Early edibles

As a survivor game we start in Solace Crafting with almost nothing. Over time we can rise to Hero of the Multiverse! or just build lot's of fun stuff, it's all up to you.

Having said that, players need to be sure to eat well if they want to last through their first night! Nutrition isn't complicated but it is important so evolving past just mushrooms and carrots is an important step for anyone, but that doesn't mean mushrooms and carrots don't have their place.

I made and textured these two models today. They're nothing special, but I don't like working with primitive placeholders. Until a player has better facilities and the tools required to get better food, raw edibles can mean the difference of life and death!

Building beginnings

Two of my favorite games are Minecraft and Rust. Precisely because you can build freely and design you own homebase. This has always been a necessity in the world of Solace Crafting and it's been a lot of fun getting the system in game.

Currently the the system works through a UI that is quite different than Minecraft and Rust, though the end results are similar. The UI still needs a lot of growth visually, but I'll post pictures soon. Basically it's from a third person perspective as most of the fantasy RPG world is. This allows building from a greater distance than when placing things by hand.

As for the mechanics Building is a profession like smithing or mining. We get better at it the more we practice and this let's us learn new building styles, shapes, as well maximum height and others.

The Building profession also opens up to the traps and tower system in which players are going to be able to build defensive and offensive tower and rooms to protect important areas. This leads to lots of fun in PvP and friendly maze building, but is also often a necessary for upgrading Dimension Crystals, the main form of transportation, during which waves of enemies spawn to try and interrupt the process.

I also learned a lot about PBR materials and found a great normal map builder: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ .

Looking forward to getting more building options in and improving the building UI. Building is really one of my favorite aspects of any survival game.

Website now linked to blog!

The website is now linked to this blog so I don't have to manually update news objects!

Part Time Dev

As I am new to the business I still have a day job. My real passion, game development, happens during my breaks and at night. This causes a lot of problems to be honest. For one, rarely do I get a stretch of more than an hour or two of solid focus, usually on the weekends. I have two ten minute breaks and about 45 minutes of my hour lunch break free, then usually a couple hours, more or less, at night. Time management becomes a paramount skill.

Lately I've been doing largely math and 3d modelling/texturing when free at work, then focusing on furthering/implementing game code and mechanics back on my computer at home. The laptop I bring to work is far too slow to handle a full scene of 3d graphics, but it works good for modelling things in Blender, and texturing through Photoshop and Unity. Today I modeled a new crude hatchet which is one of the first items a new player goes for.

Another problem is somewhat similar to humility. As a solo dev with no funding, yet, it's important to know where I am and what I'm capable of with the time given to me. I'd love to create a lot more than I do, but that's not being realistic. Many games nowadays are made with dozen of staff focusing each independently on specific tasks. For the aspiring developer, the ideas and passion can be real, but the time and budget restraints are as well.

It's important to take time for leisure, the youngest of my three cats is not happy I don't play with her 24/7, and of course rest, exercise and nutrition. I eat well, including a healthy breakfast, and no fast food. I also do around 50 chin ups throughout the day bringing my knees all the way up to the bar, as well as five or ten minutes of morning exercises as is a common practice here in Japan.

Last but not least, motivation!
When motivated everything falls into place.
So let's get to it!

Tools and facilities

I got the basics of harvesting tools and processing facilities in and working today.

Harvesting tools are like any other recipe meaning they can be upgraded to any level, any rank, any tier, and socketed with enchantables for customization. This lets us harvest higher tiered resources and at a faster rate. Later on they will also be able to help boost our harvesting spells and talents for much more engaging harvesting.

Once raw resources are harvested they need to be processed, such as when ore is smelted into metal. Facilities are also planned to be upgradable and customizable, mostly for quality control, but also for some forms of specialized crafting.

As I mentioned yesterday all of these system are the foundation for adding additional items in. Once one tool works a dozen more can be quickly added in for further customization, and/or more stuff to find exploring!

The biggest problem with adding new items at this point in development is art. As a solo, and part-time, developer I don't have the time to model, skin, and create 2d art for everything I put in. Hopefully when we go live we will have funds in the form of sales that will allow me to outsource original artwork. I'd very much like to be paying young aspiring artists in the online gaming community, I know there are a lot of them out there!

Google! Google! Google! "It's only a model... shh"

Time to start posting regularly, which is a bit daunting when you're coding and uploading and managing everything yourself. I've decided instead to let Google help me out, and look forward to posting on this site much more regularly that I have on my own. Links to be set up shortly of course.

As far as Solace Crafting goes, progression is steadily moving forward. I've been dabbling a bit in marketing and have learned a great deal at the cost of precious development time. I've also read a lot into company formation and management, or in other words law and taxes, as I take steps towards forming a legitimate legal body to handle sales and that side of things.

Today I simplified a fair share of the recipe databases to make adding in new content and managing what's already there even easier. The structure that all crafting is built on top of in Solace Crafting has a very serious need to be flexible and accepting of new and changing content. Luckily it was built that way from the start!

Though to be honest I spent a lot of my free time cleaning today. Our apartment was getting messy and I gave a lot of our appliances a good scrub. Clearing the clutter is important for focus! Which the next four days will have a lot of.