Another busy month here for Sand Rush, we remained as productive as possible. At this point we have made it to the middle of Q4 , and I must say things are starting to heat up around here. We continue to make improvements to our work flow as we learn what works best for our team. Lets take a look at some things we have gotten through this month.
Focus:
Our focus continues to shift from asset creation to world building, and LAND development. As many of you may know SAND RUSH is the proud holder of over 150 LANDs in the SANDBOX metaverse. This is a lot of surface area to cover. We choose to articulate, and make the best use of our space as possible. With that being said here are a few things we have been working on.
LAND Development:
The SANDBOX defines LAND as the following:
“The Sandbox Metaverse is made up of LAND, which are parts of the world, owned by players to create and monetize experiences. There will only ever be 166,464 LANDs available, which can be used to host games, build multiplayer experiences, create housing, or offer social experiences to the community”
Each LAND is bigger than one might expect. Built to scale, a single LAND is 96x 96x 128 meters. Typically LANDs are developed from BLOCKs in a Minecraft fashion. Here at SAND RUSH we have made a decision to try and stray away from this “ Blocky” look and feel. However, we understand using blocks are going to be a necessary part of development and offer a simple way to lower our overall polycount. Not to mention, using blocks for path finding resolves many of the collision issues we have come across.
As you can see from the above, we have a fair start on block building. Although these examples are still in progress, we have close to 100 blocks in our current library. As we get much closer to bulling into mass LAND development, blocks have become a personal focus of mine this month.
The Plan:
LAND development is a critical component to our goals. Rather than just throwing together something on a whim, we focus on pre-production. This involves building level mock ups. One of the major advantages of this process is to help establish path finding. In addition to this, building a level mock up allows us to open up a group discussion with our team to talk about potential game dynamics and quests to be issued to the player during game play.
Once we have a mock-up LAND we all agree will work, the process of converting this to a LAND starts. The first step is to establish the location of where we need to place blocks. From here, we will go through and add several levels of detail, until the outcome is up to our expectations. Once the diorama has been completed, we will establish game dynamics, and quests. Getting us closer and closer to the completion of our first experience.
Asset creation:
The Sand Rush art teams continues to create assets, in a never ending process. Lets take a look at a few of the cool things we have completed this month.
This beautifully textured tree kit has a lot of flexibility. Essentially, we will port this out from Voxedit, into the Sandbox Game Maker, and assemble trees to suit our needs. These will be a beautiful addition to our environment.
Among having a variety of vegetation, the Jungle Rush game will be littered with relics and interesting objects to help keep the players visually interested.
Shipping containers? I thought this was a jungle!? Sand Rush has many things in the works, and you never know what you will find left behind from the humans who previously occupied these lands. Stay tuned next month for more!
Continuum
Over the course of this month, we continue to engage in conversations with other projects, and have put a lot of thought into some up coming partnerships. We might have a few surprises coming down the pipe line for next month. In addition to this, we continue to make progress on our Discord server, and are coming to the final stages of a public opening. We have recently seen an overwhelming amount of spam coming from other Discord servers in this space, we will attempt to learn from their reactionary processes. If someone were to ask us when we plan to open our discord to the public, I hope it will suffice to say “ Very soon”. We still have a few gimmicks we need to get in place with our sponsors before we roll out.
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