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!

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.

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!