Moods and Karma | State of Matterless #4
As promised, this week we’re focusing on elements of game design, core gameplay loops, and we’re excited to let you hear what Matterless might sound like in one of our next builds. Plus, a special visual treat!
A preview of the next Matterless build
Moods and Karma
The Matterless animals will have a series of stats, some visible, some under the hood. Today we are introducing the concept of overall mood, which is a blend of your other meters. Your first goal as a player and pet guardian is to keep your companion in a good mood.
We are also working on a social meter. For now, we envision a meter that goes up slowly if you are in AR mode with your companion, and super quickly if you are in Shared AR with other players. If you’ve been a part of our closed beta, you know you can feed Calliope to increase her happiness.
Now, your overall mood will now be a blend of social and hunger meters.
If your companion's mood is high, you’ll get Karma at regular intervals. Karma doesn’t do anything yet, except that you can certainly use it for bragging rights!
The karma you will be earning is still a proof of concept at this stage — It will likely be temporary and will be reset once we have the bugs fixed and math finalized.
Set Your Companion’s Name
In the next build, you can finally set your companion’s name to be whatever you choose! This feature has been requested from day one and we are happy to be able to let you name your Matterless buddy. The name will be saved to your shiny new player account, and you can see another player’s name if you join them in a shared AR session. (Note that if you want to post screenshots to our Discord, your companion name needs to follow the server rules)
Sound of Matterless
Sound design is often just selecting and reediting from predefined, commercial audio banks. Native recorded materials are always an added bonus. Here are some shots from our biosphere audio field recording session.
Here is the result of these explorations! The sound character of Matterless is still a work in progress, so we’d love to hear your thoughts. Listen and let us know.
Last week we dove into exploring the visuals of metamass, and this week we are searching for the metamass sound… for instance, some crystal sounds are being rearranged into crystal droplets and glass bells.
Visual Development
We’re toying with animal design. Our goal is to have the animals display emotions clearly. Do you think this is a happy Shiba doggo?
Player Accounts
We’ve integrated Sign in with Apple, which is a way to authenticate your player account with our servers. This will be important so you can recover your game data if you need to switch to a new device or re-install the app. In the future, we will include other sign-in options including email, FB login, and others.
Server Resets
We’re hoping we won’t need to, but until we are out of early access there are a lot of things constantly changing under the hood. What that means is that occasionally we may need to reset your game data for new builds. :/ As the game gets more developed, this will happen less and less (and eventually never!)
We plan to have the next build ready by end of February, so follow us to not miss an announcement soon!
— Jason, Product Manager, Matterless
