Murrlandia is a great, fractured world that once united various biomes. After the Cat-A-Strophe, some biomes changed, giving rise to new, previously non-existent locations. The Winter Biome is one of these new worlds and has become a key part of our project that our developers are actively working on.

Work on the Winter Biome began at the earliest stages of development. During the prototyping of the visual aspects of the islands, we had numerous sketches of various biomes and experimented with the mood of the locations. Some of these ideas have already been implemented in recent updates, while others require more time for thorough development.
We periodically revisited the Winter Biome and even planned to start its development simultaneously with the Summer Biome. However, we realized that it required more time and attention to achieve the desired level of quality.
For the visual concept of the Winter Biome, we drew inspiration from northern regions with their natural features, adapted for a sky-floating world. The concepts for the Winter Biome included elements of such landscapes but with a magical and mysterious touch characteristic of Murrlandia.

Creating the atmosphere of the Winter Biome through graphics was a challenging but exciting process. Besides the snow covering the ground, we used many new and unique effects. The air temperature in the frosty region affects everything around: clouds become heavier and denser, weather effects change, and sunlight takes on a special hue, creating the feel of a cold winter fairy tale.
The winter islands in the WorldShards universe are part of the overall world, so we prepare a lot of new content and adapt familiar objects that have spent a long time in the new region. On the winter islands, players will encounter familiar Wargs, who have set up their camps and outposts in an unusual environment for them.
We also continue to work on remastering existing content, which will gradually be replaced with higher quality and more detailed versions.

Creating a true winter atmosphere was not an easy task. Simply painting the ground white to create a snow effect was insufficient. We studied the visual impact of snow from the observer's perspective and developed a special shader that gives the snow all the necessary soft shades, regardless of lighting, with a magical shimmer.
The Winter biome will feature corresponding weather effects on certain islands, providing a dynamic and engaging atmosphere for players to explore.
We have a method for creating and testing various weather effects, which we plan to significantly improve in the future. We can't disclose all the details yet, but stay tuned for updates.
One of the most challenging aspects of development was correctly assessing our capabilities and choosing the most important and necessary elements from a multitude of ideas. Each task is a challenge for us, and for each, we learn and apply new knowledge, approaches, and methods.

The development of the Winter Biome continues, and the team eagerly awaits the opportunity to share their achievements with players (trust us, it's coming soon). We continue to improve and develop this cold world so that every player can feel the beauty and magic of the Winter Biome of Murrlandia!

In today’s developer diary, we want to tell you about the path of the Wargs: who they are, how they appeared in the project, and maybe give you some useful gameplay tips. Be sure to read to the end!

For those who don’t know, Wargs are the antagonists in Murrlandia’s story, arriving from a harsh, resource-poor world in search of a new home. Upon discovering the abundant Mana Stones, blue crystals used by the peaceful Meowkles for magic, the Wargs opened a portal to bring their army into Murrlandia. They fortified their position around a massive Mana Stone, led by their ruthless queen. When the Meowkle mages tried to destroy this stone and close the portal, the resulting explosion shattered Murrlandia into thousands of islands and scattered the Mana Stone fragments across the universe. These fragments retained their magical properties, transporting any living creature that touched them back to Murrlandia, thus maintaining a connection between the worlds.

Once we gathered enough assets, we started creating the enemies for the game. We tried different designs until we decided that we wanted the Wargs to look like large, massive wolves and started bringing this idea to life.
Yes, this is how the Wargs looked in the initial stage. There was a lot of work ahead, but we were already on the right track.
We kept working and the Brutes, Rogues, and Recruits were the first to appear in the project. They differ in combat difficulty and hierarchy in the animal army.
The work on the wargs is still ongoing. We are creating new enemies for you so that your gameplay experience becomes more engaging. Check out this serious guy here!
Wargs are smart, wolf-like humanoids. The recruits are their basic soldiers and do a lot of simple jobs. You can find them wandering around wild islands, guarding important places, or staying in camps. If you kill them, they drop valuable items. They have a few basic attacks and are tougher and stronger than big animals.
Warg Rogues are quick and dangerous warriors. They do special missions for the Warg Queen but often hang out on the islands while recruits do the basic work. You can find them roaming the wild islands, guarding important places, or staying in camps. If you kill them, they drop valuable items. They have a few basic attacks and some deadly combos. They are the fastest Wargs and have more health and damage than Warg Recruits.
Warg Brutes are big, heavily armed warriors who lead the groups and give orders. You can find them roaming the wild islands, guarding important places, or staying in camps. If you kill them, they drop valuable items. They have a few basic attacks, deadly combos, and powerful heavy attacks. They are the toughest and strongest Wargs, with more health and damage than Warg Rogues.
Currently, we are mainly working on creating animations in Maya. The main focus is on making the character setup as high-quality as possible, ensuring that all animation elements move naturally and correctly. During setup, it’s important to carefully analyze the characters, imagine the movements they could make, and choose interesting poses according to the concept.
After sketching the animations, we move on to timing the movements to better convey the sense of action. Then, we smooth out the movements, add details, and perfect the animations. Various specialized scripts are actively used in this process, significantly simplifying the work.
Working on animations often involves technical difficulties. Our animators consider the specifics of game engines, the peculiarities of bone animation, and constantly keep optimization and game mechanics in mind.
Use combat consumables in tough or large-scale battles with the Wargs. Remember that meat-based food can heal you in battle. Read the attacks correctly and dodge them, fight the Wargs with appropriate gear and weapons.
Working on the Wargs in the Murrlandia is a process of constant improvements and changes. We strive to create interesting and memorable opponents that make the gameplay exciting and engaging. We hope our players appreciate the effort and attention to detail put into each Warg. And who knows, maybe someone new will show up soon. Only time will tell…

To give you the full picture, let’s start from the beginning. As we said, we purchased ready-made assets. We acquired various materials to test our ideas. At this stage, we created gray prototypes based on concepts and experimented with low-poly models with simple textures. This was essential to quicken the game’s development. Now, let’s share what came out of this process.

Right from the start, after purchasing the ready-made assets, we faced the need for significant adjustments in materials, scales, and styles of the assets themselves. This led to our first experiments in creating locations and visual effects, which allowed us to quickly do a playable island.

While our work on locations progressed successfully, we encountered challenges with character models due to our inexperience with low-poly modeling. The process of creating characters requested time and effort, especially when attempting to adjust stylized concepts into 3D. Turned out, making characters look like actual characters and not geometric nightmares is harder than it sounds.

We realized that working with low-poly models did not achieve the desired effect. This raised the question: why stick to a style that fails to impress if switching to high-poly models can improve visual quality without genuinely extending development time? Therefore, we decided to complicate our character models by adding more polygons and abandoning low-poly stylization, while still maintaining our 3D art style. Surprisingly, this step allowed us to speed up the art production process and improve the game’s visual quality. It’s important to note that we are not abandoning ready-made assets and will use them as sketches for further refinement.

Well, how about this transformation from pig to warg? And you wouldn’t recognize Farro anymore!

Recently, we have made significant strides in content development, creating new character models, armor, weapons, and upgrading environments and visual effects. Our journey in evolving our art process and optimization continues, and we are confident in the direction we’ve chosen. Not one step back!

However, there’s still much to be done: from location update and creating new islands to improving animations and working on finer details. Our mission? To take the WorldShards game world to the next level!

Stay tuned for the next Dev Diaries!

Yes, it’s been a while, but we’re finally bringing back Dev Diaries. And we have a lot to show you! We’re excited to take you behind the scenes and share the journey we’ve been on. Get ready.

Everything began with purchasing ready-made assets. Yes, imagine that — we bought a bunch of stuff to feel out the idea. At this stage, we created gray prototypes based on concepts, experimented with low-poly models with simple textures, but something was missing. Finally, we decided to switch to PBR (Physically Based Rendering) models, and that’s where the real magic began.

Our concepts are inspired by games from masters like Darksiders, Battle Chasers, and Ruined King. We aimed to convey the same brightness and dynamism that attract players so much. And yes, Wayfinder was also an influence! Big thanks to Joe Madureira for his amazing visual style.

In our work process, we used Maya, Blender, ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Photoshop. There are many different programs, each suited to its own task. And we learned to draw highlights on blades in our own way: instead of traditional painting in the material, we baked them from the geometry.

Switching to the PBR pipeline was a significant step in improving the quality of our models. Concepts initially created for low-poly models were adapted to the new style.
Moreover, we refined the texture painting process. Previously, we stuck to the original colors from the concepts, but then decided to use richer and more vibrant colors for high-level items. This decision gave our models a more premium look and helped better distinguish the rarity of items.

Feedback from senior artists and game designers was extremely important. The first 3–4 models went through thorough checks and adjustments, especially in terms of painting. Game designers made corrections to ensure the models met technical requirements and intended dimensions. We learned on the go and improved with each new model.

While these items do not have superior base stats compared to regular ones, they can be repaired and upgraded with in-game currency, allowing them to be used at higher levels of play.

We hope you enjoy the result of our work and appreciate every detail. Stay tuned for updates!

Adventurers,

Your support is, as always, overwhelming! Today, we've reached 50k wishlists on Steam, meaning that your trust and passion truly knows no boundaries. It's incredible to see Murrlandia growing across all the platforms and communities.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

Adventurers, we have incredible and exciting news for you! We are now accepting applications for the closed playtest of WorldShards!

Wanna be one of our first playtesters? Just follow this link and fill out the form. [forms.gle]

What’s next?
Selection results will be sent out within 7 days. If you are among the chosen playtesters, you will receive all the details including the invitation to the game.
Good luck, and see you in Murrlandia!

A new trailer for WorldShards, the life-sim sandbox MMORPG, is here!

We're excited to show you the current state of the game and basic mechanics, including exploration, base building, farming and fishing. Don't forget to like the video and tell your friends about the game!

Your journey is set in the world of Murrlandia, where you can explore its ancient magic and mysteries, meet the Meowkles – cute furry cat-like creatures, and build you own dream house!

Hi folks!

It’s been a while since our last update on WorldShard’s development journey, so we decided to show the highlights of what we’ve been working on so far. Hope you’ll enjoy this paw-tasic dive into WorldShards!

This spring we put together the first playable build, showcased it at the MEFCC, GDC, & Unity Developer Day, allowing us to gather lots of valuable feedback and impressions. Though this version of the game is not public (stay tuned — when the time comes, we’ll let you know about the public demo and its dates), the work on the next version is in full swing. Right now however, we want to show you the ways in which WorldShards has already transformed.

One of the most important visual aspects in any game is the main character. After all, the environment changes while you wander around the game's world, but your character is constantly there, a focal point on your screen.

If you’ve seen some of our earlier snapshots, you may have noticed that we used a low-poly approach for the models. However, we never intended to have this in the final version.

Looking back at the models - how they used to look and the way they are now!

So, what do we want WorldShards to look like? We find a special charm in the low-poly visuals, so we’re not going to fully abandon it, but we’ll be giving the game an extra layer of detail making it look a lot more high-definition.

Check out this comparison to see what we mean!

This is just a glimpse of the many improvements we've made. But have you ever wondered how these changes look from our side? Let us show you the creation process of two 3D models – the Warg and one of our crafting stations. Seeing each step of the iterative process and the evolution is clear as day!

By the way, can you guess what this crafting station is used for?

So, what graphical improvements are we currently working on?

• Environment (from the lighting to the flower textures)
  
• Models (player, enemies, animals) and animations (movement, idles, attacks, etc.)
  
• VFX (spells, abilities, environmental, etc.)

And as a parting gift, we want to give you one last teaser. Besides graphical improvements, we've been working on a bunch of new features for WorldShards. For example, crafting equipment and building player housing. We're really excited about these features and can't wait to share more with you!
You can keep up to date by following us on Twitter or joining our Discord server[discord.gg] for more news and daily updates!

Hello there everyone!

GDC2023 is well and truly underway and we’re having a blast! What’s more, Thursday 23 (yesterday) was the first day that we were able to showcase the game at the event and get to know what people thought of the game.

One of the best parts of an event like the GDC is the first-hand reactions that we can get to the game. Sometimes people just want to hear about the game’s concept, so throughout the event, Artyom, our Game Designer, has perfected describing the game.

To us, WorldShards is a cross of Animal Crossing and Albion online with a lot of resources to gather and loot to craft. The game lets you play in many different ways, whether you want to take on a stealthy route and sneak by everyone, aggressively kill and destroy hostile creatures, or even take the peaceful route, build a reputation with the creatures and thus gain the ability to travel through the islands unscathed. Our main focus is on player immersion, we want to give out players a chance to properly express themselves when playing, and feel really comfortable while doing so!

Other times, people want to have a more hands-on experience. After all, nothing beats actually playing the game.

So far, we’ve seen a lot of people having fun playing the game and we’ve had some great conversations with both gamers and developers (this is the Game Developers Conference after all). Right now we’re looking forward to what the final day (Friday 24th) will bring us!

Check out our trailer to see the game for yourself!

That's all for now, but don't worry, we'll be back soon with a much more in-depth write-up of GDC2023 and what we've experienced there!

Stay up to date with WorldShards, by following us on Twitter, liking us on Facebook[www.facebook.com], and joining our Discord server[discord.gg]. If you have any questions about the game, leave a comment on this post, or head over to the Discussions tab and ask to your heart's content!