Applying Floorcraft Polish | State of Matterless #47
We close out 2022 with a shiny new hovercar for Floorcraft: Arena, along with a new update, and the team hosts a live chat to review the year.
Applying Floorcraft Polish
Our AR hovercar toy Floorcraft: Arena has been out in the App Store since October. The team has been steadily augmenting it with new features and enhancements.
Earlier this week, we released our first post-launch patch, 0.1.1. Among the bevy of improvements, one of the more significant changes was to increase the size of the hovercars, which was in response to feedback that they were too small to see properly when playing on the ground. We initially had them at that size because it was easier to maneuver the cars when playing on an elevated surface, like a table.
We also removed the Brake button. Though we conceived it as a gameplay device to throw off a pursuing opponent by coming to a sudden halt, we found that players rarely used it and simply elected to swerve to evade pursuers. Taking the Brake button’s place is the Add Obstacles button, a more fun gameplay feature previously positioned at the top of the screen, breaking immersion.
Our newly minted tester Michal is busy stress-testing build 0.1.1 in search of bugs that could detract from the experience, such as the one above where an accelerating hovercar is destroyed upon impact with an inanimate one. Additionally, he’s also testing a new update we’ll be making to the boost mechanic. What exactly are we changing? Follow our socials to find out first.
Meanwhile, give Floorcraft: Arena a whirl if you haven’t already done so, and talk to us at our Discord!
Hovercars 2.0
One of the major updates to Floorcraft: Arena is an overhauled hovercar model with a brand-new lighting solution. After establishing a new creative pipeline, Marko and Batu worked together to recreate the hovercar model from scratch.
As we touched on last week, this new model will have updated textures with reflective qualities, giving the hovercars more weight and physicality. The animated render you see above by Batu reflects our progress so far!
Rounding Out The Year
2022’s coming to an end, and we held a live chat on our Discord server with Damir, JD, Andreas, Robin, and Jason to share how far we’ve come in just one year. Among the many things we talked about were the following:
- How Incos progressed from a low-poly cougar to the lifelike Shiba to the adorable blob creature known as Bob
- How moving away from a milestone-based development timeline has benefited our team
- What’s coming next for both Floorcraft: Arena and Incos in 2023
- Our favorite simulation games and nerding out about game design :)
Listen to the whole thing above, and be sure to join our Discord to participate in future events like this.
Check out our LinkTree to be immersed in every facet of the Matterless realm, and have a very happy holiday season!
