Hey everyone, Ash here, once again bringing you an update with our work for the past month on Chrono. Let’s cut the introductions and move on to the exciting stuff.
Many of you may have already heard, but for those of you who don’t follow us on our social media or discord, we have made great strides in replacing our AI images with hand-drawn art with the help of the artist BEIKI. You’ll see here Sleepy Druid and her immortalized form Xae, Dreamstrider and we’re very happy to welcome them to the Finished Card Club. We’ve got a few more pieces that we haven’t shown you yet, some great art that *Sparkles* and one we’ve been *Tending* very carefully, but we’re gonna hold onto those for the time being. We want to leave some surprises for you when the alpha is released. For now, please enjoy these videos of the creation of these two pieces.
On the front-end of our operation, this past month we have built upon multi-scene structures and scene-transitions in tandem with things like animating cards drawing, actions activating and moving from the main menu to the loading screen to the battle screen. The overall scope of the client is firming up. A good UI also requires good sound effects! We are welcoming a few new professionals to the team to work on recording sounds, SFX integration, and music. Voice acting is also being scripted and charted out. This means we are now integrating with industry standard FMOD for Unity to allow a smooth and effective collaboration. Sound and audio is a whole other topic though and we’ll likely delve deeper into it in future updates.
For our back-end, November was mostly focused around network management and data synchronization. Data sync is the quickest to cover, so in brief: when you launch the client, it checks if your local data storage matches the online storage. It does this by checking some Set data metrics, and if there is a mismatch, it will download the Card data you are missing. This all runs in the background and essentially makes sure that what shows on your screen is consistent with our server. Things like balance patches or new content.
On the networking front, this is the standard feature suite you would expect. For example - ensuring the connection to the server remains open, allowing data to propagate to all connected users, handling disconnects, and more. Over December, we’ll be working more on the Rules Engine, and getting the game to flow as intended.
This concludes this month’s update. Development over the next month will slow around the holidays as the team takes a much deserved break. There will still be a December Dev Update but it may be lighter than ones that have come before. Thank you!