Upcoming Pre-Alpha Tech Demo:
We brought back and improved the functionality of saving and loading blueprints from land plots. There are few modes, like saving selected structures on land plot, or saving just one floor. As well as loading structures blueprint on the selected land plot, selected elevation of the land plot, or load blueprints on all land plots. The feature is still rough at the edges, but is being polished. Additionally blueprint files are in the readable format JSON, so anyone will be able to edit it, if really want to.
https://antyversum.com/2025/05/11/umefate-pre-alpha-building-skyscrapers-town-49/
While UMeFate is still far from ideal and bug free, we are approaching the point, where we would love to share with everyone the playable update. The progress can be seen on the linked video.
In the next few weeks until the next demo, UMeFate will be focused mainly on polishing what we already have here.
These includes:
- Basic building mechanics (as shown in the video).
- Ability to save and load structures as blueprints.
- Terrain map editor (shown previously ont the blog post posthttps://antyversum.com/2025/04/11/umefate-map-editor-splitscreen-timelapse-46/).
- Split-screen for at least 2 players (up to 4). This was also shown previously, around Easter 2024 on the blog post https://antyversum.com/2025/04/17/umefate-pre-alpha-happy-easter-egg-splitscreen-party-47/.
- 1st and 3rd person views with corresponding control schemes. UMe character, which is now standard for UMeFate.
- Up to 1000 inhabitants (currently walking randomly).
In today’s video, UMeFate showcases a playthrough of nearly 2 hours of building the castle from the ground up, condensed into 5 minutes.
The video was also a playtest bed and quite an experimental event, as we had never tried building a castle in UMeFate before. So you may notice some trial and error and strange choices here and there.
The video starts with building the base for the tower using 8m tall walls. Wall height and thickness are adjustable, which is unique among most life sims. Then, floors and ramps are added inside the tower segment to allow climbing up later. At the moment, there are no stairs, but ramps are the good equivalent and much easier to implement at this early development stage. After that, the tower segment is saved as a blueprint, which is later loaded and stacked into a 3-segment-tall tower.
A floor is built on top of the tower, with surrounding short walls and some flag decorations (mod feature) added. Then a doorway is added at the bottom of the tower, after which player controls are enabled back, and we walk our character to the top of the tower.
Next, we fast-forward to the top of the hill, where we claim a new land plot and start building the castle by placing the first three towers, which were previously saved as a blueprint. Then the main gate begins to be constructed, followed by walls and passages connecting the walls and towers.
We continue expanding walls around the land plot, following the terrain elevation, until finally completing the entire castle and enclosing it with walls on all sides.
In the meantime, we walk around parts of the walls and towers, to see if all passages work and how they feels. We then invite our UMe land community to the castle party to let them explore.
Toward the end, we fly the camera around the castle and UMe land. Finally, we spawn our saved tower blueprint on all unoccupied land plots to make the land look somewhat like a town.
What is new?:
While adding new features is mostly on hold, since UMeFate is focused on polishing for the Pre-Alpha Tech Demo, our internal playtesting led to the need to add a few things, which allowed us to record the castle-building video.
Foremost, UMeFate focused on removing a range of bugs. We are aware these are not all the bugs we have found, but we addressed the most important ones that are showstoppers, or are critical for the game stability. Mostly bugs are related to wall and floor building mechanics, which are very complex at the core, but also to the game performance, stability, and the UI behaviours.
The main challenge was to build the castle for recording purposes and as a playtesting goal. This introduced certain feature requirements that had to be added, mostly related to building mechanics and UI tools.
For example, allowing floors to be switched on and off, to create staircase passages, since floors are automatically generated when enclosing paths. Adding grid and wall snapping options for higher accuracy and building fidelity. And adding the option to spawn saved construction blueprints, to place towers at the desired positions, on the selected land plots.
UMeFate added ramps functionality, which will later be expanded to include stairs.
One of the new features is a tooltip helper for controls, displayed next to the player pointer, indicating which actions can be taken. For example A: Select Land Plot. C: Delete wall node. (A = action, C = cancel). More informative icons are planned for the future, but due to changing control schemes ability, implementation of these is much more complex. Or would say, it just requires more time to be implemented.
There were also various other smaller building quality features added.
We have also finished two new audio tracks, which will be showcased at the appropriate time. One was long overdue and holds a special place in the upcoming Tech Demo trailer.
Currently Working On:
As already announced multiple times and in the headline, UMeFate is now preparing for the Pre-Alpha Tech Demo. We are focusing on polishing the current game loop. This alone, along with debugging, takes a lot of time. But we’re getting there 🤗
Unfortunately, during the last playtesting and recording, a bug occurred that prevented us from saving the whole castle, which is a shame. However, that was also the purpose of the playtesting: to catch as many issues and bugs as possible. Hopefully, this will be hunted down and squashed in the upcoming weeks before the next demo release.
What's Next:
Features from the next and previous updates:
- Finish UI redesign and refactor (ongoing).
- Main menu improvements, including an option to switch player control schemes (keyboard, mouse, gamepad). No keybinding changes yet, as this is more complex and will require further work
- Fix in-game and the main menu feedback system.
- Fixing tutorials.
- Playtest game loop.
- Playtest split-screen functionality for up to 4 players.
- Playtest map editor.
- Resolve some saving bugs of constructions on land plots.
- Fix furniture placement, scaling, and rotation. Various improvements have been made, but some bugs remain.
- A bit of polish, but mainly focus on stabilising the game for this phase of UMeFate build and preparing the demo update.
- After the pre-alpha tech demo release, planned in a few weeks time, UMeFate will finally begin work on character interactions and autonomy (classic AI). We’re very excited to get there soon.