Updates with the Dev Team

Recorded: Dec. 22, 2022 Duration: 0:42:57

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Hey, good morning. We're just getting set up.
Hey, alright, let's wait a couple minutes for more people to join in.
It was -12 this morning here, so we're all just warming up.
Okay, so welcome guys to this development Twitter space the purpose is to give you kind of like a quick update and run down what the development team has been working on and maybe talk
like some goals that we have for 2023 and if you guys want to answer some questions we're waiting for the deaths to sit up so yeah let's wait for more people to join
Can you pass me co-host, Vinnie Champs? Sure.
Now who cares, just did.
Yeah, so of course, you know, the request to speak thing doesn't seem to be working right for us. So, Karen, our kind of main guy here is gonna switch over to his phone and try again.
Well, reset us from anyway. But I'm here. Hang on. Let's see. Brandon's requesting, hey, Brandon, you can talk. Let me see.
I can hear you in the room. Just one sec.
- Try now. - Yeah, we can hear you. Hey, there you are.
Yeah, my Twitter on browser just was not letting me be a speaker.
Hey guys, looks like we got a little bit of people here. Hey, yeah, I don't think I think you can listen to spaces on browser, but I think it's only like iOS and Android that allows you to actually speak up like daddy's on the browser right now. Oh, no way. That's so cool. I know. It's good.
Maybe I click something I don't know. But yeah, it's working, so good enough.
Awesome guys, welcome to the show.
We're here to tell you about what we've been up to.
which is a lot. This week, actually it's nice at Brandon's here. We can talk a little bit about the Jetpack. So this week, last week actually, Brandon got the Jetpack working. But of course, working doesn't always mean playing. So we've been doing modifications to it. I got him to add some
some exponential curves when you take off in land, but basically making it have some level of difficulty? It's actually really fun. I'm not under the weather, I just feel a little bit wet today. The really cool thing, it's funny, you know, I'm on my phone.
Even though the microphone is in my headphones, I feel like I'm holding my phone up, talking to the phone as if it's the microphone. But I don't have to. Yeah, I have my phone right here on the front of me like a month's younger. Yeah, but it's literally in my headphones. I just put my phone down and lean back. I'm not used to this. Usually I'm on camera.
So usually I have to be more attentive to staring at some little dot glowing dot. So yeah, back to the get. We really did start to make them fun. That's the cool part. We'll have a video out this Friday. We had some
issues with our giant environment so we skilled. Oh hang on hang on hang on hang on hang on. We have to say why we have issues because Kirin again, Melisoda's lab partner and it gets to a point where it just gets too hot and
And now at about 40 what is it 48 bags of RAM and use or I got it up said just kind of stop to 59 gigs of RAM used yesterday. Well, I was trying to build the level It was kind of nuts and the computer stopped or was just the engine just stopped the engine just closes. Yeah, yeah, but it stops for me at
32. I think 58.5 and then it just bit. But when you're developing a game developing is different than playing you have to deal with a lot of assets that are
are one-offs and that are just like individual in the development side of the engine, but when you package it up and bake it out, it does all the optimization. Kind of like when you're dealing with video. If you have a bunch of rendered out frames, they have the same, like let's say, every single frame of a video that's like a minute long has the same background.
what you do when you render that video and add compression to it is the algorithm actually looks and sees that oh these pixels don't change the entire time so we need to just basically print these pixels to screen once and hold and don't change so that's how your compression works and that's the same kind of thing
for a game when you package it up. So development, like even a mobile game, you need a decent computer to develop on if you want it to be not frustrating so you rip your hair out. And while my computer is top of the line and epic, we've encountered that if you want to make any maps that are
eight kilometers or larger. You need about 128 gigs of RAM to bake that out. So that's our little situation that we're doing with you. But it brings me to the cool topic of the jetpack. So the jetpack is just the first in the integrating all of our siloed out prototypes, finally into the
main open world level. So in Unreal 5 they've really free created the way you create an open world level. You stuff to do this world, I think it's called world component, but it was basically a hockey system with trigger boxes and they've integrated that completely into the engine so we can
And now, build worlds that are, I think, millions of kilometers if I'm not wrong, if not hundreds of thousands. So that's really cool. Where before you were restricted to, about eight kilometers. But that thing is, like, you know, the moon is about, I think, 10 kilometers in diameter.
No, 10,000. 10,000.
If Unreal, if it's set appropriately, apparently it can go on this directly from Unreal up to 88 million kilometers. Yeah, and that's the newest 5.1 update. It's amazing. But I think that we really just wanted to get the, I don't know if you guys have been following
us for a while but we have this level called the apartment level and it's basically a prototyping level where we do a lot of our prototyping. It may appear in the final game but I highly doubt it because it's really just where we tested all our assets in a silo so we've tested out our character controller
Our props, our brand-in built a really nice point system. So we've tested those out. We got a procedural system for building our buildings and we exported that and put that in. That's the apartments that you temporary see. Nothing here has been put to the finished level. So we've been wanting to get everything
to a level that we know it works, we know it's like efficient enough, like a rocks and teleporters, and now we can finally start building the actual moon line. So from, I guess for most of you guys, it'll be probably January forward, but for us right now, we're starting the actual
In January, I have been watching for the last time.
not even fully in production for the last nine months because we really did a lot of pre-production. We had switched a whole different concept art team which changed the look and style of our game. And if you did get a chance to see just a tiny bit last Friday, and I know Danielle is going to be posting more of this
but we got our new universal body type which is something that's really exciting for me personally with the idea like sometimes I think of the metaverse as AOL and sometimes I think of it as Internet and it really is a different it depends on the projects it depends
on what I'm looking at. But right now I really want the gaming metaverse to actually be connected and we have the technology to do it. So one of the things we want to do and I think you've seen this in redness on our Twitter is create a central hub and what we can do with that is allow other people like before we finally
specialized and perfected technology, especially with games that have been in production for over a year already. It's really hard to backtrack and integrate new characters and things like that into them. So like we look at things like Crypto Citizen, their characters would work in our game, or we can make a call it a no.
It's a dummy type character that is the most basic silhouettes of our style and our look. And we can give that to studios and they can customize that however they want. New texture, geometry, armor, clothing, glasses, whatever you want. And then when they integrate that back in a moon lens, we can integrate those.
props and things back into the game too. It's really exciting times and we're so early on in all of these crypto projects that they can be integrated together into the Merlin hub to be the social multiplayer it's destined to be and I'm really excited for that and it starts with going back to Jetpacks. So this week
We got them flying and I think Brandon got them going faster than the walking speed. We got them going so that we actually have you can go. Basically you can't fly off the moon. I don't really want players to fly off the moon. Maybe we'll experiment with that.
it ends up in a loss of characters. But what I want is races, challenges, we're going to have a bunch of mini games with these jet packs and I'm just going to come out and say we're doing laser tag, like we're doing laser guns. So you can fly the jet packs and shoot each other with lasers.
as well as go and watch a show. And if you noticed a scroll to the Moonland Meta Twitter and you'll see the new shot of the Saul character, we've produced a shot from. So in one of the integrations from the siloed prototypes is
we've been working on a shop prototype. So it allows characters to walk into a shop. There's shop helper robots. You can switch the shop. So instead of walking into a bunch of different shops, you can actually teleport from shop to shop just by looking through a list of different products and brands. It's really fast, easy to use,
and you can literally just snap your fingers and you're in a different shop. You want to go from, I don't know, this name brand to that name brand to even like an in-game a person's shop, you can switch it and the world around you changes and the textures change on the walls. It's really cool. So that's coming up, but we had to build the first big
open world first and that's taken a little bit of testing because behind the scenes you have so much technology that goes into multiplayer. You think about this. You play in a single-player game. Character punches another character or a character even jumps, let's say. Now on a multiplayer game
You have to also jump.
on the other player's side of things. So you're both running again and the server is actually the thing that's telling the other player that you're jumping and they're jumping at the same time. So there's a lot more replicated calls that need to be done and the fine tuning of that in a big game.
game, we really wanted to get early on. And I'd say, Brandon, you even found a bug recently with a running, right? That was why it was starting to get like sketched out because it was like not replicating properly. Yeah. And it was actually, it's pretty easy.
fix it's just you gotta do things in a very specific order in order to get them to talk properly with each other but with enough research and stuff you're able to really really get it get it going and you were able to get solid the game going right you
Yes, I was and I'm actually playing with Sol right now in the the character selection so that way it's able to change the animation blueprint even on. Oh, that's so perfect. Thank you. Oh, that's what we're doing, but I'm so excited. So we've been.
Like I said, we've been siloed and I know you guys have seen Kimmy in the space suit repeatedly, but we really want to make it so that like when we add something, sometimes, let's say you added a new character and a new environment. If something breaks, it's really, you're gonna spend more time looking
into both of those at the same time to figure out what breaks than doing one thing at a time. So while we have been making more characters, we've been really just in-game using the one character that we know works perfectly so that any animation bugs or anything else doesn't cause us any discomfort basically. It doesn't create a crap load of bugs that puts us
But again, we're at about nine months now with pre-production and entering early production for Moonland. And I'd say that this marks the time right now where we're going to have the next shots of the new world that you'll be seeing is the world you guys will be playing in first. So that's exciting for
We've basically prototaped every aspect of the game besides the laser tag. So that's the next step. We will be prototyping that in the apartment level, but then we'll be bringing it to you guys in the big main level. We already have a public server that's top secret, but
But we have the ability to send you guys a copy of the game and you can hop in. Now, I think what we were talking about yesterday, right now we're trying to get that all set up for you for January, but we're also
creating a page for you to register on the moonline meta.com. So soon you'll be able to go there and register an account. You can either log in with your wallet or create account with your email and that's exciting because that's the first step to getting you guys into our game because we need to identify you and have you in there. Of course we could make a multiplayer level where you guys
just can pick a character and play, but I would rather not. I'd rather have it so that it's tied to your count. We already built a point system and a leveling system, so we want to get you guys in there and we want to get the connection to the NFTs started right now. So we want you guys to be able to do what we've been saying all along.
All of our characters are NFTs. All of our players, users have to buy an NFT to play the game. That is going to be your character. Or win. Or win. Yeah, or win. We're going to be given away. Lots of them too.
So stay tuned, that's the big up and coming thing in January or February, it'll be really exciting. We have a whole bunch of NFTs for you guys to come down to and take a look at you. So we've been working
working on some schemas for that. That's not really my area of expertise, so I'll leave that up to Danny. We're concentrating our best at getting vehicles in next. We really
Let's say once we built a big environment, we both mean Danny took a look and it was like, "Oh, we need to drive. We need to drive like hover cars. We need to be able to fly things in here."
So immense. It's so cool when you're running around a giant world. And I guess as a developer, I really love this time because once you build that open world,
In development, you use something called a height map. The base height map is a black and white gradient map that allows you to create mountains and valleys.
We don't actually have a good high resolution of that one for the moon, so it's taken a while to really paint and get a really good quality height map to start with, and then we actually go in town real and we sculpt in by hand where the roads are going to go or we place splines to place areas that can change that kind of thing.
And that's, it's like playing a demigod. You literally are building a world from the ground up. I literally just put rocks on the ground yesterday and it just feels so amazing. And you know, when you drop
and you see the environment for the first time in your play especially in VR. You get overwhelmed because it's what you've been working on. It's really exciting and I'm really excited to share with you something else. We our modeler Alicia has been
She spent the last week, she really did finalize the universal body type, so you'll be seeing that soon. But she also has gotten the first character using that body type, almost finished. We're going in a more detailed
and I think you guys are gonna love it. It's gonna really pop, front reel. And it's gonna really make the character stand out in the realm of NFTs and even just regular games. Not even crypto games. Our characters are gonna look freaking gorgeous.
As far as dev updates go, we're here on out.
We are going to concentrate on getting as many characters for you guys to play as possible, the giant open world, and the city won't be finished, but it's going to be in construction so you can run around the city streets and take a look soon. That's all coming this January.
And I would like jump scares in VR. Yeah, so we're not. Oh, okay, if we have time, jump scares in VR. Perfect.
All of that is super exciting. And oh, there's something that we have to say. If you guys have been paying attention to everything that they've been saying,
and updating you about won't lend. We're going to have a little surprise in our discord. So make sure that you stay tuned and being in tension through all the updates. Awesome.
All right, so there's someone else like any questions or anything.
[sniffing]
Oh, you know one thing I might yeah, I'll mention to just because it gets mentioned in Discord and all that kind of stuff as far as everything go. Obviously we're building that out so right now it happens when we start the development game we select the character
right away. There's a wallet connection there, but because we're working out how that min is going to go and all that kind of stuff, we haven't made the character selection directly tied to a wallet. So that's what that sign-up page is coming. That's its main purpose, so that we can basically get people to connect a wallet.
and then connect that to their NFT. So that should be soon. Right now it's a database, right? So one really cool thing that OpenC is doing now is you can have levels and you can also have levels for specific skills on your character.
So yeah, you guys are gonna see a lot probably in January just it's so cool now because like not only can you you like say level your vehicle, but you can also level your guns on that vehicle or level your your thrusters and all that kind of stuff So yeah, it started out as just being like oh the vehicle is gonna have a
a bunch of different levels. So now it's going to be like, you know, you can level your thrusters, your guns. So it's just, it's way more and that's going to be fun. You know, there's, we've talked about PVP a little bit. We've also, you know, most of this is going to be a PVE, right? Like, so some world events, all that kind of stuff.
But we're definitely doing PVP. And we got the pets. So we're working on getting some concept art for the eggs for the pets so you guys can purchase your first eggs. And the pets inside will be a mystery until we unlock them in the game. But we have the first pet doggo that
we displayed and that pet is actually going to be in the game you can go talk to it at the pet cemetery or not pet cemetery the pet creates the trees that's where the jump scares you're gonna be sorry the Pokemon hospital that's what I meant
Yeah, like Danny was saying, we've done a little experimentation on the testnet, our head of crypto experimentation, I guess, and it worked and it's really cool. One of the concepts that we've been playing with is that you can either with the level system
their fully leveled character or before they sell it they can wipe the character and give you a blank account but at least you get to start from scratch. It's just such an exciting time for this level of the technology especially in this market right now we really do get to experiment with that side of the technology not just as a commodity
but actually as a technology that's used for something. And for the NFTs to function in the game, we've come up with quite a few ingenious ways I haven't seen being used yet, and that's exciting for me. Most of the time you just see a gallery. And that's cool. It's cool to show off your NFTs. I know that
And we're going to have that. We have apartments. You can buy NFTs and put them in there. Even 3D NFTs, like record players or posters. It'll be really cool. But beyond that, the technology to
decentralized and scale player leveling to deserverify some of those aspects is and also to seal them. So like if the server turns off it's okay but with the blockchain you almost always have a node running so you're always going to have access to that content it's really exciting times especially in the Web 3 side of this.
I just want to add one last thing only because it's really cool and I need to figure out how we can do it is I really don't scare. It's right now. It jumpscares yes. That's happening we have to find a way to do jump scares but it's at least in VR only because
I hate it. But anyway, we've been playing with the questing and all that kind of stuff. I kind of want to use like OpenAI now. I'm like, I wonder if we can use OpenAI to do a quest. It could just be random. It's so cool.
I don't know how that would actually work in game, but after playing with it for the last few days, I'm like, "I need this." It's because it's so cool. I think it'd be really cool to, because they're training it on Wikipedia and stuff, but what if you just only gave it data sets of your game? So all it knew was information.
inside of MoodMotion. And if you restricted that information, you could create different personalities for NPCs. So some NPCs could know more than others. But everyone would probably know if some could only tap into it. And then you'd have your NPCs set up.
Yeah, I don't know. I think they're still... They're not even sure how they're going to do their API. I've heard, but still, it would just be a cool thing. I definitely think in our test environment, I'm going to play around with that because that would be kind of fun. But who knows? Maybe that could be something that's in the game, but I just...
I'm sure all you guys have tried that. What is it? Open GPT? It's just cool. Yeah, exactly right. It's just like wow. So I don't know if that could be something that you can do. I'm sure they have, you know, agreements and all that stuff in place. Like you brought me a few weird licensing.
if they even do it. But it's so cool. I just like playing with it. They used the stable diffusion and chat at the IPT in the high on life game, which is a AAA big box seller game right now. And they they came out and they they used AI to do a lot of the alien stuff to
make it look not as human. And that's, you're just going to see more and more of that. I'm going to say I sit on the fence when it comes to this topic because I see like anything the double-edged sort of technology. So I just sit on the, I sit on the black, the flat
side of the blade and watch both people run at either side of the sharp pointy bits. This is something that you're just going to see more of. And to be honest, you've already seen a lot of it. You just didn't know what's happening because it was done by private studios. And now it's just open source. So we're...
I watched a video of a guy ask it to create a game and see plus. And he did. The AI did. When it got to a certain point, the guy would correct it and say, "Look, can you do it this way?" And it would just change it and do it that way. It would change the code. And eventually it got to the point where it made a little shooter game.
like move around the map and point the gun and shoot the enemies. They were just blocks but it was all created by an AI with a human, I guess human assisted right and that's kind of the world that I foresee we're always going to be any human assisted AI world. We're never going to really
be in a fully AI automated world, like the paper-- A fully AI replaced-- A different world, yeah. A different clip philosophy, right? I don't think we'll ever get to the point where the Earth is destroyed by a machine that just makes permanent or infinite paper clips. Like we're not going to get there, but at the same time--
Let's find out. We still don't have walking talking to robots. I hope I'm just alive to see that. And Elon Musk's Optimus doesn't count. I think, awesome from back in the day.
Yeah, speaking about we actually had some really cool concept. Oh, I can hear someone maliciously typing. Sorry, I just got to be able to make a phone. That's good that you're working.
Oh, yeah, so Matt, our Matiao and Brenda, our concept artists, have done some amazing work on this new character body type, the universal body type, and we've got the first ever rendering of the robot races too. So we got robots.
I guess I can talk about them now. The dog of the canine species. You saw their leader, Doggo was announced. Finally, we got to announce the other characters. And you have the alien species. I was calling them the Atlantians for a while, but I think that's more of the history part of something else to do with them.
So, um, we, I don't know the fish people, I guess. Not sure if we have a name for them. Uh, uh, Brenda and Matt, if you're out there, you should send us a name for those guys. Uh, but we will have new names for these new other characters coming out. This, uh, the one right now is a really cool name.
We have a guy with dreadlocks, the soul, and the Kimmy that's a different kind of Kimmy than what they use in the Universal Body Time. It's basically just a space suit character. Kimmy, as far as Kimmy's go, she
Let's say during development you're also watching the history of Moonlight evolve. So that's why we're wanting to bring people onto the Moon surface earlier as we build up the city and buildings and infrastructure around. So we've created scaffolding and little robots that are actually
building the city in the game. So when you're playing you'll see the city being built and as we update you'll see more and more buildings appear and more shops. It's one of those things that early players will get to see an early build of Moonland that feels like you're actually taking part in Moonland's history.
And that's something cool. I've never seen in a game before. So you will actually get to play this so early that even where we... We're gonna place rocks and mountains in areas that we will eventually be taken out and we'll place machines that take those rocks out. So you'll see the world developing in real time.
And sooner or later, there will be VR jumpscares. Yeah, VR jumpscares for sure. I don't know if you guys ever played Doom 3, maybe I'm dating myself now. I play Doom 1 2 and 2, so you guys can just read.
Red key opens the red door. So Doom 3 was the happiest game but it looked so good at the time, but I hated the jump scares. It had like these hallway closets that didn't make any sense and they were even textured or modeled that nicely like you literally turn a corner and you you can almost tell with
the trigger boxes and as soon as your character walks into it you can hear a door open behind you and a stupid ugly monster attacks you. I hated it. But I tried that on the Oculus Quest 2. So there's a modder out there that's modding a lot of games to work with the Quest or just VR and it was aphane amazing
The jump scares are so perfect in VR, it's exactly what you want. You want rooms that don't make any sense when you're actually in it. You want to turn around and there's another monster that go. It's so weird. The difference between mono screen and on-ocular screens. It's just a...it's...it's not in deck.
sense of depth and it really doesn't put that fight or flight in you. I think one of my first kind of scares was with that alien game and I think someone kind of modded it so that it goes stand in a locker and look through the
Yeah, it was it was crazy just the sound and everything just not resurrect. Yeah, let's not have I've changed my mind no jump scares no jump scares, please I played that yeah my first experience with that was Silent Hill and then I really registered it was half like two when they added the Raven Hall mm-hmm
I like that the Lost Coast too was like it had an eerie vibe like something was gonna happen but nothing never really happens. I love that feeling of being when you're like yeah when you walk in a raven home before you're getting attacked it's just like you know.
and that's why I'm here.
lighting enough to not only give mood and atmosphere, but really draw the players attention and even on the mini open maps you never really get lost because you're always going towards the light.
But I think that once we get the top side of Moonland city developed, we're going to have to start working on the shadow land and do more concept with our concept writers for the shadow land of things. Because I know there's a lot of people out there that want to do some
18 plus things in Finland and you know that's only in Shandaland.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah, that's a lot of development updates, hopefully for everyone. Obviously, ask questions and discord. We'll try to do this spaces around the same time, going forward once a week or something. But we'll just see.
almost at the point where we're community can kind of direct us a little bit. We're going to have some more demos out and people can ask us questions about that. I know for some of you guys it feels like sometimes you join this and we're just like here's all the stuff we've got. Any questions? Well there's no questions because we just said everything we did. So hopefully once
you see the game, you see us flying around in it, you know, that'll bring some more questions. And we'll talk more about the NFT stuff in January just because, oh, it's a lot of database stuff. So like they're doing all the fun like games and all that kind of stuff and I'm like looking at spreadsheets. So, you know.
Updates in January for that. I didn't live in between that world I think. Yeah, I'm always balanced between back and a friend and where it's it's fun though. And I kind of have started to do that more these days too.
We need more functionality and more art. So we're a tight-knit team and we're cranking this stuff out. We have met our hardware limitations, but I mean that's just how it goes when you build a new fancy-esque game. It's awesome.
Um, did I forget anything? Um, Daniela, are you good? Are we good? I'm trying to think. I think I think that's perfect and that's a pretty good update. This is gonna give us a lot of content to then cut out and put on some
social media. So that's amazing. Thank you guys for joining us. There was one thing I really wanted to do and I don't know how we're going to achieve it yet because we're just going to have to and I want to do some of the streams and stuff from inside the game.
to. So like eventually I'd like to just, you're actually watching us live on YouTube or as well as this basis so you see us there playing the game and that'll be really fun. So we can actually have these kind of events in Moonland.
Yeah, yeah, I was saying we a while ago that we could have done it from the test environment, but I like the idea of waiting until this world is stabilized a bit more and then just have our characters in the open world and just be like blah blah blah and we can map it through the the game. We're gonna have like a camera. Yeah.
I'll put a soapbox in the middle of a big plateau. I think VR chat has a feature like that in-game camera you can use it. I think you can connect it with OBS. It's a video store. It's pretty cool. We'll find out 100. So get on that. No, I think voice chat.
the next thing we're going to be pumped out. We have lots of things to do. We have the mall listed down and we're starting to write it down but we have a roadmap for development that's at most of us
share frequently. So we're in a good space and I'm really happy with the amount that we've been able to prototype and prove out over the last eight months. I guess you guys, Ben and Alicia are two main work with me.
They've only been around for seven months, so really in seven months we've achieved a lot. And I can't wait to show you guys that in January. All that and get you to, like, it makes me so happy to know that we're about to allow people that aren't working on the game to play it.
That's amazing. I'm pretty sure we're gonna make kind of like a recap of what 2022 was like. That's gonna be pretty exciting to read. Yeah, I can't wait for that.
Thank you Daniela. All right guys. No, thank you guys for making the time. I know you guys are super busy doing all of this stuff, but thank you guys for joining and thank you for all of our listeners. See you on Discord. It's been fun. Bye everybody.
Thanks, see you guys. Bye, Merry Christmas. Oh yeah, Merry Christmas to all of us. Happy all day.