Sifting ideas out of destroyed habits

Habits are a serious danger in many industries. In manufacturing it can even lead to death. When a worker gets used to their job they start to feel safe even in extremely dangerous situations. In the industry of game design we don't have to worry about molten steel being poured over us, but habits can be the death of creativity, and very destructive to our profession.

In order to generate new ideas I like to take apart systems we consider normal, especially if there are players that complain about them. Why is it normal? What problem is it trying to remedy? What happens when you burn it to the ground? Going against our habits takes us out of our comfort zone, and that's exactly where new ideas get found.

Here are some habitual features I destroyed in my search for something better:

Destroyed Habit #1: In any RPG I can think of, there is big boss armor, fancy PvP reward armor, and crappy starter gear that can vary extremely in their usefulness. A common complaint being that crafted gear is so much worse than dropped gear that crafting feels pointless, or that only people that grind for months are ever able to get the "best" gear. In order to prioritize crafted equipment some games will remove dropped gear entirely, asking players to seek out powerful recipes and components instead. Both systems are the same mechanism: there is always a "best" recipe, a "best" sword, a "best" bow, and with patches they get pushed higher and higher to keep end game players engaged.

New Idea #1: What I did instead was to give each recipe the potential to be any level, and to be tailored for any class, using fully customizable recipes. Every weapon does the same base damage, and every piece of armor provides the same base protection. What separates one weapon recipe from another is it's visuals, damage or protection type, and how a player chooses to craft it. This let's players choose equipment based on preference rather than trying to get the same "best" equipment thousands of other people are using. Again, the base math for all recipes is the same, sounds crazy right, but the final product is affected by many different player choices, including: level, rank, materials, passive skills, crafting facilities, color, and above all enchants.

Destroyed Habit #2: As a game world gets bigger and bigger, travel often becomes a concern from a design perspective. Commonly this is partially alleviated using ferries between important locations. The next step is almost always to give higher level players super fast mounts that let them whiz back and forth to wherever they're adventuring. Unfortunately a huge amount of danger is instantly lost as players dart past monsters uninterestingly, and the game world no longer gets much attention as we blur from here to there.

New Idea #2: No mounts, no ferries, ever. Instead, players can build and connect their own fast travel network, but only at places they've reached themselves. Building a teleporter requires light, a currency rewarded for the banishing of evil, so we can't built one every ten steps. We can however create our own points of interest when we find a cave entrance we want to explore, a lavafall deep underground we like, or a town with quests that we're interested in completing, providing a permanent connection to our home base or bases. Maybe we started with a cabin in the woods, and now want to build a castle in the mountains. Getting to the mountains will take some time, will no doubt get us into some fights, and will bring us across many smaller points of interest, secret areas, skill locked rewards, area based quests, etc. Once we find a place we like, we can build a teleporter, and travel freely back and forth between our cabin and our castle. We don't lose the fun and rewards of exploration, nor are we forced to walk back and forth between the same locations over and over.

Destroyed Habit #3: When leveling up a warrior you are expected to get stronger, when leveling up a wizard you are expected to get smarter. Some wizards use ice, some use fire, but none of them use crossbows. This is because classes are preconceived, built with expectations, and attempt to reward players for their chosen limitations with stronger and stronger attacks. A class may have several paths to choose from, but only a few. In the long run every level fifty character will have thousands if not millions of other characters built exactly the same as they are, destroying uniqueness and any sense of personalization.

New Idea #3: Open classes in Solace Crafting means that you don't choose a class to start out as, but are free to increase the abilities of any or all classes. The more you spend in a class the further it grows. That's not necessarily new, but I've taken this feature further still. For one, each and every skill has no hard level cap. Flame, Fireball, Fire Storm, and Meteor, like recipes, can all be leveled up without end and all use very similar math so that no one spell is the "best," though some are certainly more situational than others. Furthermore, players can mix and enhance their skills with passive abilities such as a chance to stun, or reduced mana cost. This allows players to mix skills from any tree creating the possibility for millions of combinations. It's still a young and evolving system, but I hope more than anything people will have fun with it.

I don't have a staff of hundreds, nor millions of dollars to throw around, yet, so spending my time on fancy AAA graphics just doesn't make sense. I also believe that's not how fun games are made. Looking back at games that have endured the past two decades it's quite obvious that players don't go back to them just to watch the cut scenes for a sixteenth time, they go back because they are fun, because they are engaging. As a solo developer I aim to create a fun and engaging game not through money and manpower, but through ideas.

Sometimes it takes years to work the kinks out, but when a good idea gets noticed, word spreads fast. Here's hoping people outside my head like some of my ideas as much as I do!

The importance of good planning

This week, once again, I got a lot done: rare resources are spawning; crafting professions are leveling up; the reworked enchanting system works well; harvesting tool strength; reworked stat system with equip/unequip controls; stone and metal building materials; combat armor and damage calculation; dimension crystal crafting, placement, resource storage, and teleportation; encounter monster and loot spawning; as well as combat experience and levels.

That's not to say that all of those features are finished, but that they are all in and working.

Currently I'm finishing up the reworked skill system which is already working fine, I just have to finish the skill point management and "purchasing" of skills.

The past few weeks I've been talking about my minimalist approach to development, I thought I'd explain that quickly.
Imagine you have:

50 sections or feature genres in your game, and each one has
100 stages of completion. If each stage of each section takes
1 day to finish (that's 5,000 days)

you can spend 30 or 60 days on just one subject no problem, but then all the other 49 sections of your game, all important to it's playability and overall fun, go completely neglected. That was more or less how I was handling development before making a clear todo list and sticking to it. Now I'm making sure everything is level one before moving on to level two. A couple items might get an extra level or two here and there, but overall everything is evolving in an even fashion.

Sometimes it's hard to to settle for less than what you know you're capable of, but sometimes that's a smart decision when time and resources are extremely limited.

Next Saturday I will go on vacation (from my day job) for a week, and hope to get a decent amount of development time in. I will be out of the country for the entire 9 days, so there will definitely be lot's to do, but I'm counting on a fair share of downtime as well as two ridiculously long flights.

Tiny but lots of steps

Ever since taking on my minimalist stance of just getting everything working no matter how bad it works, I've been making great progress! This has probably turned out to be my most important lesson over the years. I could fuss on making the sunset perfect for months if I wanted to, but that's no way to go about developing a fun game.

This week I got basic saving and loading in, a simple starter screen, monster spawning, resource generation (requires some tricks for terrain based trees), weapon damage, some crafting features, encounter spawning(towers), and a simple recall spell in. I did spend a little too much time messing with biomes and terrain generation, but I learned some lessons.

This isn't the best screenshot... but I don't like posting without at least one picture. Pretty much everything you can see in this shot in unfinished, but the basic programming is all in and working. I have a speedtree license, and hope to use all original trees, but for now have some basic Unity Trees spawning in.

Dimension crystals, like the one in the screenshot, are the basis of long range travel, respawn points, and several other features. That's mostly what I hope to be working on next week. I have a 2d minimap I was using to show crystal locations throughout a world, but I might change that to an easier to use list.

The towers in the screenshot are far away, but you can absolutely run straight to them and climb up them. They don't spawn their own monsters and loot yet, but that's their main purpose and we'll get there soon enough. Eventually I plan to have different towers for each biome such as pyramids for desert, and endless mineshafts in the mountains (which might be hard to see from far away).

The biggest problems looming on the horizon at this point are monster movement/combat AI and pathfinding. I'm pretty confident in the rest of what I'm doing, I might be looking into some third party tools to cover those that area up rather than take up a bunch of my time at this point in development.

Lots of tiny steps, but all necessary, and adding up towards the big picture!

On the shoulders of giants

Minecraft spawned a huge wave of voxel based games, some of which were very poorly received as mere "clones," but it's important to understand that big titles like that change the gaming world permanently. Once a sound idea or a better way of doing something has been proven to work it would be wrong to not take that knowledge into account when designing something new.

Along those lines I have dozens of pages of ideas for improving different systems from many games I've played over the years. I'd love to incorporate all of those system into Solace Crafting with a magic wand, but two of the biggest skills an indie designer must never forget are prioritizing and time management. Understanding how important something is to your game and at what stage it should be implemented is difficult at first. Sometimes realizing that something doesn't fit with your game at all can come after hundreds of hours of trying to force it in.

I am often asked what kind of game Solace Crafting is and I have the long winded genre title: open-world, procedural, crafting based, survival, role-playing game; but those could mean any of a whole array of different sub-genres, and I like instead to point out several of the giant titles whose systems I'm incorporating and expanding on.

1. Diablo 2
The Diablo 2 skill selection trees offered a level of freedom that could both make and break your character. Over the years people built unorthodox characters that proved to work great in different situations. From this freedom the developers gave to players, original content was allowed to grow. I hope to expand on this system heavily in Solace Crafting with a very flexible class system and the ability to master any of a large number of skills, for better or for worse.

2. Rust
My favorite aspect of Rust is their method of player buildings. Their system was the foundation for the current building system in Solace Crafting, though it has been changed in more than a few ways, and still has a lot of implementations on the drawing boards that differ from the path Rust seems to be following. The ability to construct outposts, home bases, and connect everything across distant locations is one of my highest priorities for Solace Crafting.

3. Minecraft
Some of my favorite experiences playing Minecraft are from finding strange landscapes, like jagged mountains and deep caverns. Then of course not only finding them, but building stuff on and around them. Bridges, tunnels, towers, castles, you name it, I built it. The biggest problem for me was always not being able to see far enough away. That was the inspiration for my distance engine which in the latest screenshot I uploaded is showing a 60km range, or 120kmx120km landscape letting players set their eyes on a mountain or desert from very far away rather than just wandering aimlessly to see what shows up. Currently the starter world, Khora, is a rather "normal" fantasy landscape and doesn't have at all as much strangeness as I hope to include in it over time, but rest assured there will be magma.

I reworked a lot of the crafting and code based item generation this week to be much simpler rather than plan for everything I have ever wanted to create all at once. It has been a real challenge for me to keep things simple rather than trying to account for every possible upgrade that could come about over time. This weekend and next week I'll be working on collision detection for the building system, and teleportation between dimension crystals.

New tools, simplification

So I bought an old house with my wife and that ate up a lot of time/money over the past few months. Still have so much to do with it too, like, ten years worth XD

I worked for a while on a side project with a friend, and it really showed me how finicky I'd been with Solace Crafting. Paying attention to things that don't yet matter, working too hard to perfect tiny details etc. The end result being there are things not yet implemented that are core to the game mechanics. In otherwords, it's not yet playable, and that should really be goal one.

I've also ditched some tools that just really weren't updating in the ways/schedule that I was hoping they would, and have picked up a new tool instead:

I just bought this generator a few days ago, and made this scene this morning in about four hours. Most of that time was just trying to get my distance engine, and RTP to work properly with it, but it more or less works now, so on to more important things. The barely visible mountains on the horizon are 60km out in this picture.

I'm going through and simplifying things, for example I've ditched animations/custom armor for right now. Crafting and building and harvesting and what not work fine, but they're all lacking in a layer or two of content. Mobs are in as well, but they are not yet procedurally leveling up like they need to, and their spawning mechanics are pretty lackluster. Once I get those four systems working at their most basic levels (harvesting, crafting, building, monsters) I will get back to implementing Dimension Crystals (vital for storage and travel), and towers (vital for loot/crafting upgrades).

One those systems are in we'll at least have a fully playable system. Then it's content. And LAST is polish. I've played plenty games with horrible animations/models, because they are FUN. I'd love to have AAA animations and a million custom armor sets, but that's just not realistic at this point and time.

Refining and Crafting

Over the past few days I brought the refining system and the facilities used for refining raw resources to a much more robust and interactive system. Though the basics of the refining system were in and working, setting up all the ifs ands ors and buts required quite a bit more time. It's always amazing how simple a concept can seem until you really start hammering it out. Even now there is a fair share of things put off for later.

As all facilities, items, buildings and everything are player crafted in Solace Crafting, there needs to be a recipe, a model, icon art, defined capabilities, and other settings for pretty much everything. If Smithing was the only profession just programming a forge and an anvil wouldn't be that hard, but we've got
Hunting / Skinning / Leatherworking,
Forestry / Woodworking,
Reaping / Tailoring,
Quarrying / Masonry,
Divination / Enchanting,
and Mining / Smithing.

Starting out we're allowed to do pretty much anything besides Smelting, Smithing and Enchanting with just a workbench letting players get early armor, weapons, and tools before the night gets cold. This only works with the first Tier (levels 0-4) of resources and limits item quality to a maximum of 40%, so getting proper facilities setup can make a big difference, but isn't required early on.

Refine raw wood into lumber for building your first house and some chests. Refine raw stalks into yarn for clothes and a new bag. Gather enough stone to build a forge and refine ore into metal for a shiny sword. A level 0 sword isn't an awesome weapon, but it's a lot better than no weapon. Or maybe your more of a magic staff kind of person. And there's sure to be some enchants waiting to be found just over yonder.

Once you're equipped well enough to handle the first few kilometers of the enormous world that is Khora, the starting dimension, you can head out to find rare resources and recipes, special encounters and quests. A flaming weapon enchantment from the desert towers, or maybe an ice reflecting shield from the mountains? With 10,000 visible kilometers the freedom of what to seek and where to look is yours.

Setup your Solace (your main Dimension Crystal) and travel as far as you want, knowing you can recall home at any point. That way you can work on upgrading your base if you like rather than building new ones as you go. I personally like to build bases all over, next to waterfalls (we don't have waterfalls yet), atop mountains (we have really big mountains), one can be a castle, one can be a summer cabin.

Ahh for the days when I get multiplayer working =]

Taking Global Inventory

I find that I don't like to make posts without fancy pictures, but at the same time I don't like to let as much time pass between posts as has the past couple weeks. I did have a hard couple weeks with a string of headaches as the seasons and weather changed drastically here in Japan, but I have also made important progress on parts of Solace Crafting.

Originally I was just reworking the User Interface (UI) though to get it where I want it, for now, I needed to improve the global inventory control system. That being how world items, player items, items left in facilities, storage chests, loot chests, etc. are all managed.

Inventory is not a big deal when you are simply moving things from A to B, but in Solace Crafting we actually have quite a few systems that required quite a bit mode code to get working properly. For one, as shown in the attached screenshot inventory has special slots for raw resources which are upgradeable both in total slots available as well as stack size per slot. These are part of the "Void Storage" system which is important to streamlining resource gathering throughout the Multiverse of Solace Crafting.

The other major user of Void Storage are Dimension Crystals which are player built facilities that let us teleport between locations we deem important. Any dimension crystal can be equipped with void slots for resource storage allowing the transfer of resources between locations as well as remote access for crafting facilities within range. Normally just storing the items on the gameobject itself would be enough, but this way we can track and make sense of where all of our items are throughout the Multiverse.

Now that the inventory system is fully equipped and running well, I have the tools to make persistent objects anywhere in any world. In pregenerated worlds this wouldn't be a problem, but in Solace Crafting we are free to travel thousands of kilometers making the programmed destruction and respawning of everything in the Multiverse necessary.

As I polish some final steps in the crafting UI I'm moving more and more into polishing up the skill system. Soon I'll have my hands on Terrain Composer 2 and then we'll be getting ready for Kickstarter with the dream of developing full-time!

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.