to see just how athletic the Cavemen are!

While all the large-scale production fighting animations are being created, there are also numerous procedural animations being worked on. For instance, perfecting the beer stomach for the Cavemen, ensuring their eyes blink ~12 times a minute like real humans, and mastering the multi-layer animation system.

An example of beer stomach physics for the Cavemen.

In just the past few days, we’ve been testing new VFX and animation workflows for refining a unique game style. This process even included hand-drawn flip-books of movements and actions (Future raffle item?).

Caveworld Server & Technical Progress

Server Update

The past few weeks have been especially difficult due to the need to hire out a new crew to develop the Caveworld server. This is the backend bones of the game ecosystem and, on top of being insanely complicated, must be built to perfection. Danny and Sergey reviewed hundreds of CV’s and Resumes, and conducted dozens of interviews, to find someone who would make us proud. With the release of this article, we are thrilled to welcome a new member to the team.

Interface Design

With the backend team taken care of, our front-end team has been crushing it on the development of the User Interface. This is a crucial piece of mobile gaming because every aspect of Caveworld must be properly represented and understandable. We’ve made tremendous progress, but have no drafts that we feel comfortable releasing to the public… yet.

The game mechanics crew has also continued polishing all aspects of the game. For instance, they created standalone weapons, finalized the set bonuses for item sets, finalized ability mechanics and tiers, and finalized Caveman NFT ability tree bonuses (huge deal). Although seemingly simple when written in a short sentence or two, these completions mark massive milestones in production.

Join the Community:

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!

OOGA BOOGA to all!

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Caveworld

A Play-to-Earn project built for true gamers. Built by the Crypto Cavemen Club on Solana.