7 min readDec 20, 2021

COSMICRAFTS WEEKLY DEVELOPER UPDATE #7, 8 & 9

Hey commanders! It’s been a while since our last WDU. We have been working really hard and adding extra stuff to the game and the project itself.

First of all i want to welcome all our new members, starting with SAKUNIX, who will be aiding the Blockchain party to develop all the engineering needed for NFT’s, Tokens, Wallets and Multiplayer. He’s a Linux expert who has experience working on a University Data Center. Next, we have Moo and Ingram, who both have been dedicating their time creating all the new designs and concepts for the Cosmicrafts Universe, from ships to new characters, you already have seen a sneak peek of what they are capable of in past art features. For Social Media, Gianella has joined the ranks to take proper care of our official accounts, she’s an experienced Social Media Community Manager. And last but not least, we want to welcome Nebula Tech team, who have been helping us develop the .com website. Thanks guys, you are the best!

Finally I want to thank every one of you for reading this and keep supporting this project. I know we have been a little absent the past few days but believe me, it was for the better! Now we are stronger than a month ago, and we are 100% focused, working hard for Cosmicrafts! Stay tuned for more ;).

Wos, Cosmicrafts CCO

PROGRAMMING: CHARACTER SYSTEMS, DECK BUILDING, MULTIPLAYER & UI

Now that we have the first versions of the character systems and deck building, the work is now divided into a couple of very important tasks. The first is the integration of the UI in these two systems, currently there is an interface with preventive graphics, for testing and development. The new graphics are in charge of making these systems look incredible, but it will take a bit of work on the interface code and adding some animations to make it look attractive.

The second active task is to serialize and prepare the information within the game to create the online multiplayer system. Before creating a connection between two players, the data packets must be light, efficient and secure for transfer. This requires analyzing what data is really important in the games and finding a way to optimize it as much as possible. Of course, we must also work on multiplayer safety and ensure that the results of any game are legitimate.

All this will take a long time, but we have faith that we will be able to run the first multiplayer tests in December. Meanwhile, we want to put together a demo version already with the new sections and interfaces, to give it a little taste of the big changes that are coming in the future.

During the week I saw some previews of the new UI for the character and deck sections, with the novelty that they will now be integrated as one, this to have most of these player characteristics available in one place. As soon as I have these new designs and images I will start integrating and programming them into the game. On the other hand, I was coordinating with the person in charge of the blockchain to put together a work plan about the multiplayer of the game. We have an initial idea of its operation and we seek to raise everything in a technical design document about multiplayer, this for the order and documentation of the system, which Dfinity asked us to have in the project.

I already have the basic information that will be synchronized in each game ready, and I will begin to prepare the most important functions and actions to be able to do the first multiplayer tests. At the beginning we probably won't have the visual effects and other secondary characteristics of the game synchronized, but at least the positions of the ships and their main statistics will be reflected between the two players. All of this will take time and a lot of testing, but we hope that players can have a good gaming experience soon.

MULTIPLAYER COMING REALLY SOON

The premier of the first trailer for multiplayer is December 16. I already have the technical document and there is a lot of work to be done. However, I have had several complications with my internet provider, so I have not had the opportunity to move forward as I expected. I hope to solve all these issues before the trailer premier as I need to do the first sync tests with my blockchain partner. We will start with the functions to search and find games, then we will move on to the basic synchronization of the first units between the two players. Having synchronization, the next thing is to create the deployment of units in parallel. Finally we will synchronize the victory and defeat screens in order to conclude the game.

We hope that the Definity blockchain will provide at least an acceptable response time so the quality of the multiplayer won't be compromised at the beginning and will be acceptable for a public version. Otherwise, Dfinity will support us to work together to improve response times as much as possible.

THE SPIRATS, FACTION-EXCLUSIVE BATTLE SHIPS & ART-CONCEPT

As you might have seen we’ve been working on the Space Pirates, also known as Spirats. Ingram is our new member of the team and he is in charge of creating from scratch the concept art for what we will have in the game later on as 3D.

This is the Scrapper

The plan for Cosmicrafts NFTs is to have replaceable parts, in which those “NFT Components” will add value to the spacecraft… for example making them do more damage, attack faster, critical damage, evasion, move speed, armor resistant, more powerful shields, reflect damage etc.

Also we’ll have skins and the ships will morph depending on the NFT level

Yes, this and more cool stuff, coming up!

MOO & INGRAM: ART-CONCEPT

The Cosmic Rafts Art department has started to develop original art for a more iconic game experience. I joined the team a few weeks ago and i’ve been working back to back with Bizkit to develop the idea of “the Spirats” that we have in mind. We started by writing down the ideas of what we believe a Spirat should look like and by writing down more of the Spirats lore in order to understand more about them. After that we started to work on some concept art. The second step we took on creating a Spirat ship was drawing some silhouettes to explore the primary forms of the spaceships. We followed the ideas that we wrote down on the previous step in order to establish a starting point.

Once the silhouettes were done we picked one to start working on and experiment with it.

After some trial and error we ended up with these two shapes:

We truly feel that we are on the right path on creating a Spirat ship, although the shapes we are doing are still very rough, they help us to create the bases of a final 3D piece, which will be the final product in game.

The first objective of the art department it’s to produce ONE final ship that can be truly called a Spiratship. Art by: Henry Acuatico and Ingram. Writing: Moo

In the 3D department I have been working day and night to be able to pass the concept art of the "Scrapper" ship to a 3D model that has only the necessary topology for the silhouette of the ship to work and that is as optimized as possible to have as few polygons as possible. The modeling of the ship is almost ready, once finished I will take UVs to start texturing the model and after that I can articulate it and start making animations. -Moo

I´m beyond excited to start developing the concept of this amazing, promising game. I started by creating the silhouettes of the S-pirates fleet. We got a silhouette that would finally become the 3d model Vlad would be modeling. We took this idea and made some changes by taking some references from Warhammer 40k, Mad Max, Waterworld and some others. While Moo and I were working on this concept, Brian was exploring more silhouettes and made changes according to my feedback and with bizkit´s feedback, we arrived at the almost final iteration, we then designed the wing and the cabin. For the inner details, we faced a hurdle because the details were not appreciated in the game due to the small scale of the ship, so we will start next week with a final design, and deliver a fully modeled concept.

Hope you enjoyed reading this Weekly Developer Update Compilation. Next week we will be ready to deliver more info about this project.