Alternative funding options

   I'm just going to be honest and admit that I'm fine with making money for hard work, but I get a little uneasy asking for funding. I'm 100% interested in making a really fun building and crafting game, and getting paid enough to improve it for years to come. However, a little funding will absolutely help me get there much faster, and I very much appreciate everyone that has expressed their willingness to help out with pre-orders and beyond.

   Truth be told, with a few hundred more hours work Solace Crafting will be able to support itself, I don't doubt that. So the goal is really just to get those hours in. Without funding I can only get somewhere around fifty to one hundred hours in per month. With funding I can get two hundred plus hours in per month (and still go to bed on time).

   One thing to keep in mind is that because I put time into development every day, the remaining time needed to get Solace Crafting into early release gets smaller every day. In other words, the amount of funding that I need to cover expenses gets smaller every day. Somewhere in the near future, the amount of money I have saved, the amount of funding supporters have provided, and the remaining time needed, will reach a point where it is "safe enough" for me to go full time. The $9,000 that Kickstarter reached though did not fulfill would realistically have been "enough," but maybe not considered "safe enough" by all parties.

   For those interested in pushing that date closer to now, I've researched some alternatives and would love to hear what you think.

My top pick: Patreon

   Patreon is actually a subscription platform by nature, something I never want to impose on general players, but it could work well for the current situation. Every dollar earned through Patreon can be displayed as "total amount raised" towards a goal. I can also reduce the goal amount freely as time goes on and I get closer to early release. Patreon also allows rewards so I can still offer the $15 pre-order, etc. I will be posting updates to Patreon most days if this is ends up being the way to go.

   Another possible route would be Equity Crowdfunding through IndieGoGo, but this has a heavy initial, a fair amoun of paperwork, and so forth. I don't think is the best choice for right now, though equity does have its benefits.

   Also with IndieGoGo, a "flexible funding" campaign with inDemand would allow me to keep whatever is earned, and to continue to raise money even after the deadline has passed for players interested in buying higher tiers. I already have a video and graphics, so this too could be a viable option, though I wouldn't be looking to "run it" like I tried with Kickstarter.

   Another possible route is to offer pre-sales through for example the Humble Store, which I've heard is possible, but this makes it difficult to accept different amounts depending on what individuals are capable of/willing to support. Or to simply pre-sell the game myself using PayPal, but this sometimes leads to PayPal freezing accounts, and in general is a lot more tax and paperwork for the developer.

   Personally, I think creating a Patreon page that clearly states the purpose and goal of allowing pledges is the easiest, safest, and perhaps best way to go. Please let me know if you think IndieGoGo has a better chance, or if you are interested in something else and why.

Thank you!

   Since the campaign has ended and I've refocused my attention on developing the game I've got a lot done. Some of the code I wrote over the weekend won't be going in just yet, but solace upgrades, demon wave attacks, and static defense obelisks are all in and working! I just have to make them look better =]

   I also made a lot of improvements to building and added in some more pieces for increased creativity.

   To help potential patrons better understand where Solace Crafting is going I've started a development road map, though it's just text for now. Check it out and let me know if you have any ideas:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/670260/discussions/0/2381701715727540383/

Best wishes to you!

What to do when your Kickstarter fails

My Kickstarter has failed!

   Grab a blanket, break out the ice cream and your favorite feel-good movie 😭
   I'm just kidding! It's no big deal, and I'm very happy to explain why.

So, what's the point of Kickstarter?

   For me, the reason for starting a Kickstarter campaign was always to buy me time. Time is the one and only thing keeping me from finishing Solace Crafting.
   Crowdfunding had been on my mind a long time, though I started to actually spend time seriously researching Kickstarter early 2016. I started to write promotion video outlines, catch phrases, todo lists, and timelines. I started working social media, farming Twitter followers, and reading articles about who succeeded or failed. By early 2017 I had started a company, was filing taxes, filling out forms, setting up bank accounts. I was recording and editing video and audio, something that takes a lot of time and effort. What I was doing though, to be blunt, was spending more and more time doing things other than game development.

My goal was defeated by the means.

   In August of 2017, I had a full week off of my day job for the Japanese summer break. I didn't spend it working on marketing, social media, and Kickstarter. I spent five weekdays nine to five developing Solace Crafting. I got so much done, it was in an odd way disheartening. In one week I furthered development more than I had in six months of trying to do seven or eight jobs at once. After that something inside of me started to boil.
   I knew I wasn't spending my time and energy where I wanted to, despite the obvious allure of funding. Still, I had dug so deep into the idea of Kickstarter, that I didn't want to simply abandon it. In mid-September, I threw together a video, and pushed the 'launch' button. I bought the services of an indie focused marketing company known as Black Shell Media, through which over sixteen hundred Steam keys were sent out to YouTubers and gaming related media, millions of Twitter views were achieved, thousands of clicks, as well as my own paid advertising.
   All in all though, Solace Crafting was too underdeveloped, did not attract the media, and Kickstarter lulled from day one.

Now that's all behind me. 

   I am once again focusing 95% of my time on game development, and it feels great.

   Should I never have looked at Kickstarter in the first place? I don't think that's something I or anyone else can say. I learned mountains worth about social media, advertising, business startup, taxes, law, video production, and much more. I met a handful of dedicated supporters that have given me some invaluable insight, and really helped me better understand even what I myself am looking to create. It would be nice to already have the game selling on Steam, but it may never have started down the path it is now had this extra time not been allowed to it. All things said and done tens of thousands of people have now heard the name Solace Crafting that hadn't just 30 days ago.

   My sincere gratitude goes out to those that have backed the Kickstarter campaign. As Kickstarter is all or nothing, some of you have expressed an interest in supporting Solace Crafting outside of Kickstarter. I am considering several ways to go about that, and will post again with my findings asking for your input on the best way to go about that.

   In the meantime I will get back to posting regular updates on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (I can post to them all simultaneously, it's not very time consuming), with less frequent updates here and on Steam. If you'd just like to know when Solace Crafting is ready, joining the mailing list, or adding it to your Steam wishlist is a non-intrusive yet surefire method to get a notification. I only send out mailing list updates for major events.

What I learned preparing and running a Kickstarter

1. Health and relationships
   Mine suffered. I lost a lot of sleep, grew short-tempered, put on weight for the first time in my life, and got sick a lot more often than I usually do. I skipped outings with my wife and family because I was "busy," and even skipped my day job a couple times. Looking back these were all poor choices, and I would encourage indie developers to accept the fact that there is never enough time, and to always put your health and relationships first.

2. Social Media Followers
   I grew over 7,000 Twitter followers across my three accounts over the course of a year. Somewhere around six of them backed me on Kickstarter. This was the biggest let down of all for me. I spent somewhere over 150 hours throughout the year on Twitter, yet the end results were laughable.
   Now, I met some of the kindest, most supportive people on Twitter as well, who continue to help test Solace Crafting and have been a big healp; so I'm not saying Twitter is useless, just understand the term "follower farming," and do not engage in it. Most accounts are just following you because they want their follower count to go up into the millions, as I did, they don't care about you or your game. The people that do care will notice you eventually if you're posting #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #indiegame etc. and don't need to be farmed.
   This applies somewhat to Instagram as well, but Instagram and Facebook are much more organic.
   Facebook does not allow the same sorts of freedom that Twitter does and requires quite a bit more work. I would reccommend working with paid advertising (see #3) more than trying to spend time in social media much yourself.

3. Paid advertising
   The advertising I paid for myself via Facebook, Twitter, and Google ads did far worse than the non-paid posts run by Black Shell Media, a service I also paid for. The difference is that they are posting on accounts they have spent years building up with large audiences, versus paid advertisements that target an extremely diverse audience and are clearly marked as "paid". People that follow content posters like Black Shell Media do so because they are interested in upcoming games, indie developers, and crowdfunding campaigns. No matter how specific you get with paid advertising keywords and targeting via facebook/etc ads you're going to hit a lot of people that don't care about any of these things. I would highly recommend considering a service or two or three ranging from 50$ to 500$ posting to curated audiences over self-managed paid advertising.

4. The demo
   My demo sucked, and that was the end of the story really. Plenty of people are able to see beyond that and are willing to back your project, but streamers and media get stuck. Getting people to back your project is less of a problem than getting people to see your project, and they're not going to see it if streamers and media don't have enough to work with. You also don't need any fancy video production if your demo works, you just record it and your good.

5. The video
   Do not spend any time trying to make your video fancy by mocking up cut-scenes, making new models, recording new voices. If it's not in your game, it's not in your game! This was something I learned early on. Trying to take screenshots and video of stuff that isn't finish takes time. Instead of spending that time you should finish it! Then all you have to do is record.

5. Time ⏰
   If you're building a board game, printing a comic, shooting a movie, you need money, and Kickstarter might be the most awesome thing ever to earn you money. If you're an indie developer, you need time, not money, no matter what people in the industry are used to saying. Consider two alternatives to Kickstarter:
   A: Don't spend your time on anything other than development, and just get the game to an early-access stage. Steam has the most subscribers of any sort of "media outlet" you can imagine times ten thousand. If you're game is going to sell at all (and some games just aren't, no offense) putting it live on Steam will sell it.
   B: Consider IndieGoGo for its investment options. I ultimately stuck with Kickstarter because its got the "biggest audience," but that didn't cover up the problems with the campaign, and it also comes with a lot more rules, and a lot less options. I have people that -want- to give me money to help out, but Kickstarter only offers an all or nothing campaign style. IndieGoGo allows you to offer equity, and to opt to keep what you get, both of which for a goal as small as mine was, may have been a better option. Not in all cases, but it's definitely worth thinking about it.

   I read time and time again that crowdfunding takes a lot of time and work, but I never mentally translated that as "time you could have been developing," until it was too late. Life is, however, experience! I'm not interested in moaning about what's done, and have my eyes back on the true goal: a great game!

   I'm shooting to publish a public build before the year ends, with a big update this Saturday!

   Thank you again to everyone who has backed, commented, and shared their ideas. Your continued participation is important as we move forward with turning Solace Crafting into a financially healthy and well-staffed project, and is very much appreciated by me and everyone looking for better games.

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!

Building improvements amidst video production

Hard at work on my promotional video! It's coming along nicely, albeit sort of a rough draft version for now. I'm getting all the scenes built, recorded, and in order so that I can make sure the flow and length of the video is good and get a better impression of the kind of music I want to use with it. Here's a little gif from the video I made with the text removed:

I implement little things every day, regardless of what my overall goal for the day or week is. This past few days I put in a new set of building models, upgraded the camera controls/collision detection, and am working on some physics upgrades to the character controller.

Our building system allows for super fast construction. Where you place buildings in most games is a Select type -> Select location approach, but we go backwards. Once an area is selected you can pick from many different types of buildings categorized first by type (edge, floor, roof, etc) then by recipe, wood wall, stone wall, metal doorway, etc. Then you're free to move the placement around using wasd, qe for up and down, and zc for rotating. By default you're locked to the grid so everything lines up perfectly.
Building a long wall is as simple as hitting space to construct, 'a' to move the selector left, space, a, space, a, space, a, space, a, etc.

The buildings are still mostly square, walls, doorways, as well as stairs and stuff, but I want to get some round stuff in over the weekend, maybe tomorrow night! I really want to be able to make castle turrets freely, maybe with a 2x2 placement option in the future, but as a 1/4(1x1) piece for now. You can rotate everything freely already, so that fits into the system super easy.

Third Party Goodies

There is a part of us all that wants to do everything from A to Z, write our name on the cover and marvel at our success. In years past this has turned into me working on a feature for weeks and not getting it to half the quality of a 30$ asset on the open market. More recently I've learned that there is a time and a place for doing everything meticulously by hand, and that time is not now.

There is however often some very nice middle ground.

I recently picked up a new weather package to help improve my clouds, sky, and weather, but am not using it as advertised. I already had a weather system that I liked very much, and so have merged the two into a glorious companionship.

I'm using my own cloud maps with more layers than are supported out of the box, spreading the different layers into different short range and long range rendering schemes, some overlapping terrain with others not. I have taken full control of each cloud layers coverage individually, the different layers of rain and their animation sheets, multiple layers of fog, atmospheric scattering colors, and more. It would have taken me months to write all of the helper functions and shaders that I'm using just for the weather.

My budget and free time are non-existent, so it's not easy to pick something and go with, but it certainly beats trying to do everything by hand. Many of the assets available to indie developers such as myself are built by passionate indie developers that spend months or even years perfecting their products... just like me! It's just a different target customer base.

I'm currently hard at work on a promotional video as I finish the last bits of company registration fuss with some help from my family. With Steam's Greenlight getting the axe... I'm not sure how that will all play out, but Kickstarter is getting closer and closer. Stay tuned!

Law and Armor

We now have an official legal body to call our studio! Introducing: Big Kitty Games LLC. It's a pretty simple website for now, but the reality of creating and managing a legal body is a little less simple.  I'm still in the middle of setting up a business account (tough living overseas), and a couple more things to file, but the ball is most definitely rolling.

As a legal body there are now a new set laws I have to be careful of with pretty much everything. For example when I buy an asset on Unity's Asset Store am I paying with company money as a company expense? Right now we're still a one man show with zero income, so I don't have to worry about too much yet, but salary, spending, taxes, and more can all end up costing you unforeseen money if handled improperly.

Despite all of that eating up a lot of my time, it's been a very fruitful month in terms of actual game development. I've added some global settings so that players can turn up and down the quality of the game world. I've also incorporated a simple day and night cycle, am working on some weather improvements.

The biggest change of late is by far my new avatar system. At long last I've got armor pieces swapping individually per slot. Cloth gloves, leather shirt, metal leggings, totally possible, and absolutely necessary for a proper RPG. This system also allows extensive avatar modifications and though not yet fully implemented, I hope to add tons of player customization the point of trolls, ogres, elves, human, blue skin, pink hair, and more. I really believe that players should be allowed to experiment as much as they want, and be given ways to correct things when they conclude that pink hair on their Paladin was a mistake.

I've also got spell and ability effects in and working well, though I still need a lot more.

The game story has also developed quite a bit from the quite random "You exist! Have fun" sort of introduction I had up until now. It's going to require some new artwork so I won't be updating the website just yet, but it really blends nicely into letting players be whoever they want to be!

Runtime marketing, er generation

I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks upgrading the real-time (runtime) terrain generation. For starters I switched from using multiples of 10 to using powers of 2. This has solved more than a couple issues I was having because a lot of the base code in Unity and some of the plugins I am using are built to only work with powers of 2. So instead of 1000 meter terrains we now have 1024 meter terrains, but ultimately the end user isn't bothered as a meter is still a meter.

I also doubled the long distance quality which makes for a longer initial load, but it looks a lot better and doesn't affect performance that much.

The way that the runtime generation is setup allows players to easily specify the long distance draw distance from 16km up to 64km, which runs fine on my not-so-awesome computer. The above picture is 48km though and should be more than enough 99/100 cases. Once the rain kicks up you can't see anything anyway ;p

I've also spent a fair amount of time working on my marketing skills. It's not something I personally like to do, but it's widely recognized as perhaps the most important step for a solo no-name dev like myself. If you don't know how to tell anyone about your campaign for awesome, it just flops its arms in the mud.

I plan to spruce up the UI, loading screens, and the opening screen a bit, and then start digging my heels in the dirt as I prepare for the biggest plea for help in my life, Kickstarter! There are of course alternatives I've been studying, so who knows. Ah for the day when I can call such a glorious profession my own! Until them, I'm here on my lunch break working for a completely unrelated company thinking up new angles to approach my remaining gamedev challenges with =]

Best wishes to you and yours in 2017!
It's going to be a wild ride for me!
Stay tuned!

Skills to make the kills

Last week I got biomes working in my new level system, currently with a snow and a desert biome mixing in with the main ocean/grassland/moutain biome. This way I can spawn biome specific resources, monsters, encounters and more.

I also simplified my cloud system to just do what I need it to right now, and it's working great. Mixed with a little sun and some minor post effects and we're not looking too shabby.

I also put in some of my speedtrees, which do look a lot better than normal unity trees. I'm not spending much time on them yet, but it's easy to make tons of them once you get one set up.

While on vacation the week before I set out to implement the first tier of skills for the four starter classes called Archetypes. These are made up of the Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each Archetype starts out with six possible skills choices which are primarily attack focused skills to assist in the first few levels of combat and leveling.

Even before I started writing any code I knew I would need a very flexible system as skills in Solace Crafting are numerous and extremely varied, include player buffs, direct attacks, timed spells, passive abilities, and so on. My system is also a bit unique in that every skill has unlimited levels and needs to be able to scale and blend with other complimentary skills. I more or less had built similar systems before, but it's always great having a chance to start over and really know what you're going into.

The main obstacle is how to initiate skills that are not instant. The Scout has a tier one skill called Double Shot for example that fires two ranged attacks in quick succession. The second arrow has to launch shortly after the first arrow meaning we can't just call single function in one frame. Using coroutines and their yeild capabilities we can create loops for damage over time spells, wait for casting times to finish for complex spells like Meteor, or do a series of completely different things over time like teleport, attack, and warp back.

I have gained a ton of inspiration from League of Legends and their massive array of over five hundred skills, as well as from the classics like Dungeon and Dragons, Everquest, and many others. I plan to build a wide array of skills over time aiming to grant players the ability to be unique and interesting, rather than just cookie cut.

I'm starting now to work on two videos for Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter! Fun times! I will be signing up to IndieDB and more things as I build these two and other screenshots over the next couple weeks.

Vacation with work?

I am in Hawaii right now! My first vacation other than visiting my family in the states since as long as I can remember! Maybe seven or eight years since I went to Mexico. There are wild chickens, lots of different flora, and half naked humans everywhere!

It's vacation, but only from my day job. I love working on Solace Crafting and hope to get plenty time to code in the sun. I got a lot done last week, but here I am, up before sunrise while everyone else is still asleep. Coffee in hand I'm ready to code, but I'll post a little update as Saturday flew past me.

This week I implemented a universal equipment/buff/attack stat system, so that I can add more types of damage and stats over time; a few skills that can be learned, equipped, and used; basic pathfinding with A*, though it needs work; monster drops; improved inventory/item stats display; added character creation/loading to the start screen; as well as adding player buildings into the save/load equations, which took a little thinking; I also added monster scaling over distance, though it's just levels and hp/damage at this time.

I wasn't sure how I was going to go about the player building saving, but it turned out to work just fine. I had to move rotation into the storage script and was able to optimize the class a bit while I was in there. Being able to save progress is one of the biggest requirement of an RPG type game, but also a pretty complex deal when you start having thousands of items slots in the form of chests, and rewards scattered throughout dungeons or houses you've built over time.

Currently I'm working on implementing the first tier of all four early skill trees, called the Archetype trees. These are Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each tree has six skills in the first tier and are action/attack heavy as this is where you want to pick your main attacks for the first few levels. I've got some ranged magic skills in, some power attacks, and am working on buffs/debuffs, as well as ranged projectile attacks at the moment.

After that I'll be working on some crafting improvements to make sure the set enchants work, as well as building placement checks to stop floating walls, and that kind of stuff.

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.

Back on track

I have achieved a lot more than I initially knew I was capable of with my struggle to make Solace Crafting the best crafting game on the market. It's still a long ways from completion, or what I consider completion in my head, though there are already some really fun and unique aspects to the game. A part of me considers it a crime to hoard these new ideas and not put them out in the hands of players, for better or for worse. Another part of me wants to wait until the game is AAA quality, fully staffed, and the best thing since tuna sandwiches, though I realize more and more that is not something I can realistically expect from a solo project.

I also started a new project with a friend several weeks ago we're tentatively calling Insulation. It is much more PvP related than Solace Crafting, and focuses on construction, gathering, and all around hoarding. We'll get a website up for that soon. What I've done with Insulation though is really starting from scratch pulling all of the best things I learned how to do from Solace Crafting and squeezing them into a new shape. The progress I made in very few hours spread out across several weeks was much greater than I had been making with Solace Crafting for quite some time. Precisely because I abandoned the desire to have everything be AAA, super smooth, and worth a million dollars. I hope to bring that mentality into Solace Crafting now as I come back to it and progress, rather than fuss, through the many things left to make it fun before it's pretty. Here in Japan there is a famous saying "Hana yori dango," which means food before flowers. Tweaking sunsets and generation algorithms is a lot of fun, but if the game doesn't have the basic hundred components needed for players to get in and start playing, it's little more than incomplete.

I am currently applying to a large game company I am very excited to hear back from and have been brushing up my skills on all fronts in hopes of securing myself as the best candidate for the position. Amidst that, our new house, and a stray kitten fiasco it's been hard to find time for Solace Crafting and Insulation. The ultimate goal was always to get funded through Kickstarter so that I could work on it full-time, though a job with this company could powerfully snuff that desire as I would love love love to be working for them. With that dream dominating my thoughts I've been able to put Solace Crafting back in its proper place as a side-project, and not something I should be trying to make AAA quality piece by piece. I'm certain this will speed up the development of the still necessary yet incomplete portions of the game, as again, I work towards getting it out to prospective players as soon as possible.

I'm sorry for the lack of updates, and appreciate all the follows and likes I've received on Twitter. Whether I get hired or not, development will continue, so stay tuned!

Biomes in biomes in biomes!

I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post!
My wife and I bought a house, and I've been testing TerrainComposer2 which is now out in beta!

TerrainComposer was already my go to tool for terrain creation with a lot more power than any other tool out there for my specific needs. Usually several artists will hand paint levels to look good as players move through them. In Solace Crafting the game world(s) is(are) 100% procedural. This means that I can't fine tune a mountain, or reposition a tree by hand, everything is different every time!

With TerrainComposer2 I've now got the tools to add biomes within biomes within biomes for extreme control of the near infinite worlds I'm designing. I'm working directly with the develop to get some extra features in that will make my life much easier, though we're still a week or two away from getting the bugs fixed and really being able to plug version 2 into Solace Crafting's engine.

In the meantime I've made big improvements to the building system. I'll have to go more into depth on this with a post of it's own when I'm finished with it, but you build big and fast with this really easy to grasp building system. The buttons rotate with you as you move and switch between keyboard controls and back to movement simply by holding the right-mouse button down (used for look in most RPGs anyway)

Once I get upgrades in and add stone and metal I'll post a video showing just how easy it is to get things moving.

Hope everyone is enjoying the nice weather!

Monsters, Programming, and Epiphanies

As a crafting heavy game I've spent hundreds of hours thinking of, taking notes, and testing ideas about how to make crafting more controllable. One thing that I knew I wanted to improve on from the beginning, though I didn't figure out how until this week, was a problem made very clear in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I love the Elder Scrolls series and of course enjoyed crafting my own gear in Skyrim, however, with limited resources and a little testing it quickly becomes clear that repeatedly crafting daggers is the best way to level up smithing.

Now, we're not trying to make a "realistic" game, this isn't a simulator, but crafting 300 level 1 daggers to become a master smith just seems silly. But how do you do better? Game development is not easy. I tried requiring five different items crafted per level. I tried requiring different categories within a profession to be leveled up individually. I tried many things. But ultimately it comes down to how much metal did you bend. If a 3 metal dagger gives 3 exp, why not make a 6 metal sword give 6 exp. We also have tiers of metal, and other factors, but I'm finding this to be a -now- obvious system, though it took a long time to stumble across.

Speaking of crafting, I rewrote all of the crafting code this week into a much more compact system, in some cases reducing over a thousand lines of code into roughly one hundred. How? I'm now using what are known as machines in the code. Rather than "hard coding" the stats for a Sword, a Longsword, and a Shortsword each individually, several variables are input and the machines outputs what is needed. The greatest part of this method is that a new item can be added into the game with one a few lines of code. I hope that this eventually leads to opening the door to community created items by the dozens.

Monsters are in and working well. Spawning with different, skills, stats, and colors based on their biome. They're not the brightest when it comes to pathfinding, but pathfinding in a procedural world is never easy. If anyone is a genius in that field please let me know ;p

The UI has improved a lot. I hope to get more tooltips in over the next week to show information when requested rather than filling the screen up with levels and stats.

My wife and I are buying a house! So I've been pretty busy. And Terrain Composer 2 has been delayed, so I'm not currently working on level graphics. I hope to have more flashy graphics to show off soon =]

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!

Environment, Health, and Skills

The User Interface (UI) for Solace Crafting has gone through many different stages of evolution. Recently it has merged into a single cleanly divided overlay. Initially I thought it best to have multiple windows that were movable letting players customize, but to be honest it was a hassle Now as a single static overlay with different tabs things are now much more clear, consistent, and concise.

While implementing the new UI I also added in satiation, hydration, nutrition, and temperature. Each of these four systems is controlled by several different factors, for example when a player is too hot, diseased, or poisoned, their hydration decreases faster, though the end result is displayed with a simple percentage and colorbar.

Most of the weather mechanics are in a flowing freely. They can mix and match a wide variety of stages from hurricanes to monsoons, heatwaves to cold fronts, etcetera. The minimum and maximum
rain or snow, wind, and temperatures are decided by the weather stage, but then move independently making no ten minutes of weather the same.



Temperature becomes very important to survival, though starting out doesn't need to be bothered with much. Come first nightfall you might freeze to death if you're still not wearing anything at all, but that can also be averted with a warm camp fire. In Solace Crafting we manage body temperature whose lengthy exposure to cold or heat will push the player past their limits but skin temperature is handled separately. Thus even a naked player could warm up by a fire enough to gather for a while out in the cold rather than having to sit by the fire until sunrise. Player core temperature and the limits we are capable of withstanding can be managed with armor, as well as special clothing known as underwear, which we'll get into in the future.

In other news, the skill system has gone under a bit of evolution. Rather than creating a skill for everything, I've cut the total number of skills in three, and added related upgrades to almost all skills. Thus a shield bash doesn't become obsolete when shield slam becomes available, instead a chance to stun can now be added onto the shield bash. Further points can be spent to increase the damage, or the stun chance, with a percentage of each point being shared with all related upgrades. This maintains the high level of class customization while keeping the hotbar from getting too cluttered.

I also created a couple monsters and played with a lot of animations and animators, but I'll polish them a thousand fold before we go into that ;p

I'll post more screenshots soon!

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.