Hello! In today’s development update, we’ll be sharing perspectives from the team on the progress we’ve made in the first half of 2024. These include a first glimpse of our in-development new engine and an overview of the way we’re structuring the development of the game from 2025 onwards. We’ll also provide more details of our plans for creator outreach and, of course, show off another reimagined Orbis faction.

To kick us off, here’s Hytale’s Executive Producer, John Hendricks.

John: I am happy to report that the team has been on track since our Winter 2023 development update. It's been a year since we brought our shiny new engine in-house and started the process of integrating the bespoke systems and workflows we need to build Hytale. As we mentioned in our Winter Update, the first half of 2024 has been focused on finishing that process and transitioning our creative teams into the new engine.

The rest of the year continues that mission, culminating in an internal milestone that we're referring to as 'Filling In The Blonks'. The goal of this milestone is to verify that our engine, tools and processes are capable of supporting our gameplay and creative goals. The name comes from the simple version of PVP that we'll be implementing first – a knockback-based gamemode featuring weapons the team have been referring to as 'bonk sticks'!

‘Blonks’ will put us in a position to get back to fast iteration on our core gameplay, building off our successful combat playtests and minigame prototypes and beginning the process of 'porting' our creative play features over from our old engine. 'Porting' isn't a term we've used to describe our development before. In video game development, 'porting' typically refers to transitioning gameplay from one platform to another. In our case, we're in a hybrid stage. In some cases we've transitioned the active development of features from the legacy engine to the new one, and in other cases we are porting near-complete experiences or content to the new engine. It means we have the potential to move fast, but our velocity is also less predictable.

From now on, we expect gameplay development to follow a predictable pattern with four stages. These are:

• First Playable: the first time a feature is usable in the new engine
• First Testable: the point where a feature is complete enough to test
• Alphas: features are ready for broader exposure, but not feature complete
• Betas: features are complete, but may be buggy or have incomplete content

With that in mind, think of 'Filling In The Blonks' as our 'First Testable' milestone for the new engine. This end-of-year milestone will represent the most ‘functionally complete’ version of Hytale to date! Speaking of which...

Engine Progress

We're excited to share our first images from the new Hytale engine! Thomas Frick, Hytale's Art Director, has been working hard to validate that the new engine meets our expectations in terms of look and feel.

Thomas: We have spent years carefully crafting the 'Hytale Art Style'. We have poured our passion and love for the genre into it, and we're grateful it was embraced by so many within the community, including artists and creators. It's been my mission to make sure we carry it across while changing engines, assuring that the visual identity that made millions of people buzz with excitement stays intact.

Thomas: We never aimed to be pixel-perfect when comparing the legacy engine to the new one. What we're trying to capture is the feel, the colors, and the vibe of places! We want to keep improving the visuals and unlock more great features over time. 

We are at a stage where a screenshot of the differences between the two engines are less evident to the untrained eye. We have progressed a lot on replicating texture colorimetry, ambient occlusion, and shadows for different types of models – blocks, chests, flowers, leaves, etc. We've made a lot of progress on how sunlight travels and is occluded by terrain, and we're ready to start working on the next big things: improving shadows and lights, polishing long-distance features, improving our visual effects system for particles, working on fog, skybox, weather, trees and foliage shading, etc.

What this means for the team is that artists can effectively work in our new environment. This will exponentially ramp up our ability to build assets that go directly into the game. It has a big motivational impact on the entire team. Seeing clear signs of progress like this has a positive snowball effect!

Team Focus

Disclaimer: goblin planning does not accurately reflect real-world dependencies or progress. (Illustration by Ted Artsel)

All of these efforts are focused on getting Hytale back in front of players – both in the user research lab, and beyond. Moving into the new year we will be focused on mini-games and creative tools, moving quickly through the first two phases of development outlined above as we port over the progress from our legacy prototypes and playtests.

The team is continuing to grow to ensure we're ready for the challenge. Here's our latest team photo from our yearly studio meetup – this time held in Dublin.

We're currently looking to fill a wide variety of roles, from UX design to studio operations, production, QA and engineering. Find out more about our open positions on our jobs page.

As we build our team, tech and tools, our design and creative vision for Hytale continues to mature. Our adventure, social and personalization features are coming online, informed by research and data from our insights team.

At its core, Hytale is about empowering creators. While we have always drawn inspiration from our history in the modding community, it’s vital that we bring in fresh perspectives to ensure that our approach meets the needs of today’s creators. To achieve this, we’ve brought a select group of creators into the fold to provide their input on our plans for Hytale’s tools and creator ecosystem. Here’s our community manager, BuddhaCat, to explain more about this recent outreach work.

Creator Outreach

Illustration by Bob (Brickface)

BuddhaCat: Since last year, we have been reaching out to creators from various backgrounds and platform experiences. Collectively, they represent a broad range of creator communities. These discussions are helping to inform design and product decisions, ensuring that we have a concrete understanding of creators’ needs as early as we can in this phase of development. For example, we've spoken to creators about their own histories, the difficulties they've encountered, and what their expectations are of Hytale. This has already been really useful. Learning about their processes, the tools they use, and the audiences they serve has begun to shape and reinforce our own decision-making.

As we progress through 2024, we will continue to bring more creators into the fold as we work to lay the foundation for our future creator programs. 

We want creators to be ‘in the room’ with us as much as possible, and recently we had the pleasure of inviting a pillar of the Hytale community to meet the team. YouTuber Kweebec Corner joined us at our recent meet-up and gave a heartfelt keynote presentation about the community and why Hytale is important to them. We want to give a sincere thank-you to Kweebec Corner for all of his hard work. You can find his full presentation and Hycon breakdown on his YouTube channel.

Rebuilding The Hive

During Kweebec Corner's visit, we gave him a peek at some of the recent work our creative team has been doing to expand and improve Hytale’s worldbuilding. Now it’s time for you to see it, too!

This year, the evolution of Orbis has marched ahead, particularly when it comes to the creatures and characters of our adventure world. As we said in our last dev update, we've revisited every faction to make sure that they have a clear purpose, deep connections to their world, and offer engaging gameplay to players. Here's former community artist turned invaluable team member Pebble, and our Narrative Lead, Chris, to talk about the evolution of the Scaraks...

Chris: Scaraks have been present in one form or another in every instance of Orbis' worldbuilding, and made an appearance in Hytale's launch trailer as well as some subsequent screenshots and legacy concept art. We began the process of their redesign with a few goals in mind. First and foremost, we wanted to ensure that their visuals reflected their history and relationship with the world of Orbis. We also wanted to make sure that they presented interesting gameplay opportunities to players in a variety of contexts. These two goals have been front of mind for every faction we've taken back to the drawing board – and at this point, that's all of them!

Scaraks presented some unique challenges and opportunities, too. We wanted to ensure that Scarak encounters feel different to encounters with other kinds of giant bugs. We also wanted to put our own spin on the notion of an insect faction – playing into the tropes in some ways but subverting them in others.

Scarak Environment Concepts by Bob (Brickface)

Pebble: I knew when the task came up that preserving the successful elements of the ‘legacy’ Scaraks was vital. We’ve had an amazing opportunity to re-imagine and update our content with the production of our new engine, but Scaraks have their fans just as other factions do, and we’d be doing a disservice stripping all that away. Things like the insectoid/non-humanoid silhouettes, the glowing blue bits, the antenna and mandibles – you still see these elements coming through. We pulled the glowing blue from the egg sacs and eyes, and made it a key feature of the faction, from their bodies to their hives, even as their source of nourishment. The otherwise grounded earth-tones of their carapaces are offset by an ethereal cyan, glowing with an eerie energy.

Scarak Environment and Lineup Concepts by Pebble

Chris: It was incredibly exciting to arrive at this new vision for Scaraks. In particular, the new focus on bioluminescence helped hammer home something that we'd been developing from a narrative and design perspective. Scaraks are not psychic, and they do not have a 'hive mind' in the sense you might expect. Instead, they communicate efficiently using light and gesture – just like some real insects do. They also have a highly ordered, hierarchical society, forming a 'chain of command' that allows for swift, sometimes uncanny feats of coordination. This can make them look psychic, but really what you're seeing is a sophisticated system at work. This is very compelling from a design perspective, because it suggests lots of gameplay opportunities to explore – and crucially, it makes Scaraks feel really different from other forms of bug-monster. They're intelligent, organized, noisy... and they glow in the dark.

Chris: The Scarak warrior above represents the culmination of a ton of work bringing together multiple disciplines to establish our quality bar and design language for this faction. It is not necessarily the model you'll see in-game, but it's the 'hero asset' we'll be using to guide the development of all of the different Scarak forms you can see in the concept above – and any others we may want to build in the future.

Scarak Guard: Marika Orehek / Scarak Scout: Pebble

Pebble: Working closely with our Art Director, Thomas, ensured I didn’t go too far off-track from the Hytale vibe when concepting the new designs. Constant collaboration with team members, whether it was other artists, the narrative team, or a certain bug-loving Goblin in game design, kept me from wasting away in a personal bubble or letting my own biases pull the faction in a particular direction. Making sure Scaraks didn’t just feel bug-like, but alien-adjacent was a clear goal from the beginning. This wasn’t a mindless swarm of robots, but an entirely foreign intelligence, with their own evolution, goals and means of communication. They clearly inhabit Orbis, but their presence is still somewhat of a mystery for players, and we wanted that mystery to be front and center in their design.

I can’t wait for players to see the Scaraks and their fresh coat of paint. The best part of working on these factions is imagining how players will interact with and react to them, and further, how they will use them as foundations for their own creations.

What Comes Next

We'll continue to share updates as we move through future milestones – from blog posts like this one and our series of Technical Explainers, to less formal communications like #AskHytale via BuddhaCat’s X/Twitter (and more goodies via John’s X/Twitter!). You can expect us to share our progress when it comes to all of the different bits and pieces that those goblins are so eagerly cobbling together. 

After a long period of refactoring, the wheels are starting to turn in earnest and Hytale is beginning to come to life around us once again. We’ll be back with more to share at the end of the year.

In the meantime, we’ve got blonks to fill.