The Matterless Method | State of Matterless #50
2023 is off to a roaring start with progress on vehicle customization, a new teammate, magical AR hand effects, and updates on the Metamass.
Welcome to the 50th State of Matterless update! We’ve now been blogging about our Matterless adventures for 50 weeks, and there’s no telling how our story will unfold over the next 50. Now, let’s get to it.
The Matterless Method
Over the past week, the art team led by Charlie has been working to develop new vehicle options for Floorcraft: Arena, along with a skin decal system that will allow players to customize their vehicles. Specifically, the team is working to create various decal designs, from basic color patterns to fully animated shaders.
So far, we’ve been successful in improving the consistency and quality of the models and textures, thanks to the efforts of our recently recruited technical artist, Marko. We unified our processes and established guidelines for future development. This way, the team has created improvements that let players mix and match colors and patterns to create a unique look for their vehicles that reflects their style.
The team has started training our own AI datasets to augment our ability to iterate and prototype new and unique ideas. We’re excited about this and look forward to sharing the results with you. Here is a little preview
A Mysterious New Hero Arrives
In just a year, our team has gone from a small gathering of developers to a fully-fledged order of techno wizards. We’ve added a new teammate to the lineup: Pontus, a senior Unity developer! A man who prefers to work behind the curtain, away from the limelight, Pontus nevertheless has this to share about himself:
Video game design, technology, music, working out, running, psychology, and self-improvement are my jam! After being in the gaming industry for seven years, which included working on several web3 projects, I was drawn to the Matterless team’s bold vision to be at the forefront of AR gaming. Now that I’m part of the family, I’m excited to get started on programming gameplay, engine, and tech for all their products, including Incos and Floorcraft: Arena.
If you’re a fellow developer, come chat with us over at our Discord.
Solidifying Our Metamass
Last week, our backend team Ondřej and Shuning successfully tested purchasing and using Metamass on a test network through various low-level interfaces. The plan going forward is to develop high-level APIs to allow players to purchase and use Metamass within our apps easily.
In addition to this, we are in the process of migrating player accounts from the Incos database to a centralized database. Once the migration is complete, player accounts can be shared across Incos, Floorcraft: Arena, and future Matterless apps we are already working on.
To ensure that our players have a stable experience and to prepare for the latest upcoming build of Incos, our backend team has implemented health checks for all backend services and set up monitoring systems for various metrics. This will allow us to respond quickly to any incidents that may occur.
Magic Dice Hand
JD spent his most recent creative exploration day adding magic to the AR dice app he and Damir are working on. This is a passion project the team has been working on for some time, tinkering on Fridays to make a tool they all wanted to use in a tabletop roleplaying session. After adding code for dice management and implementing the rolling mechanic state machine here is what JD did this week:
We recently converted our dice app to use the Universal Render Pipeline and used VFXGraph and ShaderGraph to create a new effect. The effect is a magical flame that appears when the hand is closed, and it follows the movement of the hand in AR space. When the hand is opened, the flame disappears.
This effect was added to visually obscure the spawning of the dice in the hand. Additionally, we plan to have the flame effect explode when the dice is thrown away from the hand.
We’re up to way too much in our quest to make digital things real! Check out our LinkTree to get to every Matterless resource, and we’ll see you next week.
Kerwin, Social media manager
