🛠️Weekly Update 05/08/2022

Enjoy Monkey Empire devblog and keep in touch with the ape game development

Art

We have done 2D Concept Art Rendering for Quarry Render and Barracks.

Game Design

We have been through a round of balancing ingame buildings and troops MonkeyCoin value. The idea is that new players should not access MonkeyCoin directly after installing the game, even though bots and hackers would love that. They can always buy some and get boosters, but units and buildings won’t cost any of them before reaching a certain level. This also means that the MonkeyCoin mine won’t be available before you reach that point.

We have been through more units balancing in general. We finalized a list of all audio sound effects needed in the game.

Backend

Work in progress on some architecture on implementing MonkeyCoin transfer from and to the game.

Frontend

We have updated all editors plugins, as we are using the latest Unreal Engine 5.0.3 release, on Windows, Linux and macOS. It is much more stable and faster than the original UE5 version, which was even worse than the UE5 preview.

We have done a lot of modifications to the village level this week : -Buildings are now bigger. -Runtime Virtual Textures Added -Adjustments near the river side -Adjustments in Farming area foliage(Material visibility improved) -Implemented new mesh for the placeholders -Spotlights added so we can see the buildings better -Landscape Texture Color Adjustments -Post Process Adjustments -Grass Material Adjustments -Bug Fixes -Removed Some useless stuff from the Project

After all those changes, it starts to take some time to build and test the project on all platforms, as we support Apple devices now. Building the game requires having a Dev Apple account. It was actually the most difficult part to get the game working with the Mac Studio : creating accounts but not receiving SMS confirmations to do so. It took a week to get everything up and running, but Apple support took the case very well and helped finish the process. We can now move forward on macOS and iOS builds.

3D character

Worked in the Orangutan character. -A high poly Fur is available -First tests of Textures -Finishing Low Poly version & Uv’s

We will start soon working on the final textures

We are adding hairs to the marketing chimp model, it’s still in progress. We are not satisfied yet with the current render still working on it Message.

3D buildings

3D: Optimisation and remeshing of 3D models from pc level (Vegetation especially) to integrate it on mobile high poly of quarry finished. The quarry is in progress.

Sound design

I took the time to explore many ideas for Monkey Empire soundtrack. I’m looking to create a world that is both intriguing and post-apocalyptic. For this I use Kontakt plug-ins, known in the production world for the quality of its sounds. Here are some images of these beautiful virtual instruments. I’ll let you listen to the first test of the soundtrack. There is no mixing and mastering yet.

Don’t hesitate to give me your feedback in the comments.

The whole Monkey Empire team wishes you a nice day. See you next week for the new devblog episode and don’t forget to ape!

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