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!