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!