Play it now!

Featuring Ladybugs, Ants and Mealybugs, "A Curious Triad" is the latest Creature Quest added to DoN. How long will you take to nail down all the Mealybugs? :D The Leaderboards await your pleasure!

In-Game Tutorials!

The Ladybird Beetle comes with a fun in-game tutorial covering Flight, Chemo vision, Stealth, etc. Existing creatures will also get a tutorial in the coming days! Your feedback about the dated tutorial pages has been heard.

Visual Improvements - Detailed Textures

From landscape to leaf, all textures carry a lot more detail now. The challenge has been the size of Ladybugs/Ants; they're are so tiny (they make a Jumping Spider look huge) that detail which was sufficient for larger creatures were no longer detailed enough for them. With these improvements, now the tiny Monarch caterpillar also benefits from a better looking leaf :)

Performance Improvements

This major update also carries several performance tweaks. While there's still more room for optimization, this build significantly reduces the game's texture memory consumption on the GPU.

How do I play as Ants?

In this update, you play as the Ladybug. You can cheat around this in Sandbox mode by placing an ant and becoming it, but player gameplay for Ants hasn't been built yet. This will come in a future update. This build features A.I. ants farming scale insects in return for protection.

What's Next

Current focus is on polishing this update and monitoring your feedback for the new quest. After that the possible options are to 1) Resume Multiplayer work (it's been coming along, but delayed due to technical issues) or 2) Add new quests for other creatures or 3) Finish Lifecycle work for all existing creatures in the game or 4) Add Praying Mantis / Lacewing to this Creature Quest. Either way, future updates will be posted more frequently to avoid long periods in-between builds; Your great patience in waiting for today's update to come out is much appreciated :) So keep the feedback coming, with so many possible directions to branch off into, knowing what excites you the most is always helpful in forging the road ahead! With ❤, Venugopalan Sreedharan PS: Yes, the game needs a new trailer now that this update is out!

PPS: Use the beetle's flight ability to carry and dump Ants away from any areas you need access to. More advanced techniques like this are hidden for you to find ;)

[ 2017-06-06 23:28:44 CET ] [ Original post ]