Winter 2024 Development Update

Hello! In this end of year development update we'll be discussing the progress we've made in 2024 and looking ahead to our plans for 2025. We'll catch up on this year's milestones, show the visual progress of the new engine, and take a look at the updated state of our creative features (including a little bit of new music!) Let's get into it.

Back in our summer update, John explained how much of this year would be about achieving an internal milestone called 'Filling In The Blonks' - or just 'Blonks' for short. This milestone was all about proving that our new engine can support our gameplay and creative goals, putting us in a position to start both actively transitioning features over from the legacy engine and developing new ones.

We're happy to say that Blonks has been a big success. Work concluded last week with an internal playtest that truly exceeded our expectations. Players jumped into new custom worlds and built together, explored the Capital, queued for simple minigames, and experienced a basic version of the 'adventure loop' - resource gathering, crafting and exploration in a procedurally generated open world. These experiences are placeholders, but they represent the meaningful progress we've made towards rebuilding Hytale in an engine that is far more robust and future-proof, using consistent processes that deliver great results.

We're not just playing catch-up, either. We're starting to see the benefit of our new engine over the old, particularly when it comes to networking and social features. In late November we celebrated getting a hundred players online in the Capital at the same time - a bar we hadn’t hit in legacy.

‘Blonks’ has been built from a mixture of placeholder and spoiler content, so we’re going to avoid showing too much from those playtests right now. However, we do have a bunch to share from the new engine - including, yes, a closer look at that Orbis faction we teased during Halloween...

Orbis' undead have had a major revamp over the last year, both from a narrative perspective (no spoilers!) and in terms of their look. In the screenshot below, an undead miner awaits the player in a cave in one of Orbis' temperate regions. What power has roused this lifeless being from their slumber? Who were they, and what could have happened to rip the spark of life from them?

Well, we're not going to tell you. But you'll figure it out yourselves, no doubt.

Our creative team continues to work with our technical teams to bring the new engine up to - and ultimately beyond - the standard we set previously. You can see some of that progress below.

As you can see, our dynamic lighting capabilities are much improved in the new engine, allowing for softer transitions and more striking colors during the day. Expect to see more progress like this as we work through next year's rendering milestones.

Here's an example of what the new engine now allows our artists and builders to achieve.

This clip demonstrates the progress we’ve made when it comes to recreating Hytale’s visual identity in the new engine. There are still a number of placeholder elements on display here, including player animations and movement (you’ll notice a little bit of awkwardness while going up the stairs.) However, it’s hugely motivating to see these cozy elements of the core Hytale fantasy coming into focus on our new platform.

The team has also made big strides in terms of our build tools and creator functionality. Below, you can watch a builder use an early version of our prefab library tool to create a rustic scene (along with more of that promised new music!) There are many placeholder elements in this clip too, including work-in-progress UI elements, biomes, and rendering.

Functionality like this is a big part of how we're planning to empower creators, whether they're simply happy to tinker or aspire to make content creation - or game development - their career.

When it comes to the latter, we're happy to say that our creator outreach program has been going well and is delivering a huge amount of value to the project. We're excited to announce that we intend to bring in the first external creator team to work in the new Hytale engine in mid 2025. Getting to play and create ourselves is great, but watching the first creators do it is going to be even better.

Speaking of 2025 - here’s Executive Producer and Game Director John Hendricks with a look at the year ahead.

John: It has been an incredible year, but I always say that! What makes this year special is the confidence Blonks has given us going into 2025. It feels great to be at a point where we can start using our new engine for what it is meant for: making Hytale.  

I have spoken before about how we have been using our time waiting on the new engine for much-needed tools development, creative explorations, gameplay and UX designs and prototypes, whatever we can do to get ready for what comes next, but in my opinion the most critical things we’ve been working on have been our team and our processes. I am proud to say that not only is our engine more capable than before, so is our team.

And we are going to need that capability in 2025! The job ahead is to bring the gameplay and content over from our legacy engine, a process which is often referred to as ‘porting’, and get into playtesting as soon as possible. The first half of the year will see competitive and creative play take center stage to prepare for playtests in the second half of the year. At that time we will be focused on adventure and social gameplay. We will also continue to move fundamental systems and features like tools, worldgen, NPC behaviors, rendering, and personalization forward so that they do not fall behind.

We are incredibly hyped to bring an external creator team in to give us feedback on our tools and engine. A wide variety of creators provide us with valuable feedback on a regular basis, but this is different, this is going to be a gameplay team creating a new minigame for Hytale! Why only one team? So that we can give them support, respond to feedback, and document the process for the teams to follow. With over five experiences in various stages of playtesting, it is going to be another intense year for Hypixel Studios.

Thank you once again for all of your support for Hytale, it means the world to us.

To download a .zip containing the clips featured in this blogpost, click here!