The original article is published by Intel Game Dev on VentureBeat*: CardLife’s liberating world is a game inside a cardboard creation tool. Get more game dev news and related topics from Intel on VentureBeat.
With Robocraft*, its game of battling robots, Freejam* made its love for user-generated content known. With its latest game, the studio is going back to the ultimate source of user-generated content: the humble sheet of cardboard. Not so humble now, however, when it's used to craft an entire multiplayer survival game filled with mechs, dragons, and magic.
It started as a little prototype with a simple goal conceived by Freejam's CEO Mark Simmons: explore your creativity with cardboard. He and game director Rich Tyrer had chatted about it, thrown around more ideas, and they eventually tossed their creation out into the wild. "We had a basic cardboard world with a cardboard cabin and tools," recalls Tyrer. "We released it online just to see what would happen. The point was to see what people could do with their creativity with this cardboard and these two tools, a saw and a hacksaw."
Even with just a couple of tools, there were a lot of things that could be done with the cardboard — especially since the scale could be manipulated — and its potential was enough for a Freejam team to be set up a month later to properly develop it. "We went from there and molded it into this game. We started thinking about what genre would be good for the aesthetic, how could we let people make what they want? In our minds, the cardboard aesthetic was like being a child and building a castle out of a cardboard box. You fill the blanks. That's what it came down to."
The open-world multiplayer game itself, however, is not the end-point of the CardLife* concept. "The CardLife game is more of an example of what you can do in cardboard. We want to use that to create this cardboard platform where people can create things and do lots of modding. That's why it's UGC (user-generated content) focused and really customizable."
The Only Rule of CardLife
Freejam's goal is to create a platform where people can create whatever they want, both within the CardLife game and by creating mods simply by using Notepad* and Paint*, as long as those things are cardboard. Tyrer uses the example of Gears of War*. If a player wants to totally recreate Epic*'s shooter, they should just use Unreal*. If they want to make it out of cardboard though, then they can absolutely do that. That's the only creative limitation Tyrer wants to impose.
He stresses that, in terms of accessibility, he wants it to be easy enough for kids to use. "The 3D modeling for kids moniker is more about the barrier to entry and how difficult it is for someone to make a mod. We want it to be low, whether they want to make a driving version, a fighting game, or they just want to add more creatures." Everything in the game is essentially just a collection of 2D shapes that can be found as PNG files in the game folder. Making a new character model is as simple as drawing different shapes in Paint and putting them together.
CardLife's customization isn't limited to modding, however, and whenever players craft an item, a vehicle, or even a dragon, they're able to completely transform their cardboard creation. The system is named for and inspired by connecting the dots. It's a way for kids to create art by filling in the blanks, and that's very much the feel that CardLife is trying to capture by letting you alter the cardboard silhouette of a helicopter or a monster. It's what's ultimately happening when the world gets changed by players terraforming areas, too.
The less noticeable mechanisms and hidden pieces of card take care of themselves. "If you wanted to put big spikes on the back, you can drastically change this central piece of card on the back and make it their own," explains Tyrer. "But a small disc underneath the seat that nobody really sees, there's no point in someone drawing that. It just inherits the scale of all the other pieces that you've drawn. And you can see in the 3D preview how your pieces of card have had an effect."
Parts can be mirrored and duplicated as well, excising some of the busywork. If you're making a new character and give them a leg, you don't then have to make the second leg; the game will create a new leg for you. This, Tyrer hopes, will free people up to just focus on making cool things and exploring their creativity. He doesn't want the art and the gameplay to get in each other's way, so no matter how ridiculous your creation looks, it's still perfectly viable in combat.
Beautiful but Deadly
"We learned in Robocraft that art bots, as in bots that are aesthetically pleasing, generally don't perform well compared to very Robocraft-y bots, which is usually a block with loads of guns on top, because of the way the damage model works. So it's quite hard, for example, so make something that looks like SpongeBob SquarePants* be an effective robot. With CardLife, we wanted to make sure that people would always be able to creatively express themselves without having to worry about the gameplay implications."
PvE servers will be added in an update, but combat and PvP will remain an important part of CardLife. Tyrer envisions big player sieges, with large fortresses made out of cardboard being assaulted by Di Vinci-style helicopters, wizards, and soldiers carrying future-tech. Craftable items are split into technological eras, all the way up to the realms of science-fiction, but there's magic too, and craftable spells.
Tyrer sees cardboard as liberating, freeing him from genre and setting conventions. "If you're making an AAA sci-fi game, you can't put dragons in it. The parameters of what you can add to the game are set by the pre-existing notions of what sci-fi is. And you can see that in Robocraft. But with cardboard… if I'm a child playing with a cardboard box, nobody is going to pop up and tell me I can't have a dragon fight a mech. I can. That's the beauty of it."
Rather than standing around waiting for tech to get researched, discovering new recipes comes down to simply exploring and digging into the game. Sometimes literally. "It's more like real life," explains Tyrer. "As you find new materials and put them into your crafting forge, it will give you different options to make things. As you dig deeper into the ground and find rare ores, those ores will be associated with different recipes, and those recipes will then allow you to make stronger items."
To Infinity
Unlike its fellow creative sandbox Minecraft*, CardLife's world is not procedural. It is finite and designed in a specific way. If you're standing beneath a huge mountain in one server and go to another, you'll be able to find that very same mountain. It might look different, however, as these worlds are still dynamic and customizable. But they can also be replenished.
"If you want to keep a finite world running for an infinite amount of time, it needs to be replenished," says Tyrer. "Structures of lapsed players will decay, natural disasters will refill caves or reform mountains, and that's our way of making the world feel infinite. We can have a world that's shifting and changing but also one that people can get to know and love."
What's there right now, however, is just an early access placeholder. CardLife's moving along swiftly, though. A large update is due around the beginning of March, potentially earlier, that will introduce armor and weapon stats, building permissions so that you can choose who can hang out in or edit your structure, and item durability. And then another update is due out two months after that.
The studio isn't ready to announce a release date yet, and it's still busy watching its early access test bed and planning new features. More biomes are on the cards, as well as oceans that can be explored. "No avenue is closed," says Tyrer. And that includes platforms, so a console release isn't out of the question. There's even the cardboard connection between this and the Switch* via Nintendo*'s Labo construction kit, though Tyrer only laughs at the suggestion they'd be a good fit. It's not a 'no'.
"We just want to take all the cool things you can think of, put it in a pot, and mix it around."
CardLife is available at Freejam* now and is coming to Steam* soon.