Weekly devlog #25 - improving the world system

Hey everyone, this week I have been working hard on the alpha update. While I don't want to share much of the new stuff yet, I will share some general improvements I have been working on this week.

New world naming system
I know some of you people don't really like the ID system of worlds, while others really like it. I don't wanna get rid of this system, it helps a lot with keeping the game fair by not letting all the rare world names be claimed by early players. And I think it is more natural to people who didn't come from Growtopia or Pixel Worlds.

But there are some things I could improve upon to make it easier to use. One common complaint is that it is hard to remember the world id's. And I totally agree. Thats why worlds now also get a randomly generated name once you create a world. This way you don't have to remember "keskqe1j", but you can remember "dangerous mummy castle". You can now also search in your world history, so if you don't entirely remember the world name, but you remember it had "mummy" in it, you can just search "mummy" in your world history.

Right now there are about 5000 unique world names that can be generated. As an example of what these random names look like, here are 10 randomly generated world names:

• blue gold farm
• hungry golem ocean
• beautiful skull farm
• yellow skull desert
• scary golem ocean
• friendly golem town
• beautiful flower jungle
• famous skull desert
• yellow crystal cave
• black bee center

Block shadows
One thing some people suggested was adding shadows to blocks. This helps with distinguishing blocks from backgrounds, and can also make the game look better. This might seem easy to ad, but it is way harder to add then it sounds. These shadows should only appear on background blocks, and two shadows should not overlap to make an area even darker.

It took me almost a full day to get it working, because I also had to rewrite how blocks are rendered in general. But now it seems to work perfectly.

I also did some experiments with ambient occlusion, but I decided to not add it in the end. It was either way too glitchy in some cases, or it was causing my fps to drop to 30. I might retry adding ambient occlusion later on with a different algorithm that might be fast enough, because I do really like the effect over block shadows. But most likely it will still be disabled by default on mobile devices due to the performance cost.

Thats it for this weeks devlog! This week I am mostly planning to continue working on improving the existing game, and less on adding content. Hopefully I will have most of the improvements finished this week, so I can focus on adding content during December.