A super early preview of the explore world featuring the transitions of the biotopes, trees, mountains, some gatherables and random objects. The world will be infinite and procedurally generated with the help of CraftyJS. Your beasts will actually walk in this world and explore it,interacting with different objects, NPCs and monsters. Click the image to see the fullsize!

First preview of an isometric sprite to show an idea how your beasts will look in the explorable world. Beasts will move in 8 directions, display the colors according to their genetics*, and interact with objects on the map.

*Dynamic coloring with markings may not be implemented due to the technical limits. We will start with individual base colors in alpha and see if its possible to utilize 3d models instead of 2d sprites to have the dynamic markings as well.

The first demo of our procedural world landscape generator. By this moment we have 3 biomes with trees, bushes, rocks, mountains, water bodies, artifacts and misc objects.

Very cool! I'm loving the levels of detail. I see a satellight and some sort of gun/observatory lens(?). Is this still taking place on Europa? Is it perhaps populated? Will NPCs have different levels of character? Like friendly, neutral, and enemies? 

It's still the same Europa :) Observatory and satellite antenna are two samples of the many remnants left from the hi tech civilization that lived here thousands of years ago. Vast territories are inhabited only by creatures who have stopped at the medieval science and tech level.

What are those shiny, crystal like things?

This looks great! And I agree with Nightingale; the level of detail is stunning. Also, can two players' beasts encounter each other on the same island?

There are no islands. The world is infinite and generated on demand when someone moves to a new chunk. And yes, it's the same for all players, and players can see each other.

After looking at the animated image in the first post (a gryff), I have a question to ask:

If individual animals are to be animated in this fashion, will the animation not make the explore unnecessarily hardware-demanding?

Were a client's hardware requirements taken into consideration?

Beasts can move in eight directions! That means diagonally too, right? At last! A faster explore!

Poe, you touched one of our current disputable questions!

Right now they are 2d sprites, not 3d models, and they will stay like that at least for the alpha stage. With such approach this is just another 2d image which almost doesn't load hardware.

However, we're considering using 3d models instead. There are pros and cons for both approaches. 3d models allow to implement the dynamic colors for each beast in the isometric mode, add rich and diverse animations, maybe reuse these models for mini games and other game modes in the future. It's possible to create optimized models for browser use. Obviously, no matter how simple they are, they will load hardware more than just 2d images, but there's a lot of games that do this. It's a matter of optimization. 

Another problem with 3d models concerns the development itself - it's very hard to marry 2d and 3d engines and almost impossible to make this alliance bug free.

2d sprites are less demanding for hardware and much easier to implement. Although the approach that we wanted to use for dynamic sprite generation turned out to be infeasible because of the final size of each individual sprite. Bandwidth and disk space make individual coloring impossible. The best compromise here is to show only the base color with no patterns. The animations will be more limited as well.

We didn't make a final decision on this issue yet, but we remember about hardware requirements and will optimize our models in case if we decide to go with 3d.

arete, yes, diagonally too :) Zigzag movement is ugly, so we're adding 4 more movement directions.