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.

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!

Tools and facilities

I got the basics of harvesting tools and processing facilities in and working today.

Harvesting tools are like any other recipe meaning they can be upgraded to any level, any rank, any tier, and socketed with enchantables for customization. This lets us harvest higher tiered resources and at a faster rate. Later on they will also be able to help boost our harvesting spells and talents for much more engaging harvesting.

Once raw resources are harvested they need to be processed, such as when ore is smelted into metal. Facilities are also planned to be upgradable and customizable, mostly for quality control, but also for some forms of specialized crafting.

As I mentioned yesterday all of these system are the foundation for adding additional items in. Once one tool works a dozen more can be quickly added in for further customization, and/or more stuff to find exploring!

The biggest problem with adding new items at this point in development is art. As a solo, and part-time, developer I don't have the time to model, skin, and create 2d art for everything I put in. Hopefully when we go live we will have funds in the form of sales that will allow me to outsource original artwork. I'd very much like to be paying young aspiring artists in the online gaming community, I know there are a lot of them out there!

Google! Google! Google! "It's only a model... shh"

Time to start posting regularly, which is a bit daunting when you're coding and uploading and managing everything yourself. I've decided instead to let Google help me out, and look forward to posting on this site much more regularly that I have on my own. Links to be set up shortly of course.

As far as Solace Crafting goes, progression is steadily moving forward. I've been dabbling a bit in marketing and have learned a great deal at the cost of precious development time. I've also read a lot into company formation and management, or in other words law and taxes, as I take steps towards forming a legitimate legal body to handle sales and that side of things.

Today I simplified a fair share of the recipe databases to make adding in new content and managing what's already there even easier. The structure that all crafting is built on top of in Solace Crafting has a very serious need to be flexible and accepting of new and changing content. Luckily it was built that way from the start!

Though to be honest I spent a lot of my free time cleaning today. Our apartment was getting messy and I gave a lot of our appliances a good scrub. Clearing the clutter is important for focus! Which the next four days will have a lot of.