Hello everyone!
Crest is 55% off due to Indie MEGABOOTH's Going Away (For Now) Sale! Be sure to check out the other games and support the devs and the organisation.
The New Game
Okay, we've been working on it since 2018 so not really new new, but newest! We also wanted you to know that we managed to survive the economic crisis brought about from the pandemic, right now we're helping Stanford University with their Eterna project that helps in the fight against viruses. But most importantly, we're continuing work on our new management game Among Ripples: Shallow Waters even though we failed our Kickstarter.
We're continuing work on the prototype and hope to release a new version in September and hope to make a relaunch of the Kickstarter then. Feel free to try the current demo! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096090/Among_Ripples_Shallow_Waters/ Thank you for everything, both the praise and criticism! //Martin and the team
Hello everyone! As some of you know we're working on Among Ripples: Shallow Waters right now. It's on the last few days on Kickstarter and we need your help to get to the finish goal, as little as a dollar can make a difference. [previewyoutube=jDhcErvJWjA;full][/previewyoutube]
Support on Kickstarter
Thank you!
Hello everyone,
As many of you know we have completed Crest and have been working on our new game for some time. We have now gone live on Kickstarter with Among Ripples: Shallow Waters. We're already 10% funded under 2 days and with your help we'll get to 100% soon enough. :)
[previewyoutube=S6_JL6_7t3I;full][/previewyoutube]
As our lead programmer says in the video we've learned a lot since Crest and part of that is thanks to all of your great feedback. We hope you'll play and enjoy Among Ripples: Shallow Waters too!
Link to Kickstarter Page
Thanks for the help!
//Martin and the Team
Hello everyone,
Due to Valve's new soundtrack interface you can now own soundtracks on Steam separately. You can read more about the changes in Valve's own announcement. We have prepared the soundtrack to this new configuration.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386570/Crest__Original_Soundtrack/
Enjoy the soundtrack (again)!
Hello everyone,
During the Winter Sale our game Crest is discounted by 70%, hope you enjoy the game if you've been on the fence!
We also want to inform you that we have a new Among Ripples: Shallow Waters demo out. It's our new management game, or rather, an eco tycoon sim where you rehabilitate lakes from pollution.
We're doing a Kickstarter campaign for the project in early 2020 and in preparation for that we're sharing our demo. It's not online on Steam yet but visit our website for other options.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096090/Among_Ripples_Shallow_Waters/
----
The Eat Create Sleep team wish you a happy holiday!
Hello everyone,
Crest is now on sale with a discount of 51%! We're also "giving away" our demo prototype for our new game Among Ripples: Shallow Waters. Inside of the main menu you can find a link to the demo.
Or, if you just want to download it here, try this:
https://eatcreatesleep.net/demo/
Hello everyone! Thank you for playing Crest and giving us valuable feedback for the game. Although the game is finished it helps us understand what we can do better in the future. But why we're doing this update is to let you know that we'll be launching Kickstarter campaign in early 2020 for our next game! You can try our public demo out now, if you sign up to our newsletter (sign up here). [previewyoutube=P8qsiQIiGss;full][/previewyoutube]
Kickstarter
We will be launching a Kickstarter campaign for Among Ripples: Shallow Waters in early 2020, we will let you know a few weeks in advance when we launch. The best way to keep yourself updated is to join our new newsletter!
Demo and Newsletter
You can download the demo to PC, Mac or Linux if you sign up to our newsletter here. We will only post updates about once a month and you can unsubscribe whenever you want. Join our Discord and talk about what you'd like to see in the game and the Kickstarter campaign.
Hello everyone,
As we've said before we're still supporting the game when game breaking problems occur for a lot of people. It was brought to our attention that the game is unplayable on ultrawide resolutions. We've worked on fixing this and we also found a very rare save bug (that is gone now). Enjoy!
Version 1.11 - 18th June 2019
Fixed an issue that caused saves to fail on rare occasions.
Wider monitor resolutions are now supported.
And feel free to wishlist the game we're working on now.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096090/Among_Ripples_2/
Have a nice day/night!
//Martin & Eat Create Sleep
Hello everyone!
Eat Create Sleep has together with a lot of other developers organised a sale that celebrates games that explore and talk about nature. We will offer Crest for sale with 40% discount. The sale starts today, Monday, at 23:00 CEST and will continue until Thursday this week. Check out a lot of interesting games, both famous, old and new!
Also, you can now wishlist our next game, Among Ripples 2. Our eco tycoon sim where we've taken everything we've learned from making management games for 5+ and take it to a deeper (water) level.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096090/Among_Ripples_2/
Hope you find something on the sale!
//Martin & ECS
Summary
We have the past month been working on a patch to fix the most serious issues with Crest and to give it some love before we move on to the next exciting project (more on that below). Unfortunately we havent been able to save your old save files (sorry).
Patch Update
Major Fixes
- The major bug causing the majority of the saving errors has been fixed.
- Fixed the bug that blocked players from upgrading expertise buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused followers not to be able to mine mines.
- The water consumption has been balanced so that it will be much harder to get desert islands.
- Fixed issue with completing achievements.
- Fixed the issue that caused mini map clips to be skipped.
- Visual bugs for Mac has been fixed.
- Fixed the issue with UI elements being triggered by hotkeys while being in menu or saving.
- Fixed the camera so it doesnt forget the last position when switching between scenes.
- The bug causing animations for all living things in the game get stuck in one short loop has been fixed.
- Re-connect to Twitch is now working.
- A bug causing the prompt Write a commandment! to get stuck has been fixed.
- A bug causing the word socialise not to raise social need is now fixed
- And other smaller bug fixes.
- Performance fixes.
- Added new Steam achievements.
- Teachings that were almost impossible to complete has been balanced to be easier.
- A follower can no longer die of starvation if the city has plenty of food unless they are starving themselves due to commandments or interpretations.
- Condemn is now more effective.
- If the player clicks on a city nameplate it now opens the city UI window.
- Added a popup that tells the player if a save or load error has occurred.
- Faith meter in World Overview UI window is added.
- A new speech bubble has been added that shows the player when a follower is following an interpreted commandment.
- The misfortune: Dry rivers do not happen as frequently anymore.
- And other smaller improvements.
Moving On
The game is now complete, there will be no major updates to the game. The reason is that the game has sold a lot less than we would need to make the development cost back. We have sold around 14 000 copies since we entered Early Access back in 2015, we would need to sell around 50 000 copies to even make back the development cost. Compared to how much games on Steam sell in general we did better! But that's because the average is 2000 copies, which no one can live on. The relaunch in December, 2018 was our way to fix the game, since we think you, our fans, deserved a better game. But it was also an attempt to make Crest more appealing and get a second life and sell more. If the game would've sold better we could've continued with updates. But the relaunch didn't give us huge numbers to encourage more development time. So it's a simple answer, we didn't earn a lot of money and working more on the game would only drive us into bankruptcy, we have to eat too. :)
Next Thing: Among Ripples 2
A small team at our studio has been working on a prototype for Among Ripples 2, our upcoming sequel to our first game. It will be an ambitious management tycoon game where you shape lakes and oceans, ravaged by pollution, and make them habitable for fish and other animals.
We're pitching the project to publishers and investors right now and hope we will be going into full development within a few months, until then we do contract work to stay afloat. We will be releasing a new trailer for the prototype really soon, here's the old one we have used to pitch the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1XDRuKvov0
Support for Crest in the Future
We will keep an eye on the game and if you find game breaking bugs or balancing issues that completely break the game experience we will patch that of course. But there will be no new features.
Follow the Development
If you want to keep tabs on the future of our studio you can do so by joining our other social media: https://twitter.com/AmongRipples https://twitter.com/EatCreateSleep https://www.facebook.com/eatcreatesleep/ https://discordapp.com/invite/ecs https://www.youtube.com/user/eatcreatesleep Right now we mainly use our Discord to talk about Among Ripples 2.
Thank You!
Making Crest has been a wild ride, we have learned a lot, and the game would not be half as good without your feedback. Thank you for your support and patience. We hope that your time in Crest was worthwhile and that you would want to support our future games. //Martin & Eat Create Sleep Team
Hello everyone! We're part of the Lunar Sale so you can grab the game cheaper for the next week, tell your friends, or give them a copy. ;) The new patch arrives on the 13th February, we've made good progress and think the next update will arrive on time! https://store.steampowered.com/app/341710/Crest__an_indirect_god_sim/ Stay tuned!
Hello all, Some of the bugs you found was trickier to fix than we thought, we have to spend 2 more weeks on the problem. We apologise for the delay, but we felt we'd rather give you a definitive patch instead of a few small ones.
Hello everyone, We're back! We're now working on our patch that will fix the major issues found after the relaunch was launched, it will be online in the end of the month. Stay tuned. :)
Hey,
The new hotfix is live to fix the most irritating bugs, we will be going away for vacation until the 10th January, during the rest of January we will be fixing the things we didn't have time for before the holidays.
Crest is also on the Winter sale during this time, so tell your friends, and leave a good review if you like it. ;)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/341710/Crest__an_indirect_god_sim/
Hotfix
Bug fixes:
- Fixed issue with followers not migrating to the coast.
- Fixed harbours not appearing for some cities close to coasts.
- Fixed diplomats not spawning when cities should create alliances.
- Fixed tooltips showing wrong texts in the main options menu.
- Fixed a non-working Steam achievement.
- Fixed issue with Expertise buildings not being able to upgrade, resulting in max 4 city districts.
- The word Socialize is unlockable earlier in Book of Learning.
- If you choose to terraform, you will no longer be spammed with Bulletin Messages.
- You can no longer open the Word Tablet and the Wisdom Tablet when your legacy has ended.
- Longer time between tutorial nudges.
- UI polish
Known Issues
- Changelog line breaks are a bit off.
- Twitch integration reconnect not working.
- Interpretation bulletin message calling it association
- Graveyard visual issues with certain history events.
- Insatiable hunger animal effect does not disappear sometimes.
- Some UI elements can be accessed after the game has ended.
- Sometimes, creating commandments in loaded games can cause them to be free of cost and the Word Tablet is not cleared after proclaiming them.
- In rare cases, saves wont work.
- For some, the Mini-Cinematics doesnt work in the minimap.
- Sometimes, in loaded games, the animations for followers and animals wont play correctly.
- You can't give up and quit in the underworld.
- Saving during the tutorial will corrupt your save file.
- Spelling errors
In 3 hours time Smash Gaming will be hosting a Twitch stream here on Steam, so join in then. :)
https://www.twitch.tv/smashgamingfrazzz
https://www.youtube.com/user/SmashGaming999/
Hey everyone!
The new art book is now available as a digital download. Everyone who bought the old one gets the new one for free. To access the art book after purchase go to the same folder where you can find Crest (Game Library>Properties>Browse Local Files...).
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386580/Crest__Art_Book/
We're still working on a hotfix, should be online on Friday, 21th Dec.
Hello everyone,
It's great seeing all this feedback from you, our fans, it seems the relaunch gave Crest some well needed features that you liked. Thank you for the praise. :) Here's what's coming up!
Art Book Giveaway
We've made a new art book and printed a limited amount of physical copies. We will give away some of these if you participate in our competition. [olist]
Hotfix Coming Up!
As you can see below we've had some reports and seen bugs ourselves, we will issue a hotfix next week before we go on vacation. We will be back early January.
Known Issues With Crest
- Changelog line breaks are a bit off.
- Twitch integration reconnect not working.
- Options tooltips for dropdown lists not correct.
- Interpretation bulletin message calling it association
- Issues unlocking some Steam achievements.
- Graveyard visual issues with certain history events.
- Insatiable hunger animal effect does not disappear sometimes.
- Some UI elements can be accessed after the game has ended.
- Bulletin messages can sometimes be spammed when terraforming.
- Sometimes, creating commandments in loaded games can cause them to be free of cost and the Word Tablet is not cleared after proclaiming them.
- Sometimes, in loaded games the expertise buildings wont upgrade and that can hinder the Cities being able to build more City Districts.
- Sometimes, the diplomats wont show up.
- In rare cases, saves wont work.
- For some, the Mini-Cinematics doesnt work in the minimap.
Hello everyone, the relaunch is live at last!
Thank you for your continued support, your patience and help with the public test builds. The biggest and most significant changes since the games initial launch have been in the making for 8 months now! You will find features such as all new gameplay mechanics, increased emergent storytelling, a new progression system, better feedback overall and updated visuals and much more. If you have played the game before your saves will be overwritten, the changes are too big to keep them, we apologise for this. During the coming week we will be ready to issue hotfixes for any critical bugs and during January we will iron out less bothersome problems. The more bug reports we get in the better. And if you like the game please write us a positive review, thank you. Enjoy the relaunch. :) //Martin & ECS Team https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQVrnizcdQU
Version 1.8 - 13th December, 2018
New Features Teachings are various tasks that awards Wisdom Points. The Book of Learning is a tech tree that allows for an individual playstyle. Spend Wisdom Points gathered from completing Teachings to unlock words for the Word Tablet, insights and monuments. Follower associations build up over time. Followers interpret commandments based on these associations. Some of these associations can make your work as a god difficult. However, you are able to spend influence in order to make your followers forget associations. Water consumption UI added to give you information about what is the cause of water consumption on islands. The Chronicler now acts as a guide. You are now greeted by the Chronicler when starting a new game and when loading a game. Fortunes system added. Sometimes during play a fortune or misfortune strikes, causing trouble or aiding your followers. - They are designed to affect the current state of the world and challenge your playstyle. - They grow more powerful throughout a game session. When saving or ending a game you get the opportunity to give your world a name. What is your journey called? Follower now have thoughts that will help you understand them. You can more easily find out why they do or do not perform some actions. City doctrine system entirely reworked. Instead of following one of six doctrines, cities now have several traits, one for each city need. This results in more varied city personalities. Cities judge your commandments based on these traits. Follower/City needs are made easier to understand. With this change comes the removal of follower happiness. Instead of happiness, if some needs are not met they cause followers to be frustrated in different ways. This makes some needs more important to fulfill than previously. Monuments have been reworked. Followers now celebrate you through their monuments by holding festivals in their city. During the festivals, each monument type gives a unique bonus to cities who have built them. Monuments are unlocked via the Book of Learning. City follower cap is increased over time. Cities start with a follower cap of 3. It can be increased to 6 by completing certain requirements. As cities grow, walls are built in and around them. This should give a bigger sense of progression when expanding cities. Followers that die enter the underworld and you can now hear their tale before they walk off into the distanceand remain there forever. You are also able to view common death causes. Added more feedback for when faith decreases by not having any commandments present in the Commandment Tablet. Added save screen. Followers are now able to praise their surroundings. This helps them raise city needs. Added the Praise and Dont Praise verbs. Overhauls Commandments no longer has a list of associations tied to them. Instead, commandments are interpreted and changed over time based on how your followers have associated words and verbs together. Your followers will interpret commandments less often if they are faithful and more often if they are faithless. The tutorial is reworked to account for all new features and changes. Information panels, accessed through information buttons throughout the UI have been reworked. In them, all features of the game are explained in detail. The Diplomacy Popup is reworked. Instead of showing all diplomatic relations on a global scale, you are now able to see relations on a city to city level. Diplomacy lines still exist to help see the global state of diplomatic relations between cities. Diplomatic relations have been tweaked and balanced. Many new sound effects have been added and some old sound effects have been replaced. The menu bar at the top of the screen is reworked. Moved the world overview button from the menu bar to the mini-map. The City Popup is reworked. The World Overview has been reworked to account for the new and changed city features. The Commandment Tablet has been changed a bit. - The size of the tablet is increased. - Added forgotten commandments tab. - You can view the history of each commandment and how they have been changed, step-by-step, from when you proclaimed them. Removed blessing of commandments. Mini-map navigation and display has been improved. - The size of the mini-map is increased. - Zoom is dependant on island count. - Mouse click precision has been improved. - Cities are now visible as dots in the mini-map. - Video clips are played when fortunes trigger. Calendar size increased. The current season is now displayed in the calendar octagon, making it visible when the calendar is both expanded and contracted. The words for War, Alliance and Trade have been reworked into verbs instead. This should give you better control of diplomatic relations. City nameplates have been reworked. They now display faith level and follower cap. The water shader has been improved. The story builder texts have been reworked. The underworld visuals have been updated. Texts and tooltips throughout the UI have been overhauled. Other The city need Food has been renamed to Sustenance to avoid confusion between it and a citys food storage. Removed doctrine advisors from the underworld. Removed the Happy and Unhappy words. Removed the Word Discovery feature. It is replaced by the Book of Learning and Teachings features. Saves are not compatible with old versions of the game. As needs change, small notifications are displayed over followers heads. Influence has been rebalanced to give it more value to you as a player. Ore amounts of Metal, Gems, Gold and Obsidian have been rebalanced to hold more resources. Added midwives that deliver children to followers when they are ready to have a child. Migrating across the ocean no longer requires a harbour. Followers now walk to the coast and build a boat before migrating across the ocean. The time spiral has been improved slightly. Added more clear feedback to the Word Tablet when placing a condition word that has no targets, making the potential commandment not affect anyone. Cannibalism motivation has been rebalanced. Added murder motivation threshold to followers, delaying their killing of each other. It now works just like how cannibalism motivation does. Doctrine statues have been removed from city centers. Rebranded Loneliness to Hopelessness when you have few followers left in the world. Followers should no longer starve if the city has food in storage. Updated loading screen hints. Twitch integration has been slightly tweaked. Viewers are now able to join cities during voting. Viewers now need to type !like/!dislike instead of !yes/!no when voting. When starting a new game through the main menu, advanced settings are automatically revealed if there are changes that are not reflected in the Easy/Medium/Hard categories to the left. Camera rotation via the keyboard has been improved. Credits updated. Improved feedback in the world and in followers. Scrollbars in the UI are no longer bouncy. If children are old enough they will take over their parents district instead of dying with the parent. Removed inverted mouse control from options. Several issues and bugs fixed.
Hey all!
For the relaunch on the 13th December we're making a new art book to collect all of the art we did after we released the last art book. If you want a physical signed copy you can participate in our competition. Also, the digital version will be available here on Steam, it will replace the old art book. Everyone who bought the old one will get the new digital copy for free.
Art Book Competition
[olist]
Hello everyone!
Our relaunch build goes live on the 13th December. You've already seen what's to come in the public test build but the relaunch version will be more stable and polished.
You need to be aware of that the relaunch version will overwrite the 1.0 version here on Steam, so old saves will break. We wish we could've done it smoother for you, but when you see all the new stuff I think you agree it was worth it.
Please help us signal boost the announcement on social media and if you think we deserve it; leave a positive review here on Steam. Every little bit helps, thank you!
//Martin & The ECS Team
Hello everyone!
We are so excited that we will soon be able to show you our finished game but in the meanwhile heres our last public test build! But keep in mind, there are still bugs we need to fix, features we want to fully implement and polish that needs to be done. During this last intensive period before the launch, we want to hear from you! This is the last chance we have time to react to your feedback before release so we appreciate if you can lend us a hand.
What the build contains
New features
- Fortunes and Misfortunes are events that challenges your playstyle. Suddenly you have to deal with a work strike or a poor harvest.
- Minimap clips is a new feedback system. Fortunes and Misfortunes are announced to the player by showing a mini-video in the minimap. This is still a work in progress but the functionality is there.
- New requirements to unlock follower districts
- Death statistics in the underworld
- New monument: The Conviction
- Splash window: New association now pauses the game
- Camera controls fixes
- Minimap navigation fixes
- No festivals in unfaithful cities
- Saves are re-enabled (will not carry over to the relaunch build, but please try that it works)
- Several major and minor bugs have been fixed
- The tutorial is disabled in this version of the game (were working on a new one)
How to Get It
[olist]
What to Keep in Mind
- This is the last public test build before launch
- The game could break or crash, more often than in the main build.
- If you have a save from the main official build on Steam and change it to the test build your save file will be deleted and/or overwritten if you press "New Game" in the test build branch. If you switch back to the official build again the same happens as well, but for the test build.
- Saves will break during development of the test build, the main branch will be left untouched until release of the Relaunch.
- Features are missing.
- It's unpolished, unfinished and buggy.
- Art, GUI, animations and VFX are missing in parts, for example the association system is still missing most of their illustrations.
Please Leave Feedback
The more feedback we get the better, we have opened a secret group on our Discord called "#divine-testing" which anyone can join if you ask Martin, please remember that we won't be online during the weekend. If you prefer to leave feedback on the Steam forum or somewhere else on social media please do so, but please be specific that you're talking about the relaunch test build and not the main game so as not to confuse others in the community. :) https://discord.gg/ecs Thank you for the continued support. Have a nice weekend and enjoy the build! // Martin & Eat Create Sleep
Hello everyone,
We're back with some news, we're releasing the final public test build on the 19th October. I want to ask you to please try it out and give us some good feedback, this will help us a great deal in making the relaunch in December great.
The most important feature we want you to try is the new event system which will create unforeseen consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad.
Stay tuned!
/Martin
Hey everyone!
We just got the new build online, and this time we've had time to iterate and smooth out some of the problems with the earlier test. Above all please remember that this is not the definitive version of the relaunch, it's buggy, unfinished and unpolished. The more feedback we get the more we can improve it!
There are still features missing and it's still unfinished, but luckily we have until December so don't worry, we'll fix the rest.
What the Build Contains
New Features • The Book of Learning is a tech tree that allows for an individual play style. Spend wisdom points to unlock words for the Word Tablet and insights. • Teachings are tasks that unlock wisdom points which can be spent in the Book of Learning. • Follower associations build up over time. Followers interpret commandments based on these associations. • Water drainage UI added to expose information about what drains water. Overhauls • City doctrine system entirely reworked. • General UI overhaul. The City Popup and much more is reworked. • Follower/City needs are made easier to understand. Some needs cause followers to be frustrated in different ways. This makes needs more important to fulfil. • Monuments have been reworked. Followers now celebrate their monuments by holding festivals in their city, awarding different bonuses. Monuments are unlocked via the Book of Learning. • City follower cap is increased over time. Cities start with a follower cap of 3. It can be increased to 6 over time. Other • Several major and minor bugs have been fixed. • The tutorial is disabled in this version of the game. • Saving is disabled in this version of the game.
How to Get It
[olist]
What to Keep in Mind
- We will release more builds before relaunch, we haven't decided when next happens.
- The game could break or crash, more often than before.
- If you have a save from the main official build on Steam and change it to the test build your save file will be deleted and/or overwritten if you press "New Game" in the test build branch. If you switch back to the official build again the same happens as well, but for the test build.
- Saves doesn't work in the test build right now (one of the reasons it's not on the official branch).
- Saves will break during development of the test build, the main branch will be left untouched until release of the Relaunch.
- Saves are disabled in this public test build, we may or may not enable in future test builds.
- Features are missing.
- It's unpolished, unfinished and buggy.
- Art, GUI, animations and VFX are missing in parts, for example the association system is still missing most of their illustrations.
Please Leave Feedback
The more feedback we get the better, we have opened a secret group on our Discord called "#divine-testing" which anyone can join if you ask Martin, please remember that we won't be online during the weekend. If you prefer to leave feedback on the Steam forum or somewhere else on social media please do so, but please be specific that you're talking about the relaunch test build and not the main game so as not to confuse others in the community. :) https://discord.gg/ecs
Thank you for the continued support. Have a nice weekend and enjoy the build! // Martin & Eat Create Sleep
Hello!
We're almost done with all of the major new features for the relaunch, now what remains are lots of balancing, tweaking, basically getting it just right. Without your help that's going to be hard, so we're once again asking for more help. :)
What The Upcoming Build Contains
New Monuments Monuments has been tweaked, rebalanced and replaced with new fancy graphics! Examples below.
We also have proper festivals now with more props and effects!
Needs Design Overhaul Each need will now have negative consequences if not met, this will lead to problematic behaviours, we realised that players should be awarded more clearly for keeping all needs met. We will also simplify the interface even more (for the better). Dead Advisors Update More varied texts and better interface.
Storybuilder Update The storybuilder in the end now "listens" more to what has happened in your game session, and more flavourful as well. Will tweak texts and designs further probably.
Water UI With our new overlay you will be able to see where people and animals drain water, so you can more easily understand and do something about it. New Verbs You can now order them to trade, wage war and make alliances, with verbs instead of words. More combinations and more direct control. Updated Tech Tree and Task UI These are no longer called tech tree and tasks. Tech tree is called "Book of Learning" and tasks are called "Teachings" where you get "wisdom points", to further drive home the point that it's not really technology you develop but rather the culture. Crest is a river culture/iron age civilisation, it's outside the scope of the game to progress through the ages (that would take us a few more years to make, not realistic). The UI has been improved as well.
---- Stay tuned! Thanks for your support with new reviews and feedback, it helps a lot. Be back soon, we're moving office in two weeks so we'll probably not write a lot before the test comes. /Martin
Hey everyone!
Crest relaunch date pushed to December, 2018. The reason is that too many cool games are coming out during the autumn. Sorry for the extra wait, but the good news; more time to polish the game (for example we'll take a look at improving save stability and speed).
The image above is concept art for the new trailer by the way. As you can see we're still working hard to make the relaunch worthwhile. In the interim we really need your help with feedback, reviews and just spreading the word.
We will give you updates on the progress of the build as soon as we've enough information. There will be more public tests as well. Stay tuned!
//Martin and Eat Create Sleep
Hello everyone. I hope you've had time to try the test build, and if you haven't you can read about how to get it here.
The most important piece of feedback is that some people still feel like it's "playing itself", something we take very seriously. It's true that we're making an unusual simulation where followers have agency, but we WANT the player to feel like they make a difference, isn't that the goal of most games? What do you think?
I opened a new thread where you can discuss the test builds, you can find it here.
Thank you for your support!
//Martin
Hello! The test build is now online, hope you are as excited as the dancers above. ;) This is the first test build of many before we release the Relaunch. Below you can read what you need to know; what the build contains, how to get it and what to keep in mind.
Above all please remember that this is not the definitive version of the relaunch, it's buggy, unfinished and unpolished, we're releasing it in the wild early to get great feedback from you.
What the Build Contains
Tech tree - Complete tasks to earn tech points. - Spend tech points to unlock insights, words and monuments. Monument festivals - During a monument festival, the owning city gains one or more strong bonuses. Doctrine traits - Replaces old doctrine system. - Cities now have traits, one for each need. - Traits affects their likes and gives "perks" (can be negative) Word Associations - Slowly over time, followers associate words with other words. - No associations are present at the start of a new game. Dead followers as advisors - Dead followers appear in the underworld as advisors. - They speak of how they died and sometimes what could have prevented it.
How to Get It
[olist]
What to Keep in Mind
- We will release more builds before relaunch, we haven't decided when next happens.
- The game could break or crash, more often than before.
- If you have a save from the main official build on Steam and change it to the test build your save file will be deleted and/or overwritten if you press "New Game" in the test build branch. If you switch back to the official build again the same happens as well, but for the test build.
- Saves doesn't work in the test build right now (one of the reasons it's not on the official branch).
- Saves will break during development of the test build, the main branch will be left untouched until release of the Relaunch.
- Saves are disabled in this public test build, we may or may not enable in future test builds.
- Features are missing.
- It's unpolished, unfinished and buggy.
- Art, GUI, animations and VFX are missing in parts, for example the association system is still missing most of their illustrations.
Please Leave Feedback
The more feedback we get the better, we have opened a secret group on our Discord called "#divine-testing" which anyone can join if you ask Martin, please remember that we won't be online during the weekend. If you prefer to leave feedback on the Steam forum or somewhere else on social media please do so, but please be specific that you're talking about the relaunch test build and not the main game so as not to confuse others in the community. :) https://discord.gg/ecs
Thank you for the continued support. Have a nice weekend and enjoy the build! // Martin & Eat Create Sleep
Hello again,
The most common feedback we've received by far after launch is the lack of progress and replayability. These are the main things we're working on to fix, read on below! Bear in mind that this is work in progress content, so expect changes regarding art, text and interface.
Progression
We wanted to make a game where you made your own goals and your own stories, as such we thought reducing the amount of endgame goals would encourage that. But, we realised we pushed it too far. Every game needs some kind of goal even if you can't win the game (which you can't in Crest). So we're correcting our earlier mistakes and implementing some new features. Tech Tree
The tech tree might look similar to 4x and strategy games you're fond of (if you're into that sort of thing), but the main difference here is that you actually spend points, and not time. The tech points are gained from doing small random quests (each play session will have a different set of quests from the same quest pool).
The tech tree in itself is also randomised, which will encourage you to make different decisions each time you play! Monuments and Festivals
We're redesigning the monuments, they will be unlocked from the tech tree and will provide unique festivals. So each city, if they have a monument, will have a celebration once every cycle that gives that city a unique bonus, such as higher fertility or more food, think of it as a "golden age".
More to Come!
As before there's more we haven't talked about, I will collect that in a future update.
Public Test Build
I asked the team when we can expect to be able to send the build out and it's unclear if we can publish it this week. So expect it to come next week instead.
Stay in Touch
If you want to follow us anywhere else here's what we have. https://discord.gg/ecs https://youtube.com/eatcreatesleep https://twitter.com/eatcreatesleep https://twitter.com/crestgame https://twitch.tv/eatcreatesleepstudio https://facebook.com/eatcreatesleep https://instagram.com/eatcreatesleep Thank you for the support (such as the new reviews), I'll be back soon! Regards, Martin
Hello everyone!
We're hard at work on the new features for Crest, just wanted to give you an update.
Relaunch - September, 2018
After all of the feedback after the launch we felt that we would need some major changes to make it into the game you, our fans, deserve. Since May, 2018 we've been working on redesigning and polishing features, as well as visually upgrading the game. The game will cost as much as before, everyone who've bought it will receive the update without extra cost (of course). The only thing you need to be aware of is that since we're doing such major overhauls the saves will break. I know we promised that we wouldn't do that with future updates, but we didn't anticipate that we'd have to do big overhauls. We're changing a lot of the core mechanics to the better and there's simply too much changes to migrate the old saves from the launch version. We apologise for this. But, what's in store will make up for it!
New Features and Improvements
In short we will give you more replayability and longevity, so more unique playthroughs and longer ones. We're also improving the visuals, the feedback and just generally making the game easier to play. Below you can see some things we're working on now! New Doctrine System
We felt the old doctrine system was too hard to understand and too rigid so we threw it out and replaced it with this. Each city will have traits that give you negative and positive effects, they will also make them react to commandments. Ancestors - Cause of Death
In the relaunch the ancestors will change role, they will instead provide immediate feedback about how they died when you visit the underworld. Visual Upgrades
This update is mainly a programming intensive update, as such we can let the artists polish some visuals to the limit. We've made a new fancy ocean and are working on making the rivers less flat as well. More to Come! This is just some of the things we're working on, we will post more updates as it comes.
Build Testing
We're currently prototyping, designing and tweaking and although these things are playable in our internal build we haven't felt it stable enough to release in the wild yet. But we will release public testing soon, they will be available in a build branch here on Steam. More info on that as it comes. For feedback I can very much recommend our Discord where we've a dedicated channel just for talking about this upcoming test phase. Let the admin, Martin know and you will be added to the discussion group. We can probably open a forum or topic here on Steam too if you prefer that.
Need Your Help
We fully understand why Crest has been "downvoted" on Steam, we realise that the game isn't the best it can be yet. But, when we relaunch the game we really need you, the community's help. If we're still on Mixed rating that will hurt our sales really bad, and if the relaunch sells poorly we'll have a hard time supporting the game after September. So it's a help me, help you situation. ;) So please leave reviews if you think we deserve a thumbs up! If you wait until you can try the test build, that's fine! But if we can push the review score above 70% that would mean a lot to us. With the current rate we only need a handful more. Thank you.
More Information to Come
We will give you another update in two weeks, hopefully we'll have a test build ready by then. Thanks for your continued support! //Martin and the Eat Create Sleep team
Hey all, Thanks to all of the great feedback you've given us since launch we feel we need to do the product justice and increase longevity and replayability. This is not a small feat however, and we will need several months to fix it. We're currently building the new features for Crest's grand update that will arrive after the summer, before then we will need testers. If anyone is up for it join our Discord and let us know! http://discord.gg/ecs When the update looms closer you will be the first to know of a launch date. Thank you for your continued support and patience! //Martin & Eat Create Sleep
Hey all, We've gotten a lot of feedback as of late that the game lacks goals or enough meaningful end game content. This is always a conflict when making sandbox games, if you narrow the goals too much it's not much of a sandbox anymore, but if you make it too loose then some people feel they lack motivation. We're going to find a better balance. So in the end of the summer we will release a new update that builds upon what we already have. The gist of it is that you will be able to shape the religion in more direct ways, for example eliminating some doctrines and having permanent effects on the religion you're building. The underworld and ancestors will provide an important role here. We still believe Crest can reach more people and have not lost hope in making it the best it can be with the resources we have. The team is really excited about these new features and think it will solve a lot of the problems people have given us feedback about. --- Before the new update goes live you can help us in some simple but important ways: * Leave a positive review if you like the game * Share the game to your friends * Ask your favourite streamers to play the game (Twitch support) Thank you for your continued support! // Martin & The Eat Create Sleep Team
We've secretly been working on a major update and are very happy to now finally be able to present it to you: the Inheritors Update, a free, automatic update for all players on all platforms, available RIGHT NOW!
New features
- Baby animals – Animals now have babies!
- Custom Games – You can now customize your games with increased or decreased amounts of resources, animals, islands and overall island quality.
- Twitch integration – Built in twitch support now allows streamers to engage their viewers in the actual game! Join cities and vote on commandments to help or disrupt the streamer's plans.
- Increased selection – Resources and animals are now selectable and include detailed descriptions.
Updates
- Associations logic - Only one word will now be changed when a new association is made with heavier focus on similar words.
- War implications – Cities who win a conflict will now pillage and kill followers of the losing city
- Feedback icons – Traders, diplomats, priests and warriors going to war now have icons above their heads to make them easier to discover.
- City and follower scrolling – You can now easily scroll between your cities by selecting one and clicking the arrows in the city popup. This also applies to all of your followers within the same city.
- Last follower death – If a follower is the last remaining follower in the world, a meter will start counting down until its death unless you actively attempt to rebuild society via commandments.
- Tutorial skip – A prompt will ask if you wish to play the tutorial in the beginning of a new game if you had the option activated, declining will turn off the tutorial setting.
- Improved death symbols – Death symbols will now be easier to spot and give a summary of what killed the followers
- Migration – All followers no longer immediately leave the city for the new, leaving the old city with just one follower.
- General feedback updates – We have added more tooltips and visual updates to minor things that happen in the game.
- Profanity filter – Has been removed completely.
- Biomes – Ground blending between biomes has been smoothed out
- Other minor updates
Bug fixes
- Boats no longer move slowly in higher game speeds
- Mountains no longer spawn on lower areas, cutting off rivers from flowing to the ocean and turning entire islands into desert
- Trees should no longer occasionally turn blue
- Other minor bug fixes
We've updated our OST with 14 new songs, bringing it to a total playtime of 49:08! This is more than triple the playtime it had before and beside the new songs composed by Tuomas Nikkinen, the OST now includes all the beloved trailer songs as well.
If you already own the OST, the update is completely free of charge and Steam should automatically download the new songs.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/386570/Crest__Original_Soundtrack
We are very busy with working through your submitted bug reports and just pushed another patch. Thanks for being so active in reporting the bugs and please keep them coming! Here are the patch notes of the two recent patches we pushed since launch last Thursday:
Patch Notes v1.2
- Balance changes
- Influence gain rebalanced: faithful cities now reward 3 influence points instead of 2.
- Follower food and hunger rebalanced.
- Animal fertility rebalanced.
- Hippos are now less aggressive. They build up anger over time instead of attacking habitat intruders immediately.
- Follower hut positions slightly adjusted.
- Tooltips should no longer display a follower death message regardless of what is hovered over.
- Fixed an issue with followers resting outside of their huts after running away from animals.
- Fixed an issue with the tutorial not being possible to complete.
- Fixed minor GUI navigation issues.
- Fixed an issue where followers could get stuck in their huts forever after the Farm word had been unlocked.
Patch Notes v1.1
- Huts and ores now always touch the ground when spawned on slopes.
- Words no longer gets stuck if you alt-tab the game while dragging a word.
- Fixed issue with herbivores migrating after loading a saved game.
- Fixed problem with some followers spawning at the wrong position after loading.
- Trade cows now work correctly after a load.
- Burning mines are now destroyed properly and can be rebuilt by miners later.
- Miners no longer build on ores without enough chunks.
- 64-bit version for Windows is now available.
- City association bubbles are now above the city name plate to stop them from being obscured by tall cities.
The day has come. After four years in development, Version 1.0 of Crest is here!
A huge thank you to everyone who supported Crest during this long road and improved the game with their feedback and suggestions.
Crest has changed so much over the years and we're really proud of where it is now. But, Crest is also a game that is never truly finished, with endless possibilities, and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible.
In order to do so, Crest has to do well during the next few weeks, otherwise we just can't afford to continue working on it. We've put together a list on how you could help us during this important time:
http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest
We'll talk soon about our post-launch plans, until then, thank you again to every single god of you for supporting us. <3
Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep
https://youtu.be/R5WiMM2gYa8
v1.0 Patch Notes
Nature
- Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
- Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
- Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
- Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
- Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.
Cities
- Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
- Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
- City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
- Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
- Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
- Needs renamed - Some of the city are renamed for convenience.
- Fellowship = Social
- Sustenance = Food
- Abundance = Surplus
- Wealth = Money
Followers
- Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
- More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is now more detailed.
- Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.
General
- World Overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
- Word Discovery - A new system for discovering words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
- Faith - No longer counts followers but cities instead.
- Mini-Map - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
- Updated Tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
- Achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
- Polished visuals - New shaders to make it look extra shiny.
Commandment and Word Tablet
- Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
- City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
- Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
- Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.
Crest - an indirect god sim is Now Available on Steam!
Become a god in this indirect god sim. Influence and try to control your followers using commandments but beware, free will leaves these open to interpretation.
Will you create a flourishing civilization or lead them into cannibalism?
Community
Crest got featured on IndieDB this week, which made it one of the Top 10 most popular games out of 46'026 titles total :O I'd like to remind you how crucial reviews are for us - especially now, being less than a week away from launch. They're immensely helping small indie titles like Crest to gain greater visibility on Steam. I really appreciate everyone of you taking the time to do so. <3 Please remember, all the new stuff we talk about below is not yet live on Steam but will be in the release version on 8th March. This goes for the achievements as well, which can currently only be unlocked with our inner circle build.
Art
Martin The trailer is finished from my end, after several weeks of work. When we release it next week, I hope you will enjoy all of our hard work! Below you can see a sneak peek from it.
Emma I spent half of the week sick again (yes, I seem to get colds way too often this winter), and then the rest of the week was all about UI. I did some final touches to the Steam achievements, then proceeded to do the last couple of layouts for the information panel added to all the pages of the city pop-up; and then just some general nitpicks in the world overview and other UI windows.
Code
Johannes W This week I worked on the Graveyard menu. Until now we only had some placeholder pictures for each Graveyard save. A screenshot of the game world is now added when the game over screen appears for the player. The screenshot is shown in the Graveyard to make each save unique and memorable. The task required for me understand possible ways to take screenshots through code in Unity engine which feels good to have learned. Last week I implemented Steam Achievements to the game. There where some small things this week that I had to tweak a bit. The icons that Emma did are now uploaded to Steam which look great. You will have to wait until the launch before you can unlock them though. Additionally to the things above, I've been focusing on bugs, fixes and improvements this week. The code for when animals migrate is optimized and improved on how new habitats are found. Johannes I've been on the hunt for an elusive bug with the shadows. When I made the new shader a while back, the shadows started behaving really weirdly:
It took me three days, but I did manage to fix it. Embarrassingly enough, I still don't know why it happened, I just fixed it by trial and error and some educated guessing. I do believe however that it's a Unity bug, regarding the way we're drawing the trees and stuff. Normally I would not let a bug go until I understood exactly why it happens, but since we're a week away from launch I don't have the time to do that, so bug fixed, moving on. Currently I'm fixing a remaining bug with the new water system, and fixing up some minor things here and there. Jens This week has been much of the same as last week. A lot of playtesting, balancing, and bugfixing. It's coming along well and it feels good to focus on polishing so close to launch, as opposed to putting out fires from major game breaking stuff. Tomas Emelie and I have polished the tutorial most of the week and we now call it finished! It has been thoroughly playtested and many smaller last-minute tweaks have been made. I'm pleased with our work and hope that you will like it and find it helpful.
Design
Emelie Tutorial, tutorial and more tutorial. I have been working hard together with Tomas this entire week to fix all the issues that has come up with it. And now it's finished (unless nothing else crops up) and I couldn't be happier. I even had time to start some other tasks which need to be done and looked at before release and there's a lot of small fixes needed everywhere.
Production
Marcus This week has been testing, testing, fixing and then testing some more. We're one week out from release and all of our resources are dedicated to making sure that game will be as polished as possible, and it's looking pretty good if you ask me. _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter. Have a nice weekend!
Community
Two weeks left until the launch of Crest and it's looking pretty good! Here's is some encouraging feedback we recently got for our secretive inner circle build: "I looked at the regular build [again] and was really surprised with the changes in the inner circle build! You guys did amazing!" If you'd like to help us playtesting the new features, you can still become a part of the inner circle yourself. More info can be here: Join The Inner Circle
Art
Martin I had to take a short break from the trailer to incorporate our new shader, it's always a bad idea to implement new things just days before release, so a few weeks earlier is better! You can here see me playing around with the new shader. It's usually hard to control specular (or the shininess) with uniform low poly artstyles without textures (like most games). But with Johannes' new magical shader I can control that for separate objects, for instance make the gems more shiny than the rock it's attached to!
Emma This week, I've been helping out with the lighting of the scenes in the trailer. It was a real challenge, especially for someone still not completely comfortable with Blender yet. Turns out that it's pretty difficult to get some decent lighting in space! After that, I've been doing some UI work, like updating graphics for the information panels.
Code
Johannes I've had full focus on the save system. I've worked on a tool to verify that saves are working properly. The tool works by saving all states in the game to a text file, then it saves the game, loads that save, and then saves all states again to a second text file. Then I load both text files into a diff tool and see if something is different. That tool has allowed me to find a few subtle save errors that I've now fixed. Jens This week has been all about polishing and fixing the features we have. Just to give you a taste of what I've done, I have added sfx to a lot of the interface buttons. The voice in the intro is now updated with a remastered version of the audio, and some background ambience has been added. The Word Tree is now more consistent, with words having designated spots in the UI window. I have continued to fine tune the stamina for the different follower tasks. Influence is now gained in a slow trickle with a bonus amount added every half cycle for faithful cities, instead of faithful followers as it previously was. This change hopefully reduces some of the frustation that could occur when you were missing just a one or two points to make a commandment. Johannes W I have fixed bugs and made some improvements and optimization with how followers find new locations when building new cities. It was an issue before with how it worked and how the performance was. Often when a world had a lot of cities it became noticeable how the game became slow because many followers tried to find new locations and not always finding anything. The old implementation was done through randomly checking tiles all over the island until a valid place was found. This was very unpredictable and a better solution had to be made. The way it is implemented now is to search outwards from the home city in circles until a good location is found. This felt like an obvious way to do it and it improved the performance a lot. The algorithm checks not every single tile outward but checks them with a bit of spacing just to lower the performance cost a bit. This fix will be available on the Crest release. Tomas I have tweaked the last things with the tutorial together with Emelie. We have playtested it internally and there are only some minor finishing touches left, then it will be all complete. The tutorial is also incorporated into the save system now, so loading a game will no longer reset it to the beginning.
Design
Emelie The update to the tutorial has taken the entire week for me, and will probably take a few more days as well. It's coming along nicely, but I wonder if I have in my haste forgotten about something important, the pacing and the time it takes to finish it. We had a playtest this week as we do every week now and we focused on the tutorial so I got valuable feedback and will do my best to make it better. Other than the tutorial, I have been dabbling wherever I have been needed and I am guessing that's what I'll be doing everyday until release.
Production
Marcus Our release is slowly creeping upon us, so this week has seen a lot of playtesting in order to fix final balancing issues and bugs. Beyond that I am also continually busy with getting stuff ready for GDC amongst other company related stuff. So there is never a dull moment. _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter. Have a nice weekend!
Community
Well, we got a launch date! 8th March 2018! Check out what's all going to be in the full version: Launch - New Features Please help us to reach as many people as possible in this critical time until launch! We put together a list of helpful things <3 http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest We will have an Official Launch Trailer as well soon, for now here's a little tease: https://youtu.be/E8G5AlZTEpo
Art
Martin Yes, the secret is out, I've been working on the launch trailer for a few weeks now. It's almost done and I look forward to see your reactions to it!
Emma This week, I've done a little bit of everything. I've been sick, I've been doing some playtesting, fiddling around with UI stuff and helping out with the trailer. The main thing I've been doing is Steam Achievements! Gonna be a lot of fun to unlock them all when they're added. Below is a sneak peek!
Code
Jens I have mostly been balancing, polishing, and fixing minor bugs. It is kind of like playing whac-a-mole. Usually when I go to fix something, I discover something else that I need to do. The biggest balancing task was the new stamina rework that Johannes W made. Previously, followers were allowed to overperform and do actions even though their stamina was depleted. The stamina system is now consistent and much better at predicting how much work the follower can do. I have gone through all the follower actions and given them reasonable stamina costs. Johannes W For me, this week has mostly been about hunting bugs. I fixed so followers can mine right after they have built a Mine and I fixed some camera movement glitches. I also finished up the code for how we track Steam achievements. We have a bunch of achievements now that are ready to be published but have some graphics and design left to do for that. I look forward for when the Steam achievements are fully done! Tomas I have been working with the tutorial together with our resident designer Emelie. It is getting an update to accommodate all the changes that are in the game since the last release. The core tutorial system has been tweaked a bit and I have constructed brand new debug tools for it to ease testing it out. It is all shaping up really well and it will probably be complete some time next week.
Design
Emelie I have been working on updating the tutorial, making sure that all the new features are explained and that the flow is improved upon. I have also been working on balancing and a little bit of whatever comes up since we are doing our best to make everything work as intended. Tweaks here and there on pretty much everything is the best way to explain it all really.
Production
Marcus This week has seen a lot of game balancing and bugfixing. I have been actively helping out with playtesting to focus our efforts on the most important parts these coming weeks since, Holy crap, we're actually releasing the game soon! Beyond that I've also kept up the preparational work for GDC, and some other stuff concerning the company, so I've been kinda split between all sorts of things. _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter. Have a nice weekend!
What a rollercoaster the past few years have been! We're super excited though to finally announce the launch date for Crest, which will be on March 8th 2018!
We've been very busy the past months and below you can see all the updates, which are going to be in the release build. Right now we're polishing & balancing everything to get it as smooth as possible until launch.
Crest is a game that is never truly finished and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible after launch. In order to do so we need a little bit of help from you. We've put together a list on how you could support Crest:
Support Crest
Now for the waaay too long list of the coming gameplay updates. Bear in mind that the list does not include any technical updates or fixes and focuses on the new gameplay changes only. Enjoy the read & thanks for being a part of our Community. <3
Nature
- Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
- Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
- Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
- Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
- Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.
Cities
- Needs renamed - Some of the city are renamed for convenience.
- Fellowship = Social
- Sustenance = Food
- Abundance = Surplus
- Wealth = Money
- Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
- Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
- City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
- Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
- Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
Followers
- Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
- More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is more detailed.
- Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.
General
- World overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
- Word discovery tree - A completely new system for discovering the words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
- Mini-Map update - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
- Updated tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
- Steam achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
Commandment and Word Tablet
- Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
- City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
- Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
- Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.
The crashes should be fixed! Like mentioned in our latest Dev Blog, it was caused by a bug in Unity and it took us over a week to find that out but a lot of other issues got fixed as well during that journey. We've also re-enabled saves for now. They are not 100% stable but if you do not do anything after clicking Save & Quite, it should return to the menu. If Windows should show that the program is not responding, ignore the message and wait a bit longer. As long as there is no popup that saving failed, the games is working in the background
Here's the full list of all the changes:
- Downgraded Unity to fix the crash that always happened after a couple of minutes.
- Fixed memory leak in our memory pooling system. There should no longer be any problems starting another game without first exiting the game.
- Migrate commandments should now be able to properly target animals.
- Re-enabled saves.
- Audio volume options should now load correctly.
- Farm remnants are now properly removed.
- Lots of minor bug fixes.
This week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.
Community
We dropped the price of Crest to $9.99 this week and started what is definitely not a cult. Find out more about The Inner Circle. We will have a new patch next week but want to make sure first that everything is running flawlessly before we publish it. A good thing about all the debugging is, that we've been able to polish a lot of the code while hunting for the cause of the crashes.
Art
Martin Look, I'm sorry that my blog posts have been so cryptic for a while but that changes soon. Here's a last tease of what I'm doing.
Code
Johannes This week all programmers including myself have been trying to fix the crash that keeps happening after playing the game for a while. After working on it for a few days, we managed to fix a few major bugs having to do with object pooling, but the crash was still happening. We finally realized that the crash started happening when we upgraded to Unity 2017.3. We tried going back 5.6 which is the last version we used before upgrading, and the crash was gone. I tried a few versions and figured out that 2017.1 is the last version where the crash isn't happening, so that's what we've downgraded to now. A very frustrating realization, but this weeks efforts have all been worth it anyway. We've fixed a lot of memory issues, and built some tools to help us catch problems faster in the future. Jens The name of the game this week has been debugging, debugging, and more debugging, and its been a journey I can tell you. The crashes have been our top priority and I have looked at more crash logs this week than I think I've done in my lifetime. At first we could only narrow it down to being a memory issue, the crashes would occur at any place in the code where new objects where created. This lead us to believe that somewhere a loop might be creating a lot of objects during the same frame, but after some testing that didn't seem to be an issue. Looking at the memory usage over time showed a slow increase, building over time. This suggests a memory leak was occuring somewhere. So we started to look for references in static instances that was possibly keeping objects from being garbage collected. When we actually found some cases of this in our pooling of objects, we were feeling hopeful that fixing them would solve the crashes. But nope... Still crashes after a few minutes. In a last effort we went back to the engine version where the game wasn't crashing, and lo and behold, no crashes! Apparently, there is a problem in our current engine version of Unity. In the end, we did fix a lot of issues in our own code so the time spent was definitely worth it, and now I can finally go back to working on completing the features in the game. Johannes W I completed fixing the bug where followers are overperforming and I made a change in the game mechanics. Each follower's action, like farming, picking berries, or eating their neighbor, will now have a fixed amount of stamina cost. Before, it was more dynamic but more prone to be bugged as well. For example, in some cases, a follower could do more actions than they had stamina for. This new mechanic I added will hopefully make designing and balancing more controllable without any unexpected bugs. I have started adding Steam achievements to Crest now. We will see how long it will take, but I think the main functionality will be implemented early the next week. The goal is to make it easy for us to add or change achievements without too much effort! Tomas This week has had it's ups and downs. I have been working closely with Johannes (our lead programmer) with creating tools for monitoring used memory in Crest. We then used the tool to find memory issues that could lead to Crest running out of memory. Thanks to the tool we have made some huge improvements. For example ending a game and returning to the main menu caused some memory to be stuck in limbo forever. This is now fixed. Even though we made alot of improvements and tried to locate the main cause of the 'out of memory' error it still occured. It was a tough nut to crack but we finally found the problem. We are now working with correcting it and polishing up on some changes we made.
Production
Marcus This week the majority of the team has been focused on finding and fixing the source of the crash bug we have suffered for a few weeks now. I have been keeping track of our progress on that and I have also been preparing for GDC this March. _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter. Have a nice weekend!
Price Drop
Almost two weeks ago we raised the price of Crest to $14,99, which had been our vision of the final price since we launched in Early Access but the landscape has changed since then. We realized that for our type of game and the state it is currently in, this price is not viable. We've crunched the numbers again and decided to reduce the price of Crest permanently to $9.99, which will stay the same when the game leaves Early Access. We apologize for this heavy drop to the few people who bought the game at $14.99. Should you be one of those and played Crest for less than two hours, you can still refund the game. Regardless of your decision, we're very thankful for your support.
Join The Inner Circle
To speed up balancing, we're looking for active and outspoken members of our community to join the secretive Inner Circle. This is a private channel we created on our discord server that will grant you:
- Access to our Dev Build with all the new features & weekly updates
- Your name in the credits
- Direct communication with us
- Free Soundtrack & Art Book DLC
More pixelated images, a folder named Company Secrets and running away from dangerous animals. It must be time for our weekly Dev Blog!
Community
You've all been very active in providing feedback the last few weeks, which has been super helpful. As you'll find out below, some of the recent suggestions from you have already been implemented in our internal build. Also please be aware that everything mentioned in the blog is not yet live on Steam. We're currently lining up a lot of things. Very soon you'll find out what all the secrecy has been about:
Art
Martin I'm a big tease, I know. But this is the last week I'm not allowed to talk about [censored]. I managed to smuggle this secret image out to you, what could it be?
Emma Just as last week, I'm just working on secret stuff again. Hopefully it won't be a secret for much longer.. Here's a beautifully pixelated tease!
Code
Johannes This week has not been as productive as far as the game is concerned as the last few weeks, due to company work taking up much of my time. I have been doing some more tweaks to the new water system, and doing some research for the save system problems. Yesterday we had a play test session, where I for the first time in a long time could just sit down and actually enjoy the game. So I feel really good about where the game is right now. Looking forward to letting everyone play it :) Jens This week I have done a lot of different minor fixes and balancing. I also added one new mechanic. Commandments themselves can now be blessed or condemned with a low cost of influence. Blessing the commandment makes its lifeforce immun to associations draining it. This allows the player to spend less influence to keep a commandment around than proclaiming a new one when the old is removed. Condemning the commandment does the opposite and drains the lifeforce at an increased rate when an association is made. Condemning also comes with a rather large hit to the following cities' local faith. The word discovery has gotten some updates. Coast is now unlocked after a new city is built instead of requiring a city with a harbour. Hungry, Happy, and Unhappy word requirements have been changed to be accumulative instead of being a number of followers fulfilling the requirement at the same time. The trading between islands is now enabled and can occur between two harbour cities. The normal prerequisites for trade still applies. The last three expertise buildings are now added to the game. Diplomacy gives a bonus to successfully create alliances. War increases chance of winning a battle. Trading expertise increases the amount of wealth received when selling resources. These are more late game expertises than Granary, Mining, and Construction as the words needed to be unlocked are Tier 2 and Tier 3 in the new Word Tree. Johannes W This week I've mostly worked with how followers decide on their actions, i.e. their A.I behavior. We've had issues with balancing that and need to adjust some things to give us more control. One of these issues is how follower actions haven't been available or referenced in the Unity editor and our balancing and tweaking is mostly done through serialized variables in Unity's inspector windows. The goal has been to list all possible follower actions in the editor along with corresponding variables for us to balance and experiment with. This has been fixed at this time but there's still some work to do with how follower actions are added depending on how expensive they are in terms of follower stamina and time. I believe, when these things are slightly changed for the better, we'll have more control in making the game balanced and a more fun and interesting experience for players! Tomas I have worked with followers reacting to being attacked by animals. My first iteration had the followers cancel what they where doing, change into warrior clothing and if they survived they would play their defend with shield animation. After this they would walk home. It looked kind of funny, in a bad-funny kind of way, so I made another iteration. My second and final iteration has the followers cancel what they are doing and running away in fear toward their home hut. About half way home they will stop and decide what they should do instead, building new orders. During this work I re-enabled running animations for followers and animals again. I also smoothed out walking in general a little bit. There were some visual issues when their target was on the move. They re-made their path and walked back about 1-2 tiles each update. Now, that is a thing of the past!
Design
Emelie What have I been doing this week? Time has flown and every day blends into each one another, I have been deep into the water system but I have started to add influences from animals, berry bushes and farms. We also have an internal playtesting session every week that is super useful for me, it helps me find and identify systems that are not working as intended or if my balancing is unnoticable and needs more tweaks. You can really feel the difference the balancing is doing so hopefully it will come together quite beautifully.
Production
Marcus This week has been very company heavy for my part, so not much news in terms of production from my end. However, we are of course still steadily improving upon game features and balancing the overall experience, as you've been able to read above. _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or chat with us on Discord. Have a nice weekend!
What a week it has been! We've put out two patches and one hotfix since the last Dev Blog and now the game should be running smoothly again but we've also done lots of other stuff this week!
Community
On Monday we celebrated the third anniversary of our first game Among Ripples and gave away the soundtrack for free. You can check it out here. As announced last week, the price for Crest will go up today to $14.99 as soon as it has been approved by Steam. This will be Crest's final price and there will be no more price raises. We had started at $5 and slowly went up over the years as the game progressed. Take a look at how much Crest has changed over the years:
Art
Martin Oh, I wish I could talk about the exciting graphic work I'm doing right now but that would be telling! Patrick tells me it has to be kept a secret for a little longer. I have a gif to show you though (also censored, teehee).
Emma I've just been working on secret stuff all week, so sneaky! Hopefully I can share more with you next week.
Code
Johannes I started this week with fixing a bunch of bugs that cropped up in the patch release at the end of last week. Tomas and I fixed some memory leaks that made the game use more and more memory every time you started a new game, unless you quit the game first. Emelie and I have had some discussions to work out the kinks and tweak the new water system. I've made a new shader that's going to replace our current default shader. The new one looks a bit fancier and has a few more features than our old one. I'm currently trying to put an end to the ever broken save system. With some effort and luck the "failed to save" message should no longer be a regular occurance when I'm done. Jens The UI for the new tier based Word Discovery has now been finished. What's left is balancing requirements for discovering each words as well as some text. The values for the requirements are visible in the text box when hovering over a word. But as seen in the gif below, the descriptions still have to be written. The rest of the week I've been working on balancing the followers' reproduction and overpopulation. In its current state, too many births occur from their own free will, which creates overpopulated cities at a fast rate. I'm now working on the AI's decision making in an attempt to curb overpopulation. It is still up to the player to make commandments to override the AI's decision but then you might end up with a lot bigger food consumption in the city. It's still going to be a valid strategy to make a lot of babies, if you have enough food and plan on migrating, or if a lot of followers are dying for some reason.
Johannes W This week I finished changing how food is stored in the game. When followers are generating food, it's added directly to the city storage instead of to the follower. Followers still carry food but it's filled only when the follower enters their home hut. I've also been working with the new water system and fixed some small issues here and there. Lastly, I helped Emelie with playtesting and game balancing, like balancing the word discovery system. We are not done with that yet and it still needs some tweaking in the upcoming weeks. I'm sure this is not the last time I did some balancing stuff, but it feels nice to take some breaks from programming! Tomas I have been working with the hotfix patch that was released only a few days ago. We fixed two game breaking bugs, improved memory management and more. Check out the patch notes. After working on the patch I have focused on an update to Berry Bushes. They should no longer spawn in hippo habitats, which could doom an early city from the get-go. Followers should no longer plant berry bushes in hippo habitats either. Also, when followers plant bushes they are now placed in a more clustered formation that looks more natural than it did earlier. Before they made a diamond shape around the city. I have also worked with iterating the look of the Word Tablet. There is now more spacing around words, the cut-off point where the scroll view cut images when scrolling is adjusted and the verbs now have a fancy border.
Design
Emelie I have been working full time with the water system, it's a complex system to balance. I have to decide how much water should drain from each tile type during each season and how fast it should be refilled by the water source (river) to make it appear natural. Another factor to think about is how much water rain brings into the mix and when a new river should appear. All of this together makes for a complicated system but I think that I am on my way to complete it. It will be good when the island's eco-system can survive forever without followers doing things. When it's done then I will start add to the followers impact on nature, making sure that each action that they do will affect nature, giving the player a different kind of urgency (fingers crossed).
Production
Marcus This week has seen a lessened focus on production from my part as I have been more involved in the company side of things. However, I have still managed to playtest the new features and balance changes that have been worked on, and I've got to say that it's looking good. So look forward to the next patch update! Speaking of patches, we have taken last weeks small fiasco to heart and will make doubly sure that the next patch doesn't break everything quite as spectacularly as that one did :) _____________________________________________________________ If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook or Twitter or chat with us on Discord. Have a nice weekend!
We realized that fixing the saving system will take more than a week. Since this is one of the main causes for the game crashing, we decided to disable the saving of games for now. You won't be able to save any new game you start but the game won't crash anymore when you try to exit and you can more easily hop into a new session straight away. For those of you who like living on the edge, you can still access the previous version with saving enabled: > Right click on Crest in your library > Click on Properties > Select the "Betas" tab > Select the dropdown and choose "Unstable" > The game will update, please wait (restart Steam if the game is not updating) > Play We are really sorry for the inconvenience this causes and hope to make up for it in the near future. Thank you for your patience and for sticking with us on this adventurous journey.
Some sleep has been lost, but we managed to fix all your reported bugs caused by last Friday's update:
- Fixed the bug where farms did not yield any food, but pretended they had food available.
- Fixed the spear fisher being frozen at their huts.
- Fixed the bug where the city border could become all messed up.
- Fixed a few memory leaks - This could've caused problems before when starting multiple new games without exiting the game in-between.
- Fixed a potential bug at load time.
Today's patch might bring you no new content but it will make your overall gameplay experience with Crest much better nonetheless!
- No more glitching around of animals or followers!
- Greatly improved game performance!
- Minor bug fixes!
- Saves can still brake sometimes! - Okay, that's not cool but we'll start working on that next week since now this huge undertaking of rewriting the whole decorator system is out of the way.
Concerns have been raised by the community if we've been replaced by robots. Not without reason if you look at all the stuff we managed to do this week!
Community
There will be a new patch coming today bringing great changes. It will fix the glitching of the animations as well as triple the overall performance of the game! Yes, Johannes has been busy doing some black magic this week to achieve this miracle! A heads up: The price for Crest will be raised next week to $14.89. This will be the third and final price raise. If you haven't yet, now is a perfect opportunity to get the game cheap because we don't plan to do any major discounts until the end of the year.
Art
Martin What a fun week! I've started working on the [censored] for the incoming [censored], mainly doing the [censored]. The late Carl Sagan once said that "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe" and that's what I have to do to make this [censored]. You see, it's about the creation of everything. So first I have to come up with how the universe was created before I can make the [censored], luckily I've studied a little bit of astronomy before so I can put that knowledge to good use. More information coming next week! [Editor's note: Sorry, spoilers! :D] Emma This week, I spent half of the week at home sick and the other half doing UI work and playtests. For example, this week we realized that the way we had planned the new word discovery UI wouldn't actually work as intended! This was simply because it turned out too messy when all the words were included with their connections. At times like these, you simply go back to the mock-up phase and take these factors into consideration. After some design changes on Emelie's part, I could start over from the beginning and come up with a whole new look for the UI; which you can see below.
Code
Jens This week I've been continuing work on the Word Discovery. I started to implement a UI for the Word Tree but after a while it started to reveal an underlying flaw in the feature. In the first iteration (seen in the picture below), we wanted the words clustered in a tree with certain words blocking others. This blocking relation was displayed through lines drawn between the words in the Word Discovery screen. The biggest flaws were both an imbalance between the word categories, making the tree look slanted, as well as the blocking lines becoming confusing with a lot of lines crossing each other making it hard to read. We went back to the drawing board and came up with much cleaner and more understandable design. Words will be added to different tiers. Tiers are unlocked by discovering a set amount of words from lower tiers. Thankfully it wasn't a huge amount of code refactoring even though it looked like a big change at first and it is well on its way to being finished.
Johannes W This week I finished the new mountain clouds, created design tools for balancing the water system and added functionality to different GUI's, for example the new world overview window that will be in the game. I also started with changing how food resources are handled in the game. Before, the total food in a city was based on the total food that every follower carried. Now, the food will be fully stored and handled by the city. Every follower will still carry food but the big difference is that they gain food only when they visit their home hut. Johannes This has been quite a productive week. I finished the new decorator which made quite a huge performance improvement over the old one. I was quite surprised myself.
I also managed squeeze in a new feature in the water system so that new rivers can be formed, to make the environment more dynamic and changeable over time. Tomas I have continued my work on the commandment definition mechanics, what commandments actually make followers do. I have also worked on minor changed in the UI. There is an issue with the version of Unity we are using at the moment which has made this work harder than it should be. Hopefully the Unity devs will patch it soon because these tasks cannot be completed until it is. One of the UI changes is the implementation of the new City Needs tab in the City Popup. There are now separate bars that show each of the six needs instead of the old radar chart. Hopefully it will ease the understanding of city and follower needs.
Design
Emelie This week has been a real hell with Unity for me, it's been "arguing" with me and things were not working as intended... Anyway, I have been updating how each individual commandment combination affect the needs, this decides how a city with a doctrine will react to those commandments. For instance, "produce farms" will have a huge effect on the need "food" and maybe not so much on the other needs which means that if the doctrine likes food then they will like the commandment. This took the majority of the week because there are quite a few combinations. Even though Unity has been making my life miserable, I have managed to playtest a few things that needed balancing this week, such as the new word discovery tech tree and started with balancing the formation of rivers.
Production
Marcus Lots of company stuff this week as Eat Create Sleep is going to San Francisco and GDC this March! Well, parts of us anyway, so I have begun working on our gameplan for that little excursion. I have also been involved in giving feedback to the new word discovery system that we have been hard at work with these past few weeks. Beyond that, we are still hard at work with getting our intended features into the game, without breaking everything, so look forward to future patches that will fix many of Crests current problems. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Our first blog post in 2018! This year will have a lot in store for our little team, so let's start right away with all the work we managed to get done in the recent days.
Community
We've only been back a week but the progress we made in this short amount of time is incredible! Some of it you will get to see next week, when we release the next patch. The patch will fix first and foremost the snapping of followers/animals. We'll see what else we can get in there the coming days because we first have to test it to see if it's stable enough to put out.
Art
Martin An eventful week, I spent it with preparing for an investor meetup to talk about further funding for our company, sent a lot of emails to possible business partners and also managed to be sick, but I've too much to do so I said to the virus "please get it over with" and it did, polite virus that. Emma This week, I've been finishing up the last UI tasks and then helped with playtesting. Last blog, I showcased one of the mock-ups of the new Needs window; now it was time to actually export all that UI to build a prefab in Unity. Same with the new Faith window, which also needed to be put together in Unity from the mock-ups. The new Faith tab can be seen in the picture below, along with the two new buttons in our menu bar! We updated our Unity version this week, which resulted in a nasty problem with our UI; it's been a real struggle working around it but in the end, it all worked out!
Code
Johannes This week I finished the new water system - until Emelie immediately found a bug, so it's obviously not entirely done :) I have for the moment moved on to working on the decorator though. The decorator is what we're calling the system that "decorates" the island with trees and bushes in the jungle, and stones and cactuses in the desert, etc. It is, together with the old water system, a big part of our performance problems. The plan is to completely rewrite it from scratch with a custom culling and LOD system. Jens The follower actions for the berries I implemented before the christmas break are now in and working since last week. The three actions are Pick Berries, Plant Berries, and Destroy Berries. Picking berries will be a good food source at the start of the game to get your followers expansion going. Since farming will need to be unlocked, the followers will have to sustain themselves with foraging and hunting. Planting berries will require an initial investment of food that will later return a lot more when the new bush has grown. This week I have been working on the new system for discovering and unlocking words. Words will now be ordered in a tree where words on lower branches will block the words on higher branches until the lower ones are discovered. Each word also has one ore more conditions that need to be fulfilled before they unlock. The back end code is pretty much done, but I first need to fix save compatibility and implement it in the game. Before the feature is fully complete I'll have to make the UI work, which will hopefully be done during next week.
Johannes W I removed the old rain clouds and added snow clouds that now surround mountains. Before in-game rain season, clouds appear above mountains. During rain season, the clouds snow and fill up the mountains with snow. The clouds then disappear when the season is over. This feature is a visual feedback on how the water works in Crest and how new rivers are created. The other Johannes, the lead programmer, re-made and optimized the water system and these snow clouds are connected to visualize some of it. See the GIF for how it looks like at this moment!
Along with the new water system in Crest, new development tools are required. I started later this week creating a debug tool to see game objects that add or drain water to the islands. The objects are supposed to be categorized to animals, animal types, followers, farms, etc. This tool will help our designer to create a nice and balanced ecosystem. Tomas I am back from the christmas and new years vacation and I have been a busy bee this week. I have made the word tablet show slots where future words are placed and all words have their own unique slot, the same slot, every game. The discovered/undiscovered tabs are a thing of the past. I have added more information to the follower popup window, displaying in more detail why followers do their actions. Instead of only displaying "because we want to", they will now say things like "because we are starving" or "because we want to feel safe". The major change I've worked on is updating the commandment definition mechanics, which means what all commandments actually makes followers do. I have added a new action that allows followers to scare away animals from their city. To write a scare off commandment you need to place Distribute in the verb slot and an animal word in the target slot. Aside from the new scare animals action, do-verbs are now working properly. The don't-verbs still need to be looked at however. I will work on that next week.
Design
Emelie I have finally gotten my hands on the new water system, it changes a lot on how nature is going to affect the world. I have been spending all my time tweaking numbers and watching how it affects every thing, it is quite tricky and will probably consume most of my time for the next couple of days. When the water system is "ok" then I have to start tweaking outside sources that will affect nature such as animals, farms and seasons, so it's going to be a lot of back and forth between everything. The gif shows how it was before balancing was done, you can see that it needs work in order to feel more "natural".
Production
Marcus This week has been full of structuring the planning after returning from the winter holidays. There has also been a lot of work to do on behind-the-scenes company stuff as well, but it is good to be back! _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
The year is coming to an end and since everyone will be going away to visit family & friends, we'll have a two weeks Christmas break. Starting tomorrow, we'll be off work until 4th January 2018. We won't be radio silent though. On Twitter we'll be giving away one Steam key for Crest each day, follow us to not miss it: @CrestGame
It's been quite an eventful year for us at Eat Create Sleep and we're thankful for everyone taking this journey with us. 2018 is looking very good so far, with a lot of long-awaited improvements for Crest coming very early on.
Since the current work week only consists of two days for us, we decided to give you a little personal outlook of what some of us will be doing during our Christmas break. Happy Holidays & see you next year!
Martin
Since we're living on an island I tend to not travel that much throughout the year, I'm happy staying on this piece of rock in the ocean. But for Christmas I go home to the mainland of Sweden and visit old friends and family, even though I'm not that interested in the holiday itself anymore, I think it's a great opportunity to eat good food and meet good friends. Also, I will bathe in a wooden hot tub in the cold outdoors. In old times in Sweden (a few hundred years ago) you usually had a Christmas bath ("Julbad") as a big event. They did it because they didn't wash that often, thankfully Swedes are very clean these days. But, some things stays true still; a hot bath is always nice!
Johannes
For Christmas I will visit my parents and close relatives who all live here on the island. We will exchange presents and eat way too much, next year I'll come rolling down the hill to the office :)
Patrick
I'll be taking a Breath of the Wild, trying to find paradise through studying the art of Gorogoa and hang out with some Floor Kids. On the other hand I have some freelance work lined up which consists of localization, editing & writing for other studios. I pretty much use the Christmas break to do other work and take care of things that got neglected over the past couple of months (e.g. Tinder). Besides watching Bitcoin grow, I'll also have a watchful eye over all our social media channels and be present on our Discord server to accompany everyone who needs a chat or just wants to be a little silly. I also wrote a wishlist to Santa. *hint*
Johannes W
I'm looking forward to my holiday. I will visit my family in Stockholm and celebrate Christmas with them and some of my cousins. The things I'm looking most forward to is seeing my brothers open my presents for them and to eat a lot of Christmas food. Especially eat vörtbröd (a bread flavoured with wort) together with Christmas ham... I will also visit some relatives on Åland and eat some more food there... I have no plan for New Year's Eve which I'm going to figure out when I get to Stockholm. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from me!
Jens
I'm going to spend Christmas with my partner and her family here on the island. Looking forward to lots of good food and some time off. I will also try to finally finish a Witcher 2 playthrough now that I have some time to spare! After Christmas we're flying down to Malmö in southern Sweden where I'm originally from to visit my family and old friends. Really looking forward to it as it has been a year since I last visited. We'll also take the opportunity to visit Copenhagen as it is only a 20 minute train ride from Malmö.
Marcus
Christmas is almost upon us, and for the holidays I'm going back to my hometown to spend time with family and friends, eat an unhealthy amount of food and watch the new Star Wars movie. I am also planning on reading the entirety of Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson, so I'll have my work cut out for me. Next year I'll be back with recharged batteries and ready to make some games! Happy Holidays!
Quick & dirty, here's what's new: • New animal migration behavior • Made saving more stable • A couple of bug fixes As you can see, we started checking off the list mentioned in The Future of Crest hence this patch contains besides bug fixes also a major improvement. Let us know below what you think of the new animal behavior. It's not completely finished yet but for now they will migrate more across the island and therefore bring a new dynamic into Crest. We'll update this post with more infos about which bugs got fixed on Monday. Finishing the patch took a bit longer than expected and we're now off enjoying the weekend.
Many battles have been won this week and an immense progress was made in tackling some of the very difficult to solve issues.
Community
A new patch will be released today. Johannes is still working on it with full force together with Jens but it'll come out very soon. We'll keep it short in the Community section this week but don't worry, there will be a special blog post on Tuesday, keep a lookout for that! Also beware of our Discord channel, holiday season seems to make everyone a bit...silly.
Art
Martin Until all of the new exciting features and revamped systems are done by code, I'm in a bit of a slump when it comes to content. Bottlenecks sometimes happen, usually for us non-programmers and especially in a procedural game. So what we do is trying to do meaningful work that doesn't increase the workload for the programmers. I'm designing hats! Each doctrine's city leader will have their animal symbol as a hat to make it easier to know at a glance which doctrine a certain city follows.
Code
Johannes I've been making good progress on the new water system. It's very satisfying to see it come together. I can't wait for it to be finished and working together with the rest of the game systems. I've also done some work on today's patch release, mostly merging fixes back from the dev branch. Jens Most of this week I've felt like I'm making a nature documentary film. I have tweaked, continued to improved, and tested the migration behaviours of all animals. Made sure that they all migrate at appropriate times. This involves a lot of observations and documentation of data related to migration and feeding of the animals. Herbivores moves when they are out of food or if they are being hunted heavily by predators. And when they move, the predators soon migrate after. The balancing of values will be further worked on but we can already see huge improvements in how impactful the followers are on the eco system. If followers decimate a predators food source, the predators will move to another food source that maybe already sustains another group of predators. Now two groups are hunting from the same herbivore habitat, resulting in a slow and steady collaps if one is not careful. I also made a change to pathing to ensure that followers will now avoid walking through a hippo habitat if they can find a better way. Hopefully this will prevent the massacres we've had previously...
Johannes W You sure have noticed in the game that followers and animals are glitching/snapping to positions when they are walking. Until now, the walking animation was dependent on a variable we call "time units". Time units are a sort of currency for how many actions a follower or an animal can do before they need to rest. Time units are updated on a constant time interval. Walking from A to B costs the amount of time units relative to the total distance to walk. The speed in which the characters moved was determined by the animation, which made it difficult to sync the updated time units and the animations. Now, the walking animations control when time units are spent. Tomas I have been working with Follower & City Needs this week. The system has not been working as intended and was finally rectified. It is a complex system of cravings and basic needs that determines followers' happiness and what they do with their free will actions. I added a bunch of debug tools so that the system is easier to balance, which should make Emelie's work easier.
Production
Marcus This week I have been doing some playtesting and helping out with game design stuff, in addition to my ordinary work of keeping track of the project and making sure that everyone knows what they're doing. I have also started planning work for beginning of next year. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Wait, what? Snow? In Crest?! Yes! This week has been all about water, in its liquid as well as in its solid form.
Community
You will read a lot about Crest's water system in this blog. What that means in short: We redirected almost all resources to improve the performance issues Crest has to make it run much smoother. What does the water have to do with the performance issues? Although invisible to you at the moment, water is the main resource in Crest. Every island consists of thousands of tiles and each tile has it's own water-level, which gets constantly updated by the system. This worked fine in the beginning, when there was only one island and not so much stuff happening in the world, but it didn't scale well over time and needs to be reworked now.
Art
Martin I've been spending this week with working on the new feedback for the water system. It's always been hard to see how the water works in Crest, and since it's such a critical resource we want it to be more clear. In real life clouds dump their water on the mountains as snow, which later melts and become rivers. There's not as much snow on the African continent as on others and this is where a bit of abstraction comes in. We'd rather have an easy to understand game than 100% realism. The mountain works like a batter, the more snow there is the more water can be "taken" to the rivers by nature. Below you can see a mockup of this new system.
Emma This week has been all about doing mockups for UI in the game. We're doing some small changes to make it easier to navigate and understand it, making it more convenient for the players to use it. For example, below, you can see the new mockup to the left which will be replacing the current spider chart to the right. The new system with bars will make it easier for players to just throw a glance at the City Needs, to immediately know which need is in danger.
Code
Johannes This week the other programmers and I sat down to figure out how we should fix the water system. The water system has always been kind of broken, and we've tried to fix it several times to no avail. So this time we decided to rethink it from the ground up. The solution we came up with should allow for more dynamic changes of the environment, and should be a lot less demanding on performance. So I'm very happy about that. We'll see how well it works once it's actually implemented :) Johannes W I participated on the discussion for the new water system during the beginning of the week and I think the new changes will make a big difference to the game, which I'm personally excited about. The programming stuff for me this week included updating migration for both followers and animals in Crest. The followers now migrate only from commandments by the player and not by their free will. The animals now migrate to new habitats based on a grid layout on the islands. The reason for this is to have more control over where animals migrate compared to before, where a lot of randomization was used. Another reason is for optimization. For example, when a herd of antelopes wants to migrate, we can search through each center tile in the grid and make basic assumptions where they don't want to move, for example the jungle or how far they can migrate. Then we can search the area around the center tile and make other more specific assumptions. These updates on the migration system are just on a early stage and may be updated later. However, the new water system will have a big impact on migration for followers and animals and therefore we want to have a lot of control when we later have to create a good balance. Jens This week I have been cooperating with Johannes W to fix the migration of animals. At first I started to increase the affect herbivores have on their environment. If the number of animals in a habitat gets too big, they will drain the soil for resources. When they can no longer find food, they will try to find a new area for their habitat. The result is that we will see animals moving more across the island. And where the herbivores move, the carnivores will follow. The aim is to get islands that feel more dynamic and ever-changing. I still need to wait for the reworked watersystem before I can finish, since it is so closely tied to how animals eat and find suitable habitat areas.
Tomas At the start of this week I was mostly involved in design discussions. One major discussion was regarding the water system in Crest and how to improve it to affect gameplay and performance in positive ways. We found a solution that should do both. At the end of the week I have been reworking the season system to allow for harsh and mild conditions. This required a rework of how seasons are queued and changed. It can now be balanced more easily and dynamically.
Design
Emelie This week have been busy for me, I don't think that I have been involved in so many different things in one week before. It all started with the redesign of the water system because it has never really worked properly, this will make the nature part of Crest have more consequences. We also discussed the new look of the city needs since the spider chart could be a bit difficult to read at times, hopefully the changes will make it more clear to the player what is going on. After we had finished those discussions, I moved on to make the design for the berry bushes. We want to pace the game in the beginning a bit better because farms are too powerful. It feels more natural to have a hunter/gatherer society at first and then evolving into farming when they got enough knowledge. I hope this will make it more interesting, as with all the things that we have planned to fix.
Production
Marcus This week I have been busy with introducing a new planning platform and making sure that everything is up to date and that everyone understands how to use it. It will be an iterative process in how we will be handling everything going forward but the team seems to like it so far. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
We got a small patch for you fixing some of the bugs we encountered: • War bug fixed. • "Toggle all" button in Chronicler screen now works properly • Updated Diplomacy window • Skeletons now actually disappear eventually • Minor UX and gameplay bugs fixed More infos about the specific bugs can be found in our latest Dev Blog. The next patch will bring a few more changes but since it's only been three days since we launched the community module, we decided to rather release this smaller fix instead of holding it back for no reason.
Before the Community Module is after the Community Module - after some stressful days of panicking, we return to squashing bugs in a more relaxed manner. This week we go a bit more into the specific problems we encountered while doing so.
Community
The Community Module finally arrived! How do you like all the new features and changes we implemented so far? Today we'll release the first patch fixing some of the bugs and afterwards we'll continue releasing patches every 2-3 weeks, while also working on the improvements we talked about in The Future of Crest. Also, our new trailer could definitely need some more love, check it out if you haven't yet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w
Art
Martin What a week! It jumpstarted with finishing the trailer. Even if you plan carefully sometimes not everything fits, and some things don't turn out as you expected. Then you have to improvise, like I had to do this time, and usually it can lead to a better result. Careful planning and spur of the moment inspiration works best for me. Hope you like the new trailer!
Emma This week has been all about finishing trailer, this time animating the rest of the scenes. I've been struggling with a running cycle, as the NLA editor doesn't wanna cooperate when I'm locking the hands to a tablet they're holding. So, I had a small mental break-down and started working on the slightly easier scenes, with mostly poses with slow movement (and no evil tablets!).
Code
Johannes This week I've been completely focused on making saves work. The build on Steam that we released this Tuesday is fairly stable with regards to saves, but there's still a few issues that I've been ironing out. Jens After the release of the community module I have been working on fixing the bugs we found while testing. The two main concerns for me were terraforming and war. Terraforming stopped working due to a problem with how spaces were delegated around the city. Monuments and expertise buildings claimed a lot of room causing terraform projects to fail. While working on getting it to behave nicely I also made some other improvements, for example terraformers now gather water from sources closer to the terraform project. We saw that war had problems with cities constantly attacking each back and forth. Now they have a longer "cooling off period", and are not as eager to start a war if they have just been in one. There was also an issue with the commandment "... produce war" causing cities to start wars back to back that is fixed in today's update.
Johannes W My week has been about fixing bugs. It included updating filter toggles in the Underworld, updating GUI for different screen resolutions, limiting the amount of messages from the Bulletin Board (the thing that shows the player events that happen in the game), and more. I did also make remnants from dead animals and followers disappear after a time. We realized that the islands turned into graveyards of dead bodies if remnants weren't removed. We want traces to be left in the world, but for right now, removing remnants after a while appeared to be the best solution. Tomas This week I began with fixing general bugs in the game. Then I was play testing and quality assuring, trying to find more bugs and issues. After the release of the community module I have once again been fixing bugs. One bug, that I just now squished, had to do with building placement. Several buildings had a tendency to clip into each other, mostly expertise buildings and monuments. This should now be resolved and will be included in an upcoming patch.
Design
Emelie Playtesting, playtesting and more playtesting is what I have been doing this week. The days have flown by and it takes a lot of time and effort to try and reproduce certain bugs that are annoying to have. It's also an illuminating experience as I can see, as a game designer, how my systems work or not work as intended which will be really useful to know for when we finish Crest. It's also really clear after all these days of playtesting that balancing has been neglected for way to long, this will be next on my list of things to do.
Production
Marcus This week was a major update week, so I've been busy with making sure that the community update was as smooth as possible, and I've also been organizing a follow-up patch that we will roll out today. Apart from the update my time has been spent with setting up our new planning tools and what priorities we have in production going forward towards the next milestone for Crest. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Here it is, the final module for Crest! Monuments, tons of skeletons & many more features, besides an overall improved experience, await you in the Community Module. The very long list of all changes, which are based on your countless feedback, can be found below.
To start off the celebrations, we got a new cinematic trailer in store for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w
Here's a list of all the new features & updates:
New Features
Remnants of the world
- Animals & followers now leave behind skeletons when they die
- Cities leave behind slowly degrading ruins after its last follower has died
- Upon death the Chronicler will tell you about the world's history
- New end screen that lets you explore the world after your legacy ended
- Revisit past playthrough's world spirals & stories
- A new type of building that followers will build over time to commemorate you, if they have enough materials & faith in you, which will provide an additional boost to the city's faith.
- It's now possible to rename your cities & followers!
- A notification bar on top of the screen informs you when something has happened in the world & let's you navigate to the location it happened by clicking on it.
Updates
Faith
- Faith interface completely overhauled with new visuals
- Faith system reworked for more insight
- Influence max cap now at 100
- Influence gain now dependent on number of faithful followers
- Tutorial updated with new visuals & improved flow
- Now explains all mechanics properly without being (too) overwhelming
- More events added to the spiral
- Filter added to the spiral
- More tips added to advisors
- Gaining an expertise now make followers create a specific expertise building in that city
- Expertise buildings are upgraded over time and give their city a boost to said expertise
- Removed: Food
- Added: Middle aged
- Updated Verbs:
- Destroy: now primarily uses warriors to destroy their targets
- Consume: has been tweaked to not as easily lead to cannibalism
- Don't: verbs have been tweaked to have a stronger impact on your followers
- Explore: has been tweaked to affect to word discovery rate
- Each season now has a unique look
- Sorting & filtering of commandments now possible
- Updated UI to better display city relationships
- Balances made to city trading
- Balances made to city warfare
- Updates made to city relationships
- Loading screen now has an animated progress bar
- Displays helpful tips while generating the world
- The camera has been updated and is now a lot smoother to control
- Many new sound effects
- New background songs
- Added ambience sounds to each biome
That should cover most of it, left aside the countless performance improvements & bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy the update and are happy with the choices we made. Let us know if you encounter any bugs or have feedback via the Steam forums or write us on discord. Thank you all for your support & have fun playing! Cheers, Eat Create Sleep
Today it's just you and me. In order to not distract people from their work I decided to do this week's Dev Blog alone, but I can sum up the week in a nutshell for you:
Emma & Martin: working on the trailer
Emelie & Marcus: playtesting
Johannes, Tomas, Jens & Johannes W: bug fixing
We're all giving our best to deliver a polished build until next Tuesday, which will be our final module launch before we transition into the pre-release phase and we'll start releasing updates/patches every 2-3 weeks. The perfect time to look back again how far we've come in the last 4 (!) years.
It's no secret, if you've read the Development History of Crest, you know about all the hardships we've been through - from the initial hype to bankruptcy and now; our Indian summer - we always pushed through.
It's incredible to see how much Crest has changed since the beginning. You can still check out our initial prototype over at Gamejolt to see for yourself. Here's a small montage how Crest evolved over the years up until the Exploration Module:
Like many of you, when I first played Crest I saw the potential it had and was very fond of the philosophical approach to the classic god game genre but everything had still been very raw. Now, with the release of the Community Module, we're getting one step closer again to fulfill that potential.
I'm pretty sure you'll will be impressed by how much the game has evolved in the last four months but also bare in mind: it's still early access, we're not finished. There will be performance issues, bugs and unbalanced features that will get smoothed out over time.
But we've only come so far thanks to the support and feedback of all of you, hence the name of the module; to commemorate you. Most of the new features and improvements in the module are based on suggestions from you. So please keep that feedback coming to make Crest even greater in the coming months.
Next Tuesday a new era will start. Until then, thank you for taking this journey with us & I wish you all a splendid weekend!
We continue teasing you about the forthcoming update, but for a change we also present a little treat for your ears. Find out what it is and what everyone's been working on this week:
Community
We found a lot of bugs at last weeks QA session at the university and more importantly, what causes them. A lot of them already got smashed but we're going to dedicate the entire week before the launch of the Community Module to fix as many as possible. By the way we're now less than two weeks away from the release of the Community Module! Here's the song that will accompany the new trailer, made by Tuomas Nikkinen: https://youtu.be/_4srlXAeXmA
Art
Martin The trailer is nearing completion, or at least the setting up part, I've created a lot of scenes, which I will now start animating. I usually split my time between all of the work I have to do. If there's several deliverables for the same project (in this case a trailer) I divide my time. So for example, if there's five scenes I've got to do, I split a day for 1-2 hours per scene. This keeps me focused on the big picture and I don't get lost in the details. What happens otherwise is that I might spend a day on one scene and the other ones are completely underdeveloped. Below you can see another work in progress render!
Emma This week has been about 2-3 days of UI work and the rest on the trailer again! It's closing in on the animation phase, with some last touches to the setup of each scene. While I've been working on the trailer, the programmers have made some changes to how some of the UI works; which means that some of the original layouts didn't work anymore. So, small fixes to layouts and new graphics for the tutorial was on the agenda for this week.
Code
Johannes After spending several days debugging a big freeze bug, I finally ended up fixing it by adding a single character in the right spot. That's programming for you. For the rest of the week I started working on making saves work again, as they always break during the development of a module. Jens This week my focus has been on getting alliances and war to work properly. Alliances are now working fine, rewarding the cities with a sense of fellowship, better trade agreements, and free movement within each others borders. The war has been a harder nut to crack but it is getting there. Some unexpected bugs were also found and fixed which will result in reliable looting and raiding if the attacking nation wins the war. We have also made sure that the player commandments now have a lot more impact on how cities treat each other. Even though a lot has been improved, there is still a lot of balancing and tweaking left to be done before the module release.
Johannes W This week I fixed the code for the new UI window that shows which cities are faithful, faithless, or undecided towards the player. The design for the faith and influence system was slightly changed, which I made sure was implemented in the code. Influence is now based on the total amount of followers in faithful cities and faithless cities, where every follower in a faithful city adds 1 influence point as reward and every follower in a faithless city subtracts 1 point. Undecided followers add zero influence. A base influence value is added to make sure the player always receives influence points no matter what. Tomas I have worked closely with Emelie this week on continuing the development of the new tutorial. It is coming along nicely. The new tutorial should have a much better flow than the previous one and it is in the world, pointing to UI elements and in-world objects that are being described. It should be easier to learn the game with this iteration of the tutorial. Hopefully it's the last major rework of it! Most of the tutorial is actually completed, only minor tweaks remain for next week.
Design
Emelie This week I have been working on the tutorial, working closely with Tomas. The text and the position of the bubbles have been iterated quite a bit and there are still things to be done, the structure is there and the focus now is to make the flow better and more guiding for the player. Other than the tutorial I've been playtesting in order to find bugs.
Production
Marcus This week I have been going through the results from the playtesting we did last friday and documenting any found bugs to be exterminated. I have also done some additional playtesting on my own to make sure the new stuff we've been working on isn't broken. Together with this I have been setting up the planning for our final push to the Community Module, while also doing some company stuff. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Lots of sneak peeks in this week's Dev Blog, let's cut straight to it!
Community
The Community Module will launch on 28th November! But hopefully you've already seen that by now. Once again, here what's going to be in there: Community Module - All the Infos Today we're having a QA day at the local university, where we're trying to find as many bugs as possible together with the help of the students. Since this is still going, I can only show you a picture from the final preparations in the morning:
Art
Martin Another week with the trailer and now I'm starting to see some real progress! It's pretty hard to make a trailer for Crest since the gameplay is not something you can understand at a glance like say a platformer or fps game. But our solution is to make cinematic trailers with some gameplay bits. Creating a cinematic for a game where most of the story is procedural and made by the player requires some finesse, you can't really tell a story of the characters in the game, because they're not important to the story, so what I can do is use symbolism, to try and tell an allegorical story that fits what you can experience inside of the game. Below you can see a test render of one of these symbolic scenes.
Emma This week has been all about the trailer again, I am still new to Blender so a LOT of time this week has been about trying to figure out different systems and handling weird bugs(?). It's been a tiring week, but I learned a lot! Below is a funny setup in one of the scenes, inspired by the world in Animal Crossing. The mines are supposed to appear after the second character joins the first character, so this was a try to see how it would look if it rotated into view!
Code
Johannes This week I've finished implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This allows us to see what commandments are being used, how long people survive and so on. It also allows us to capture crashes and errors. It will be a great help to make sure that the game is balanced and bug free in the final release. Johannes W This week I've completed the new story builder, graveyard, and end-screen feature. As this is the first complete version, it may need a revisit later for additional tweaks and added functionality. I think it works great at the moment and I look forward to see what stories our players will create when it's released! The next thing I'm working on is for a new UI window that will show information about the players Faith from cities and followers. Tomas I have implemented an entirely new tutorial system from scratch. It will be a more fluid approach, that wont interrupt gameplay as much as the old one did. I am especially pleased with how the tutorial window behaves when it is attached to objects in the game world, it follows them around. The basic functionality of the system is done but more is needed to finalize it and I will continue with it next week.
Jens I have continued working on the disposition system, and now have finished the foundation. This means that I can move on to the branching subsystems which are trade, forming of alliances and waging war. The trade is almost finished, but some testing and balancing remains. Trading is now less convoluted and will emerge later during the gameplay to not overwhelm the player as soon as new cities start to form. We want the player to have more control of how and when trading occurs and it is now better tied into the disposition system.
Design
Emelie I have been working on some design tasks from our big meeting a few weeks back, specifically on some special cases with hunger, looking a bit more into associations and the pacing of the game. It's essentially for the full release of the game and not for the community module, so it's not really our biggest priority now, which was why I went back to my other duties as QA for the last half of the week.
Production
Marcus This week I have been busy with making sure that we are on track with the development of the game and preparing for our open QA session. Lots of playtesting on the schedule! _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached with confidence.
I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:
Community
The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm; where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board. In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.
Art
Martin I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!
Emma After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.
Code
Johannes This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values. I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing. Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us. Johannes W This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs. We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week! Tomas I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments. I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it. With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week. Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder.
Jens A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it. It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.
Design
Emelie This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance. I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well.
Production
Marcus This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
It's been an eventful week: On Tuesday everyone stopped what they're doing to talk about the future of Crest and on Thursday we were left without internet at the office due to heavy rain and storms. Nevertheless, a lot of progress has been made this week.
Community
Like mentioned above, on Tuesday we had a day long discussion about the current problems of Crest and how we'd like to fix them in the future. What came out of it can be read in yesterday's post: The Future of Crest. Two important dates to take away from the lengthy post:
- The Community Module will launch at the end of November
- The "final" release for Crest has been pushed back to Q1 2018 for now
Art
Martin I've been working on the new trailer, most of the time has been spent on making a storyboard. It makes sense to create images outside of your head if you collaborate with others on a project, but the added bonus is that the ideas you have in your head sometimes don't look that good when you see them with your eyes. So it's always a back and forth between what you think and what can be made. Storyboards are great!
Emma I've been working on figuring out technical solutions for our new website and working on some new UI. From our long discussion about how to improve the game, an overview of cities was born. At the moment, it's kinda hard to get a clear view of how each city is doing if you don't go through every city pop-up and go over every tab. This new UI will provide the player with a summary of every city, easily readable with not too much information. At the moment, we need to figure out how to display this information without making it looking too "information-heavy", as it shouldn't scare the player away. Below are two of the mock-ups!
Code
Johannes I've not worked much on the game this week, I've mostly done company stuff. I have however made a tool to find mismatched calls to Profiler.BeginSample() and Profiler.EndSample(), which helped us find a couple of mistakes in the code. I'm now back at focusing on improving the island generation, to make the islands more varied and interesting. Johannes W This week I fixed some minor bugs with the camera movement. There was some old code that kind of worked against the new camera movement which caused the camera to sometimes behave weirdly. I've also been working with the story builder for the new end screen. For example, a new feature for the purpose of development is the ability write sentences that refers to methods in the script that is responsible for the story generation. So the string "Your era came to an end when {FollowerName} died of old age." results in a sentence that has replaced "{FollowerName}" with the follower's name. For randomization, "{Random(proud, noble, grand, glorious)}" results in a randomized word from the arguments "proud", "noble" etc. The purpose for this is to enable us to create dynamic and interesting stories for our players! If you are a programmer reading this, the library Reflection in C# was used to accomplish this. Tomas I have finished the new Follower word discovery speech/thinking bubble I talked about last week. I am almost done with making it so that followers with high faith never do actions that the player tells them to not do. I was almost done but after some code reviews I have chosen to re-do the feature a bit. I also looked into a major change to how Followers choose targets when they build their orders. When I am done, this should make Cannibals, Killing Warriors and Hunters behave as expected. Previously there was a possibility that they performed the actions on unwanted targets. Like for example if the player had written the commandment "... eat old followers." and there were no old followers, they would still eat people... just not their favored target.
Jens This week I implemented the playback for all the new sound effects. This means that we can start testing them during play, seeing if they work or what potential adjustments need to be made. For example, the notifications will now play different sounds depending on the severity of the message. Monuments and expertise buildings now play rewarding sounds when built or upgraded. All in all, more than 20 sound effects have been added with this batch. Otherwise I've been working through some issues we have had with the disposition system (relationships between cities). Currently the trading is getting a makeover as the cities trade too often, with too many resources, essentially making them bounce resources between each other. We want to balance the pacing of the game from the point of the second city being founded. Right now all the different aspects of the disposition system, trading, diplomacy, alliances, and war kicks in with the second city, which can be overwhelming in its current state.
Design
Emelie This week we had a workshop where we went through things that we want to fix with the game, it was very beneficial and added to my work as a designer. When we start implementing these things I hope that you will notice the difference and get a nicer time playing our game. Other than that I tested a part of the storybuilder, now that it's testable in a scene that Johannes W has made, I noticed some things that needed changing but it's coming along nicely.
Production
Marcus Work on the Community Module is getting completed at a steady pace and most of the art assets are done, which means that we can have one of our artists, Emma, begin working on the updates and features we have scheduled for our next big update. These updates are based on community feedback and internal playtesting, which have identified the biggest issues with Crest, and I have begun scoping and planning these iterations. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
With the release of the Community Module coming closer (end of November!), we started talking about what’s next for Crest. For a whole day the company divided up into groups and discussed what the current problems are and how we could fix them. The following points are to be taken with a grain of salt and are not set in stone.
Pacing/Difficulty
The problem: Crest is overwhelming for new players. There are a couple of changes we have in mind to lower the difficulty curve and to let you have more control over it.
- Word tablet: Have empty spaces to show that there are words that you have not discovered yet. We’ll keep the word discovery tab but we feel it should be more visible to let you know that you can discover words. The words will also always stay in the same spot and not switch around when you discover a new word like they do now.
- Tech tree: We’re thinking of adding some sort of tech tree to the word discovery to give you microgoals and have more control over how and when you progress.
- Building of new cities: We’ll change it so your followers don’t build new cities on their own anymore, only when you write a migrate commandment. There’s a huge increase in difficulty when your followers build a new city and we want you to feel comfortable with the one(s) you have first. This will also give you more control in the beginning on where your followers expand, but make it more difficult the more cities you have. In addition there will be greater consequences for overpopulation, making it not sustainable in the long-run.
- Limiting actions: Words like “trade” or “socialise” are pretty much done by the followers on their own and make you as the player feel obsolete. We’re going to make adjustments to those, and also tie them in the aforementioned tech tree to not suddenly overwhelm you with another layer of complexity which doesn’t even consider you.
Follower AI (Free Will)
The problem: Followers are too clever without commandments and too stupid with them. Tweaks: Followers will take more immediate action upon your commandments, eradicating unnecessary waiting time. Self-preservation: Followers will be more self-conscious about their own mortality, i.e. they won’t blindly walk into an area full of hippos anymore. Hunger will get adjusted so the priority for collecting food will get raised exponentially until they eventually stop their current task to take care of themselves. Associations: They’ll be more biased towards similar words to appear less random. Right now each word has three or more words that make sense (e.g. Coast - Ocean, Fish, Food) connected to it, where one of them gets randomly chosen when an association is formed.
UI/Visual Feedback
The problem: Lots of information is hidden or spread out in too many places.
- City needs window: While the spiderweb might look nice, it’s not really useful. We’ll change it to provide a quick overview of the city and summarize Needs, Faith & Doctrine.
- Bubble over city when a commandment has been written: We’ll change it to make it show more specifically why a commandment has been liked or disliked.
- World overview: Every city will be shown in a quick overview to make mid-/endgame navigation easier. The city window will therefore be cleaned up and have more info delivered in the world overview.
- Visual feedback for water supplies: Did you know that mountains are the main source for water distribution on the island, and that water in general has an influence on basically everything? We discussed things like showing snow on top of the mountain, depending on whether it’s full or dried up, as well as animating the rivers that can eventually dry up, but there will probably also be a general overview.
- Free will feedback: When a follower is acting on his own will, it currently states “I’m doing xyz because I want to.” We’ll change the information in the follower window to also show according to what need/craving they’re doing an action. For example: “We’re farming food because we’re starving.”
Animals
The problem: They don’t really matter or in some cases have too much influence. The animal world will be more dynamic with more interaction between each other and have more drastic consequences for the world.
- Animals will die more frequently: Starving, killed by predators, hunters or warriors, you name it. Currently too many animals get tolerated within the city borders without any consequences for them or the followers.
- More migrating: It doesn’t make sense for antelopes to hang around next to lions without panicking or hyenas chilling where there’s no food for them. Not only will them migrating more create a more dynamic world, but also more tension between animals and followers.
- Nerf animal stats (I’m looking at you, hippo!): We’ll change how much they affect the environment and also how aggressive they behave against followers.
Bubbles…bubbles…the character on The Wire? The 1982 arcade video game? Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee? The skull enemies from The Legend of Zelda? The song by System of a Down? Find out what kind of bubbles we’re talking about below.
Community
We posted a F.A.Q. today to answer some of your most frequent questions. Feel free to comment and ask away. Our wikia keeps growing every day. Let us know if you’d like something to be explained more deeply and we’ll prioritize it. [url=http://crest.wikia.com/wiki/World#Animals]
Art
Martin I have spent the majority of the week with doing preparation for the new trailer. I'm trying something new, in the film industry you usually do this thing called a ripomatic, which is a fake trailer which takes music and clips from other sources. They show this to the film distributors and producers to get greenlit, but it rarely gets outside of that setting, mostly because it's not really fair use. Since as I've said it's not really common to share I've censored the screenshot below, so mysterious, right? But I'm confident that the visuals that we will replace it with will look neat, you'll find out soon enough! ;)
Code
Johannes W I have been working on generating stories this week. The task has been bigger than expected, resulted in not being fully completed yet. I started off this week by transferring texts for different stories to the Unity project. Generating the texts was pretty straightforward. The difficult part has been giving tools for non-programmers to change the story generation. Localization has also been in mind meaning that the stories has to be told in multiple languages. The current solution for generating the texts in different languages has been to use Unity's ScriptableObject for storing texts. Because human languages can vary a lot in structure, sentences in the generated story is built like formatted strings with numbers that gets replaced in code, for example "{0} effort but it wasn't {1} this time" where "{0}" and "{1}" get replaced by specific random words. For more complex words, like the name of a city or a follower in-game, the numbers in a formatted string are replaced by specific keys. These keys is then recognized in code and adds its corresponding value, like the last name of a city that survived in the game or the animal that ate the last follower... This is only the surface of the story builder and I am working hard to get it to work properly. We feel like this feature is gonna be an interesting part of Crest! Jens A lot of progress was made with the expertise buildings and resource notifications. The buildings now use a better algorithm for placement around the city. They also make use of the new floating notifications to show when an expertise level has been increased. Otherwise the notifications will be seen for followers that are either spending resources (such as building materials for constructions), or gaining resources (mining, farming, etc.).
Tomas I have made several changes to the word discovery feature. Words now have individual progression rates, which makes some words easier to discover than others. These rates are randomized when a new game is started. There will be a discovery balloon that pops up above followers heads when they progress the discovery of a word. The balloon is finished except for the implementation of new graphics for it. I have also made Warrior followers stronger against animals, giving the Destroy animal actions a buff. Previously, Destroy animals (Warrior follower) was the exact same action as Consume animals (Hunting follower) except that you get no food from Destroying animals, but you do from Hunting them.
Design
Emelie In the beginning of the week I started writing the messages that I wanted in the tutorial but it proved to be tedious work and not very inspiring because I couldn't picture how it would be in game. I talked to Emma and came up with a much better way for me at least. I took screenshots and edited in information to see the flow and how I could fit the text in these smaller bubbles. "What is the most vital points that the player needs in order to play our game?" was the focus for the text. For the remainder of the week I made 60 images about all that is in the tutorial right now, not counting most of the new features. I thought I was done, but then Martin gave me a link to this article and it made me rethink some of my decisions, which is where I am at now, changing the texts and some of the features I thought the tutorial needed but maybe it doesn't. I can't wait for the new tutorial to be implemented in the game and tested!
Production
Marcus This week I have continued with my behind-the-scenes work that probably won't be noticed in the game but is kind of vital to the company, which I unfortunately can't talk that much about. I have also been playing the game a lot in order to get a better grasp of where we need to focus our energy in the continued development of Crest. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Most of the work this week has been around improving usability and user experience based on all the feedback we got from you in the recent weeks.
Community
We started a Wikia for Crest to make it easier to understand all the systems in Crest and in the future we'll eventually integrate it into the game itself. It's bare bones right now but we're continuously adding text and would appreciate your help in making it look more pleasing: Crest Wikia This week we also managed to go viral on imgur and made it to the frontpage with the following gif. We accidentally applied a shader that mixes vertex colours and diffuse to a model without UV coordinates. The shader chose to mix the colours with the camera instead et voilà: "Crest - Other Dimensions" was born:
Art
Martin This week has been eventful, I've redesigned the faith interface as you can see below. We didn't think it reflected clearly enough why you get influence. So we've streamlined the feedback and in the process removed the upper influence limit. Instead you get an allowance calculated from how many followers are happy or dissatisfied with you. This was how it worked generally before, but was more obtuse and confusing. Hopefully you'll like this better!
Emma This week I've been working on new UI and rework of the current UI. The Faith System is being changed slightly, which affects both the UI for Influence and adds a new tab of Faith. The layout of the Diplomacy tab was also changed, to provide more visibility for each city. With this, it'll be much easier to keep track of how your followers feel about you and how the cities feel about each other!
Code
Johannes Some more tweaking was done on the loading screen, and it is now done in our internal build. The experience of starting the game is roughly 1.2 million times better now. I've now started doing some research related to making the islands a bit more varied. Tomas I have implemented a new city symbol, based on the Acacia trees and shrubs. I have polished up the monuments feature and added monument ruins using Jens’ glorious remnant system. Also, I have changed cannibalism so that followers no longer eat each other immediately. Instead, they build up a motivation to do so over time before actually doing it. This should give the player a chance to intervene before cannibalism happens... if they want to intervene of course. :)
Jens This week has been split into two major tasks. I have been working with our audio designer, iterating through new sound effects that are going into the game later and I have also finished the new Builder follower, adding all the behaviour it needs. Most of the UI for the expertise buildings is now working, though it will need more iterations later since I used some placeholder items for now. Next step will be to get a floating feedback for when the followers spend resources.
Johannes W This week I've done a lot of refactoring and adjustments for the in-game underworld. The new game-over screen we are working on includes the chronicler showing the history events spiral. To this point, the underworld scene was coupled to the main world scene in way that it was impossible to use the same assets and scripts for the game-over screen. It has now become more modular, but there is still some more work left to do. I also started to work on generating unique stories when a game has ended, just to take a little break from the previous task. Emelie wrote different combinations of sentences and words depending on what happened in the game. It should be implemented in our internal build next week, at least.
Design
Emelie I have finally started work on the tutorial. I have spent time pondering on what is vital for the player to know at the very beginning and focused on those. Many messages were cut and the ones left will need to be reworded. After I’d decided on what to keep in the basic tutorial, with help from the team, I made a flowchart for everyone to see. Now I am reworking the messages that will guide the player through our tutorial, wish me luck!
Production
Marcus This week I have been busy with getting to know the project better and doing Producer stuff, such as planning, providing feedback and generally helping out where possible, both for the project and for the company as a whole. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
Another Unstable Build, a new employee - we keep growing in all dimensions. Besides these big news, many things we’ve been working on for a while got finished this week. Exciting times!
Community
We published the second Unstable Build for the upcoming Community Module today. It introduces remnants of the world as well as monuments that your followers can build. You can read all about the new features here. We got a new producer on Monday! Say hi to Marcus and hear about his first week here:
I have mostly spent the week getting to know the people and the project in order to effectively do the awesome work of planning pretty much everything we do here. So far it's been really fun and welcoming and I aim to do great things with the team going forward, though probably not too much that actually shows up in the game. Hopefully I'll have some more interesting things to say next week beyond hello!
Art
Martin I've been focusing on working with the new website for our studio, it's coming along and hopefully will be up in a few weeks! I've also done a mockup for the new loading screen, fancy isn't it?
Emma I've had a full week of just UI stuff, both general UI fixes and new UI for the so very secret feature you've been hearing about. There's been a need for some small UI changes with the additions of renaming, expertise buildings and monuments. Below is four different versions of a new UI, next to the current version.
Code
Johannes Apart from some bug fixes for the unstable build, I've worked on the new loading screen, which is just about done, but unfortunately won't make it to the unstable build. Jens Unfortunately I can't give any big details about my work this week either since the feature is still not revealed. Though I can tell you it has been an exiting week with a lot of progress. Next week I'll be back to working on the things that are left with the expertise buildings. It is mostly going to be about polishing and fixing the UI since the ground work already has been laid. Johannes W This week I've been working on three different things: chronicler end-screen, camera movement, and GUI for the secret feature. The end-screen is starting to take shape but there is still some design stuff that is needed before continuing with the code. The work with camera movement has mostly been about polishing things. Most of my time this week has involved working with GUI. As a programmer, I've always been curious of learning new programming techniques. The GUI for the secret feature had a lot of visual animations that was created using closures. In short, a closure in C# can encapsulate variables storing state within delegates/lambdas (C#). These closures can then be passed around in the program like any normal type of data. This made it possible to create objects with complex behaviors, like having time varying values, without the need to define new classes that do few specific things or having many adhoc variables scattered around in one class whose only purpose is to keep state. In this case, state where kept in closures instead. If any C# programmer read this, I highly recommend learning about closures! This technique helped me a lot to program behaviors very efficiently.
Design
Emelie I have continued my work on the story builder, finishing up sentences for a couple of edge cases. I have also focused on the conditions and triggers of the sentences, all that is left now is to see it implemented and watching it work. Of course there will be some finetuning but I'll do that when we get to it. Finally, I have started the work on the dreaded tutorial, we will see how it pans out. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
The second Unstable Build for the upcoming Community Module is now available on the unstable branch. This time we have a few major features instead of many small improvements for you to try out:
New features
- Monuments - Your followers are now able to build monuments to express their faith in you.
- Remnants - Instead of disappearing, followers & animals will now leave behind skeletons and cities slowly degrading ruins.
- New word "Middle aged" - Not young, not old, but middle aged.
- Bulletin Board tweaks - The notifications won't overlap anymore.
- Improved camera control - There's now a lot more flexibility, allowing for more beautiful camera angles.
How to access
Right click on Crest in your library Click on “Properties” Select the "Betas" tab Select the dropdown menu and choose "Unstable" The game will update, please wait (restart Steam if the game is not updating) Play
Known Issues
There should be no major game breaking bugs, at least none that we know of ourselves. Have fun building monuments and please let us know how you like the new improvements. This is the last Unstable Build before we release the Community Module in the not too distant future. Here you can read what's left to come.
What a week! About half the team got plagued by sickness and a lot of task switching has been going on. Find out below what we achieved this week and prepare to be puzzled!
Community
One week left until we release the next Unstable Build for the upcoming Community Module! First and foremost it will introduce a part of the new remnants system with animals now leaving behind corpses when they die. We’ve also made a new discovery on why Crest is so performance heavy at the moment, this will be improved upon at one point in the future which we don’t know yet because: On Monday our team will grow again! Marcus will join us as a full time producer but more about him in the next blog.
Art
Martin I have been having one of those weeks, a nebulous couple of days where I fill the work time with small tasks, polish here and there. The most noticeable is probably adding ambient occlusion to the world, which simply adds small shadows in creases where models intersect. This creates some grounding in the world! Below you can see how I'm "resurrecting" the builder class.
Emma Unfortunately, I managed to get another cold and I've been home almost all week with a fever. I'm gonna finish some last touches of the monuments and then get to work on some UI stuff!
Code
Tomas I have written and almost finalized the feature for building monuments. Followers are constructing the monuments as intended and they can be selected by the player. There is some minor polish left, like the monuments awarding Esteem and/or Happiness and the implementation of an information page. The actual monument models will also need to be put into the game. I am waiting for Emma on that one. And I hear she is almost done, super hype! Anyway, those polishing touches will have to wait for now since the entire coding team has been tasked to work on the secret feature hence forth. It is the most important feature of the Community module and we need to ensure that it gets the production time it needs to be excellent.
Johannes Another week of mostly company work, plus a few days of being sick. I've just started doing some work on the loading process though, so it finally won't lock up your computer anymore when Crest is generating the world. Jens This week I finished the Remnants feature. It is now tested and all of the planned buildings, animals, and followers leave behind ruins or skeletons. Otherwise most of the work was dedicated towards the expertise buildings and a lot of progress was made. The underlying expertise system is now working and the followers construct buildings when appropriate. There is still a lot of polishing, feedback and testing left to do but that will have to wait for a few days while I work on a recent task I was given. It concerns a feature that is not revealed at this moment and therefore no further details can be given yet.
Johannes W Earlier this week I’ve been working on the new game over screen, but due to some circumstances the task was put aside and I did not continue working on it until Friday. I used the remaining time to also add some extra polish to the camera movement, and I bet the final result will be appreciated by players!
Design
Emelie I have been sick for the entire week, except for today (Friday), so not much has happened with the story builder. Today I continued to fill in the words that could be exchanged in the sentences, it is a total of 400 words that need to be filled in and fit with the sentence they belong to. I am wary to promise that it'll be finished next week but hopefully it will. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
For many people it’s important to not be forgotten, while alive or after death. While our team focuses on the alive part, so Crest is not forgotten, in-game your followers will soon be able to commemorate you. Continue reading to find out what everyone has been working on this week.
Community
A lot has happened in the background this week. Marketing is always a hit & miss and can become quite frustrating, if the results remain unclear, but this week they didn’t. As you can see below, there was a time this week where we managed to generate more revenue than No Man’s Sky or The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth!
Yesterday we also had the honour of being part of the indie MEGABOOTH stream on Caffeine hosted by fr0toe, where we played Crest for an hour and answered questions.
Art
Martin This is probably my final week, doing corpses that is. It’s been a very rewarding experience, as morbid as that sounds. But honestly I’ve come to a better understanding of how mammalian skeletons work, they really look a lot alike. Below you can see what I refer to as my “bone pile” which is basically all the models I’ve done up to now. I’ve saved a ton of time just repurposing parts from my previous skeletons, tweaking them as I go. Next week I will probably do something completely different!
Emma I’ve been working on the 3D models of the new monuments coming to Crest, created from the materials gold, obsidian and gems that the followers can collect. They’re created in three different tiers, which will show different stages of actually building the monument. This week, I’ve finished all the last tiers of the 8 monuments we’re planning to add. Below is an example picture of one of them! Next up is creating the lower tiers.
Code
Johannes I’ve been doing company work, and kept working on our secret feature. Nothing out of the ordinary, can’t really say more yet. ;) Tomas I am back from my vacation and have jumped right into the fray with the monuments feature. Me and Jens have discussed a part of the code that we will share, called building projects. Building projects need a certain amount of resources to complete and they will be used for monuments and expertise buildings. I have wrote the code for building projects and coded most of the monument system this week. As it stands, followers will erect a monument when certain requirements have been met. The requirements are not yet set in stone but for now this is needed for followers to start building a monument: time, an abundance of resources and high faith.
Johannes W Earlier this week I’ve been working on the new camera movement. It will need some more fine tuning but it will be available for you to test in the next unstable build. This week I’ve also implemented a new word in our internal build: Middle Aged. The new word refers to followers that are not young or old, but in between. It just need some graphical work at the moment, for example updating the UI in the follower popup window. Lastly, I’ve been starting to work on the code for the new end screen.
Design
Emelie The story builder turned out to be a braintwister for me, all the sentences and words that needs to fit together. This week I finished most of the text, I had forgotten the headline and outro so it took longer than I had hoped. However, I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and will finish next week. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
While Emelie has been focusing on making a Story Builder for Crest, someone else finished building his own story and told us the first part in form of a live-action video! This and more about the recent developments of Crest below.
Community
We published an Unstable Build this week, featuring what we’ve been working on the past weeks. Renaming of cities & followers, a bulletin board that shows world notifications and much more can be tried out now. More details & how to access it: Community Module: Unstable Build #1 Now Live! On the same day, we received a live-action video for Crest from DiggeryK. It blew our team’s minds! An insane amount of time and effort went into the creation of this video and it's full of nifty details like featuring a joke chiptune song from our OST. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2C9Rl2hulg
Art
Martin I had a very rough but rewarding week, Johannes and I went on a business trip to Stockholm this Wednesday, since we’re living on an island that’s no laughing matter, but going by ferry gives you a nice working ethic, there’s not much else to do. The business meetings in Stockholm proved to be worth it and I will probably have some great news to tell you soon. Between all of the company work I managed to squeeze in another corpse, of lions this time.
Emma I have been working on the 3D models for the different tiers of the Expertise buildings, which will give the player more feedback of when cities advance in level of a specific expertise. Before, there was only one state of each building, no matter the skill level. As you might remember, I created the concepts for all the buildings last week; which served as a guideline for the 3D models. Concepts and the 3D models don’t necessarily need to match up exactly every time, since problems can arise while modeling that you didn’t consider when drawing it. For example, there were some buildings that were supposed to have pots or debris lying on the ground, but practically this wouldn’t work in Crest as the buildings are not on a flat surface every time they spawn. Below is the Mining building, with the previous concept.
Code
Johannes This week I’ve spent mostly doing company work and being on business meetings, the sort of meta game of making games. Jens This week I moved on from the remnants feature. Followers, Cities, Ostriches, and Lions now all leave decaying remnants behind. The remaining animals will be implemented as soon as their models are done. While waiting, I started to work on redesigning the expertise system. This is part of a larger feature which involves followers now spending more resources when constructing buildings, including the expertise buildings. In order to increase a certain expertise in a city, a follower must continue to add tiers to the corresponding building. In addition, there will also be improvements to the feedback of a cities expertise levels. Johannes W I applied some final fixes to navigating between cities early this week before moving on to update the camera movement and controlling. The main feature that will be new to the camera is orbital rotation. It means that the player can hold one of the mouse buttons and rotate around a point in the world that is the center of the screen. The player will also be able to use left and right mouse buttons at the same time to rotate towards the point on where the cursor is pointing at while also orbiting around it. It will give the player a lot of control to move around in the game world.
Design
Emelie I’ve continued my work with the “story builder” that will give the players a summary on their playthrough when it ends. It’s been a rocky start, as stated last week. I find it difficult to get a good text in place that can be specific but still generic so we can generate a different text each time that the player can relate to and remember “oh that happened” or something like that. In order for me to finish this as quickly as I want it, I have cut down a few of the texts and focused on making just a couple to prove that it works, it’s easy to add when the system is finished. As of now the layout of these summaries are: [Headline Intro Event 1 Event 2 Cause of demise Outro] If it doesn’t work at all, we will see that when we test it and make changes accordingly. Text can always be iterated, at least that’s what I tell myself at night. It will hopefully be finished by next week so I can start working on reworking the tutorial. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!
A bit more than a month ago we released the well received Exploration Module and now the time has come to show you what we've been working on since.
This Unstable Build brings you some of the features of the forthcoming Community Module. All details about it can be found here.
New features
- Bulletin Board - Shows notifications on what happens in your world.
- Renaming - You can now rename your followers and cities. Click on the city name in the city popup and the follower name in the follower popup to rename it.
- Filter and Sorting - You can now filter and sort your commandments in the commandment tablet.
- Advisors - Their advice is now more connected to the world along with increased variations.
- New sounds - City selection, calendar open/close & boats have gotten new sound effects.
How to access
Right click on Crest in your library Click on “Properties” Select the "Betas" tab Select the dropdown menu and choose "Unstable" The game will update, please wait (restart Steam if the game is not updating) Play
Known Issues
The text in the Bulletin Board can be a bit too small and overlap the event info. The loading time for generating the world can be very long. Rest assured that even when the game seems to be stuck, it's still generating the world in the background. We hope you enjoy the new features and please let us know about any bugs via the in-game report function. Feedback is also very much appreciated, especially about the new stuff. The next Unstable Build will follow in week 40, betweeen 2nd - 6th October.
A rock band called Alice in Chains once sang “Gonna end up a big ole pile a them bones”. It’s a sobering thought, I guess. Well, with this as inspiration we began making them dry bones for our creatures in the game. It sounds dark, but good feedback, bones are also a legacy, a calcium enriched one! But there’s also great news from the states of the eagle and lots of UI shenanigans, read more about the details on the dev blog!
In the community module! This week we posted on steam what the community module is going to be about and we’ve been working hard on advisors, monuments, remnants of the world and more. We’ve also moved in to a new office space. Oh, if you want to find out what is rotten, read more about what we’ve been doing on the blog.
If you’re following our weekly Dev Blogs, you might have seen that we’ve already started working on some of the new features for the upcoming Community Module. Here’s now a detailed list on what is planned, but bear in mind that not everything might make it in due to unforeseeable delays and hiccups.
Release Date: Q4 2017
A proper date will be announced at a later point when we approach Q4. The Module is built on your feedback and also focuses on giving you as the player and the world itself more options to express themselves.
Expression
Name your Followers & Cities
You will be able to give all cities and followers your own individual names to make the experience more personal.
Monuments
Your followers will be able to build different types of monuments. Depending on which and how many different materials they use, these monuments will reward different amounts of esteem.
Remnants of the world
There will be slowly degrading skeletons of dead followers and ruins of fallen cities to better visualize the changes of the world during a playthrough.
Advisor
There will be more different advices, which will also be more connected to the world.
Chronicler spiral
You will be able to share the history of your world, wherefore we’ll make the spiral more unique.
Island Generation
Each island will be more unique and have distinctive features between each other.
Overhaul
Tutorial
The tutorial will get better integrated into the world and will also be more stretched out to not overflow new players with too many infos in a short amount of time.
Event Notifications
There will be a notification bar on top of the screen informing you when something has happened in the world like a new city that got build. Thereby we’ll guarantee a much better overview about everything that’s happening in the world.
Loading Screen
The loading screen will newly contain at least one moving object; a loading bar for example, so players don’t get the feeling the game has frozen.
Camera rotation
Instead of rotating around yourself, the world will now rotate. This will make it easier to look at things without having to move around too much.
Graveyard feature
Players will be able to visit spirals of previous worlds.
End Screen: Chronicler
Instead of showing the “Your legacy ended”- screen, you will be sent to the chronicler to reminiscence once again over your past playthrough.
Commandment sorting
You’ll finally be able to sort all commandments as it pleases you.
Building resources
Each building will now cost resources and take more time to build. We felt the farms were too powerful in general and we’ll try to find a balance this way.
Diplomacy balancing
New word: Middle-aged
Verbs (reworked to affect the world more)
We were not able to include all your feedback in this module but most of it. We will have more big news to share by the end of September, which will explain the reason for that. That's all we have for now. What do you think? Are you happy with the choices we made for the Community Module?
The works on the Community Module have begun and everything is back to normal - well… almost. Emma, Martin & Patrick have been absent all week to spread the word about Crest at Gamescom in Cologne.
But more importantly you can find out about more unannounced features in our latest Dev Blog.
This week had been all about the forthcoming Community Module for Crest and after three days of discussions all went slowly back to normal. Get an exclusive sneak peek about what’s to come in this week’s Dev Blog.
Something strange is happening. After Leo leaving us last week, we started the week with even less people since Martin and Jens went on vacation. We kept losing people during the week and for the last two days only four people were left in the offices. Is Crest taking over the real world? On the other hand we managed to erase even more bugs as you can find out in our latest Dev Blog.
Another week, another Patch! We managed to get rid of that nasty bug where the game would constantly keep loading the game over screen, made a few balancing tweaks and squished many minor bugs.
Patch Notes - Version 0.46 - 11th August 2017
New
- New tutorial graphics
- New loading screen
- Larger tutorial window
- Lone animals will now try to find a new herd
- UI tweaks
- Balancing tweaks
- Tweaked intro animations
- Tweaked pathfinding
- Fixed bug that immediately triggered the game over screen
- Fixed a tooltip that used an incorrect translation key
- Many minor bugs fixed
No rest after the big launch of the exploration module. The team pretty much continued with what they’ve been doing last week: fixing bugs. Find out what nasty bugs we encountered in our latest Dev Blog.
Here are the patch notes for today's update. Thanks again everyone for submitting bugs to us.
Patch Notes - Version 0.45 - 4th August 2017
New
- A new intro is available with Vanessa Kisuule, animation timing will be fixed next week.
- Diplomacy: Happy faces when they hated each other changed to correct face.
- Follower tab info list fixed: it showed either duplicates or non existing followers.
- Fixed an issue where the followers couldn't die from hunger.
- Small fixes to the tutorial.
- Islands now arranged in a triangle instead on a line.
- Fixed issue where a follower would move from city to city until death.
- Fixed the problem where the vegetation system froze the game.
- Increased influence by 1 in base value.
- Balanced the hunger system a little bit.
- Saves are still acting up, but we are working on it and it should be fixed with next week's patch
After seven months in the works, the Exploration Module is now finally here! Now you'll be able to explore other islands as well and grow your civilization even bigger. The update includes hippos, islands, terraforming and much more. The very long list of all changes can be found below.
To celebrate the release of the Exploration Module we made a special trailer for it:
https://youtu.be/9c9xd4jyJCE
Here's a list of all the changes, additions & improvements:
New words
- Ocean
- Coast
- Gold
- Hippo
- Hyena
- Obsidian
- Volcanic
Commandments
- Terraforming
- Feed Animals
- No more disabled commandments!
Islands
- Coast
- Boats
- Fish schools
- Fishing
- Harbour
- New water system
- Seasons
New Follower
- Terraformer
New animals
- Fish
- Hippo
- Hyena
- Seagull
Influence
- Bless or condemn commandments
- God currency
Ores
New
- Gold
- Obsidian
- Gems
- Metal
- The ores can become overgrown, taking more effort to mine
City
- Borders
- City popup
- Constant nameplate
- Expertise buildings
- Follower popup
- Harbor
- Rising buildings
Calendar
- Death by old age prediction
- Seasons
Chronicler
-
More events are now being logged
Doctrine
- Doctrine specific animations to city leader
- New Doctrine symbols
Diplomacy
- City relations
- Updated war - taunts etc
Audio
- Updated audiosystem
- 3 new songs
- Multiple SFX for UI, Animals and Followers etc
- 6 new ambients
Visual improvements
- Added dry jungle
- Clouds
- Expertise buildings
- New doctrine statues
- UI overhaul
- Volcanic surface
Other changes
- Added a game over screen
- Size of followers increased
- Minimap
- Options Updated
- Tutorial Updated
Removed
- Global faith tab inside commandment tablet
- Specifying commandments
- Removing associations
We hope you'll enjoy the update as much as we do. Let us know if you encounter any bugs or have feedback via the Steam forums or write us on discord. Thank you all for your support & have fun playing! Cheers, Eat Create Sleep
What are you all doing today? All week long there were only two different answers to this question: Bug fixing or trailer. The pressure is high, only three days left until we’ll release the Exploration Module on 31st July!
More about bug fixing and beautiful trailer pics in our latest [url=http://eatcreatesleep.net/post/163524123594/dev-blog-140-work-in-progress]Dev Blog
With the release date of the exploration module coming closer and closer (10 days left!), Emelie had to bless or condemn some of the planned features. Tomas has worked on a similar named feature for the game, which now regulates how many commandments you can write at once.
Find out more about it and what the rest of the team has been working on in our Dev Blog.
In the hustle and bustle of production a new employee arrived, bearing the same name as our lead programmer. Is it a coincidence or divine intervention? It’s hard to tell, but we welcome our new employer all the same! In other news the team has been working on revamping a lot of old systems, such as trading and dispositions towards other states. But not only that, the new influence system is taking shape.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
In order to solve an upcoming predicament you have to be able to predict what’s going to happen and when. This week we have been adding to our calendar’s different predictions. We’ve also worked on disposition, the terraformer and UI. Also, Patrick’s “Tour d’Europe” is well under way and he’s currently showcasing Crest at ReVersed in Vienna but before he was there he was at INDIGO in the Netherlands.
Read more about it in our latest Dev Blog
We are delighted to present you today a preview build of our upcoming exploration module as part of our “Unstable Builds”-program. There will be bugs and saves are disabled but it’s by far our most polished unstable build yet. It will give you a glimpse of what’s to come on the 31st July when we’ll release the full module.
Here’s how to access the preview build:
- Right click on Crest in your library
- Click on “Properties”
- Select the "Betas" tab
- Select the dropdown menu and choose "Unstable"
- The game will update, please wait (restart Steam if the game is not updating)
- Play
- The energy bar of followers doesn't visually go down (currently figuring out if it goes down at all internally)
- Warriors can form clusters and just stand around or fighting forever.
- Children might not want to move sometimes (they can't find a suitable place to live, if the parents move they will find places in the new city)
Panic, stress, not enough sleep and a lot of dead bugs: the pressure was high to get a working build ready until Wednesday evening before the start of Patrick’s “Tour d’Europe”.
Find out what kept the team busy this week in our latest Dev Blog.
While Christoffer has been working on a new game over screen, we discounted Crest 50% during Summer Sale in hope that our legacy will not end anytime soon in the foreseeable future.
The whole team is still focused on getting everything done for the upcoming events. This week included designing PR Material, lots of playtesting, fixing of bugs and polishing up on graphics to be able to deliever a smooth expo build.
Find out more in our latest Dev Blog.
The biggest update for Crest so far is set to release on 31st July 2017!
The exploration module focuses on making the world of Crest more lively and will bring you all kinds of new additions like islands and fishing, while we also improved upon core gameplay mechanics based on the helpful feedback from the community. We are genuinely hyped about the update since we've been working on it for half a year now. You can find a more detailed overview about what's coming in our Development Road Map.
A taste of Exploration coming 28th June!
If you're following our Dev Blog, you know that we've been busy getting a build ready for the upcoming expos where we'll showcase Crest. You already waited long enough for the next module and therefore we decided to give you a glimpse of what's coming before the big release: We will publish our expo build on the 28th June as an Unstable Build! It will not include all coming features and improvements, rather be a polished unstable build showing off some of the new features. You can read more about how to access the build here.
Steam Summer Sale
We will participate in the Steam Summer Sale that's starting today. Crest will be discounted the insane amount of 50%! Besides a minor discount during the launch week of Crest, there will be no other until next year. If you've been waiting to buy the game, this is your chance! This is the cheapest you will be able to get Crest for at least a year to come, since we do not plan to do any other major discounts at this point.
One sound has been predominant in the Eat Create Sleep offices this week: Busy fingers typing. One goal is unifying everyone, the constant thoughts about it so loud, it has almost become a mantra: INDIGO. Everybody is working with full force on getting a working build ready for the upcoming expo and we also have a new team member joining the work force!
Read more about it in our latest Dev Blog.
What is happiness? Tough question indeed, but the inhabitants of Crest have now started to look for an answer. Animals try to find it by relaxing in the sun, Followers have a new commandment to strive for fulfillment, and to set the mood a new particle effect has been implemented for the festivals.
Find out more in our latest Dev Blog.
Fight or flight is what we have been implementing with our animals, what is their threshold on when to fight or run away? It’s what we are trying to figure out. This week we have also been working on a running animation for our lion, warrior formation and we have a new recruit in our midst.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
In order to keep the balance of the ecosystem that is Crest, you will have the ability to feed the wild animals. This will increase the chances of their survival and hopefully prevent them from going extinct, which is a possibility if you hunt too much. Moreover, this week have been about the terraformer, new doctrine symbols and animal AI and more!
Read all about it on our dev blog.
We are going to a few events this Summer and without establishing a good budget it can easily get out of hand, losing money left and right. But that problem has now been taken care of thanks to the moderately brilliant mathematicians at ECS HQ. Other than that we have been focusing on borders, city leader animations, animal AI and terraformer.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
It’s time for another unstable build to become available for you! Go check it out right now to see how we are coming along. This week we have been charging forward with warrior animations, terraformer, buildings for expertise and more.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Exploration module will bring with it many new features for you to explore and navigating through it all could become difficult at times. In order to make the navigation in the world easier we have now implemented a mini-map so the players will be able to jump to new areas faster. We have also worked on pathfinding around islands, animal icons, words, preparing for conferences and more.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
This week have been filled with things that’s affected or affects the terrain. The audio system that changes the sounds depending on which terrain you see and we have the terraformer that will have the ability to change the terrain. We’ve also worked on seasonal lighting and heat haze to give the seasons different feels.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
In the quest for investors, two brave souls from our studio crossed the sea and went to Invest in Gaming in Växjö this week. If it was successful remains to be seen but we’re hopeful. We also fought our way through some side quests this week such as disposition UI, water system and festivals.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Today we’re leaving for our Easter holiday which means that the dev blog is a day early! This week we worked on making the unstable more stable so you can play the unstable a little bit better. We’ve also continued working on the water system, UI, running animations and started work on the advisors again.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Hello all! The short of it for this update is that we will release a quick fix to the unstable build this week and explanation on how we'll proceed with the upcoming builds. After we rushed to get the unstable build out last week we realised that we shouldn't promise certain features for these because delivering on those promises would require potential crunch for each. And the purpose for these unstable builds are just to let you take a peek inside, rather than delivering solid modules. The reason behind this is that our development team of 7 people all work parallel on different tasks, and it sometimes becomes difficult to align everything for a monthly schedule (that's why we stopped with promising modules each month). But we still want to show you that we're not slacking off so we'll add things that are functional (but not stable) each month, but the exact features we deliver is a mystery. ;) You will eventually get all of the features promised for each module launch however! Since we botched the unstable build somewhat we're going to upload a quick fix later this week. We'll let you now when it's up. Please be advised that we won't patch upcoming unstable releases. As always, thank you for your patience. //Martin and the Team
The unstable build is now live! Known issues: The splash screen is completely black so just click past it. Our new GUI is not fully connected so some buttons does not respond. Read more about how to change to the unstable branch here. Have a nice weekend!
A version of our current game is soon live on our “Unstable” branch on steam, go and check it out! This week we have been working on the new water system, running animations, dangerous waters and the terraformer.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
A river running down from the mountain will bring life to the world beneath. That’s the reason why we started to re-work our water system. We want it to affect the world in a new way, creating a more dynamic place for you to play in. This week we have also worked on ores, dangers on water, biomes and a few dates for you as well.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Spring has arrived here in Visby, the sun is shining bright and the clouds are passing by. It’s the same in Crest, where new clouds are floating past, new statues are shimmering in the sun and a new GUI has been implemented as well as a new biome!
Read all about it on our dev blog.
The results are in on the survey and it has given us much to ponder on, but we have a few things that we have discussed and would like to share with you. This week we’ve worked on the inter-island trade system as well as biomes, fish schools, new actions and more!
Read all about it on our dev blog.
You might think that we have all gone fishing but that’s not the case! The followers are reeling in the fish with their new animation and we’ve also worked on docks, boats and pathfinding this week. We would also like your help with our survey!
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Hello all!
We're still hard at work on the next module - Exploration. We're really happy that a lot of you felt that the Ancestors update added a lot of new exciting possibilities - but we're aware that some people still feel that there's a lot left to do before Crest is enjoyable, which is fair.
We're now conducting a survey to gather some more opinions from the community to see if we get more voices if we do an anonymous poll. It takes about 2 minutes to fill in, and you don't need to log into anything.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeO7zLyB2h6wb_4VXVZ1SoyL9N6knd3tegMR7bz90K-TPonQA/viewform?usp=sf_link
Thanks a lot!
An adventure often starts when you move beyond what you know, exploring a new place or meeting new people. This week there has been a focus on pathfinding on the sea, boats and a new team member arrived.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
Designing an ambitious game can be difficult and daunting - before the crucial testing can begin you have to make assumptions - will it work? Sometimes your gut feeling have to lead the way, or rather, having faith that you’re on the right track. This week we’ve worked on redesigning the core loop of the faith system, adding the possibility of resources being buried deep in the jungle, and yes, more whale action (as in animations).
Read all about it on our dev blog.
You never know what’s hiding underneath the ground you’re standing on. If you dig will you find nothing or strike the mother lode? This week we’ve been working on implementing a lode system where the ores are gathered into one vein. The seagull has gotten some animations and the faith system is being reworked.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
This week we’re bringing Crest to new heights with height differences, seasons and an overhaul of the city overlay. Our artists have finished all the concept art and mock-ups for the new module, which means they can start making assets to be implemented in the game.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
This week has been filled with new animals, a rework of our disposition GUI and spearfishing. We’re also trying out a new approach to global faith.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
What a time to be alive - not every follower get to survive a cycle and partake in the grandest festival of them all! Yes, we’re bringing festivals into the mix, and we’ve also done a lot of work on expanding the world, what’s that on the horizon? Another island?
Read more about it on our dev blog.
This week has been full of concepts and the disposition system is also being reworked.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
New module, new office and newsletter! It’s nice to start a new year with new things.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
We are back from our holiday, hope you’ve had a great holiday too. This week we started our work on the next big expansion: Exploration!
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Here are the patch notes for our update today. And what about this year’s winter sale? Find out more below.
Winter Sale
As mentioned before, Crest takes part in the Winter Sale. Crest is 30% off! http://store.steampowered.com/app/341710/
Patch Notes - Version 0.43 - 22nd December 2016
Bug fixes
- Farms and mines now save properly.
- Saves should work properly now.
- Fixed a bug where, if you clicked the commandment helper and had the undiscovered words open when you closed it. You could use the undiscovered words.
- Fixed priest speech bubble.
- Follower pop-up text fix, “currently living in” was cut off.
- Children now spawn with more stamina and take food from their parents.
- Added tooltips to options menu.
- Better behaved children.
- Metal is now available at the beginning of game.
- Made some balancing changes to hunger/food.
- Chronicler: Filter buttons moved to the right.
- Chronicler: Spiral was going the wrong direction, it is now correct.
- Chronicler: Reduced emission flickering.
- Chronicler: More variations to why followers starts waging war in the spiral.
- Chronicler: Tooltips added in the underworld.
- Chronicler: Improved GUI.
- Advisor: Increased advisor text size.
- Advisor: You can now reopen an advise, as long as you don’t leave the screen.
- If there is no advice available they will tell you that if you click them.
- Skybox improved
- Added antialiasing in underworld.
Hello all,
Another year draws to a close, and, as is customary elsewhere this is usually a time to look inwards. Its been a tumultuous year, inside and out of games, the clamor of the so called “Indieapocalypse” rings still, which has shown all of us that indie development is a tough place to survive in. Since we’re better off since last year we can sit down and reflect and tell you what has happened over the year, and what to expect in the future. We urge you to read this with a pinch of salt, this is not a mopey text about us being martyrs, it merely tries to explain our struggles and successes. To keep the spirit of the season we end on a more positive note on where we’re headed next year!
Read it on our dev blog.
The Ancestors Worship update is LIVE, go check it out! You’ll find a complete changelog and a few other festive things on our blog:)
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Hello again, A small note to the people waiting for a sale, the other day we told you that we will increase the price for the base game and the Supporter Edition. We're still on it, but we've decided to change the price after the Winter Sale. This means you can buy Crest for $8.99 for a few weeks more, plus the discount (which we're sure you'll like). So the only difference is that Crest will be cheaper, but we didn't want you to feel cheated that we teased you for a sudden price increase. We had to keep the price for other reasons. Also, we'll be posting a brand new cinematic trailer on Friday (16 December), if you could signal boost it we'd be very grateful. The update is almost here now, get ready! :)
Hello all, As we've said earlier we'll get the update online on the 16th December. We also wanted to give you a heads-up that we will increase the price for the base game to $10.99 and the Supporter Edition will cost $14.99. Lastly, we'll participate in the Winter Sale, which we of course can't tell you when it happens. But yeah, we're working hard on getting the update in tip-top shape. Stay tuned!
Now we’re back as a full team! Things are progressing steadily, this week has been full of follow-ups from Slush, the spiral for the chronicler is taking shape and bugs are being squashed once again. A new menu is in the works as well.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Once again we regret to inform you that our update is not going live today, due to illness we haven’t been able to do some of the most complex parts vital for this update. I am happy to inform you though that saves are coming along and we have found many bugs that will be squashed before the update.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Hello all, The update goes online on the 16th December, two weeks later than what we promised. We regret to inform you this, but the postponement of the update is due to sickness. A few in the team, and especially the programmers have been affected, by flu and other things. We're about done with the graphics, but we need some more time on fixing implementing the new mechanics and objects into the save system, and more balancing and bug fixing. We used to release the update just to uphold an earlier promise, but we've learned from our mistakes, releasing something (too) buggy or incomplete is not a good practice. We're sorry that you've to wait even longer, but the postponement will offer you a more stable release, which we hope you'll appreciate.
Our update is one week away, we’re almost at the end of our tunnel, as you can imagine we’re super busy but we are excited to share it with you and see what you think. Our progress with the trailer, tutorial and more.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
We get closer and closer to the release now, and we’re buckling down to finish the last portions before the update goes live! In this week’s update you can read about the making of our new trailer, fancy reflections inside of the game, the explorer class and a working prototype of the time spiral, among other things!
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Hello, welcome to another update. We’re happy to announce that we’ll release the Ancestors update on the 2nd December. Our new intern has also arrived, which will without a doubt increase the pace and quality of Crest’s production. In the update you can read about the goings on, for example the children of the game!
Read all about it on the dev blog.
This week has been about the small things, we fixed highlights when selecting followers, performance and notifications. The Socialiser is also almost finished.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
The Underworld is taking shape with fully animated advisors that react differently to statements. We’ve done many different things this week such as dialogue, transitions and more.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
You dive into the world of the Advisors to seek their advice but is it something you should heed? This week we’ve been working hard on the Advisors, finishing up the chronicler and the new follower storage.
Read more about it on our dev blog.
Now the cities have names! This will give the players an easier time when they retell their stories to others.
Read all about the city names, chronicler, time map symbols and new words for you to write commandments with on our dev blog.
In this 100th post on our dev blog you can read about the discovery of words, how you voted on the scaling, a new road map and more.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
That’s right, we’re bringing the old back in style. Being selfless has never felt this good before, in Crest that is. It’s been a busy week and the underworld has now been fully realised in concept art, lots of neat art to look at. The programmers have also been adding both old and new mechanics to the game (such as the distribution mechanic). Lastly we want you to participate in our survey to solve a problem with Crest’s art direction.
Read all about it on our dev blog.
If there exists an afterlife, what would it look like? The place itself, mind you, would it be a physical space or are you just floating around? Well, that’s something we’ve tried to imagine this week. Also part of the team has been at Startup Sweden, what’s that all about? There’s also been a lot of programming work focused on story data gathering and resource management.
Read all about it on the dev blog.
This week has been about pitching at invest in games and small pathfinding fixes.
Read more about it on our
dev blog.
That is indeed the question! Read about our week with pitch preparation, advisor’s dialogue, the Socialiser and more below.
Read more about it on our
dev blog.
The advisors are beginning to take shape and a new associations system is available on our debug branch!
Read more about it on our
dev blog.
Saves are here to save the day! We have now made the save system more automatic so that it’s less likely to happen in the future. Read more about it and the mysterious Chronicler below.
Check out our
dev blog.
Our heroes are back from Germany with great experiences from the GDC and Gamescom! Emelie and Johannes is quite exhausted but most of all happy and satisfied. Lucky ballerinas!
Read all about it and some more good news on our
dev blog.
Hello, welcome to another dev blog. We bring both good and bad news. The bad is that we’ve worked hard to fix the save bugs, without being able to solve it, yet. The good being that we’re stubborn and will never be content until it’s fixed. Also, who is this figure they call The Chronicler?
Read more about all of this on the dev blog.
We are really psyched about the GDC Europe and have been working on all the essentials this week. But don’t fret! We haven’t forgotten about the nasty save bugs. We’re on it. All of it!
dev blog.
Hello everyone! We won't have a dev blog for you this week. Since we've been adding the final touches to the pre-production on Crest’s next expansion -The Ancestor Worship module, we're now good to go! Have a nice weekend!
It’s time to start working on Crest’s next big expansion - The Ancestor Worship module! We’ve spent the week with planning the features and you can read the details over at the dev blog.
Also, we will try and fix the remaining save bugs next week.
As promised, we’ve fixed save bugs, improved the tutorial and added some more feedback to the game. Version 0.40 is now online and you can read the patch notes below, as well as some good news concerning the GDC Europe.
Read more on our Dev Blog
Hello all! Just a general update that we won't have a dev blog this week, we're spending our time on bug fixes and tweaking the systems. A new patch for the Faith Module comes in about two weeks. Since we're only working with what we have there was no point of having a dev blog this week, but it's coming back soon. Have a good weekend!
Hello! We've a hotfix online on Steam now, the most important thing to notice is that we've fixed the saves, but there's a slew of other bug fixes as well. Check the changelog and see for yourself.
Now when we've fixed the most glaring problems with the Faith Module we're going to spend a week or two on a more substantial patch, which will incorporate some of your feedback. Stay tuned!
Hello all, to celebrate that the Faith Module is live we're participating in Steam's summer sale.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/341710
Also, we look forward to hearing your feedback on the forum and from the in-game report function about bugs, suggestions and tweaks. We will send out a few small patches the coming weeks so your feedback is well appreciated during this time.
Enjoy the sale!
The Faith module is alive and kicking! With hopes on making the simulation even richer and to keep you busy. So go play it and see what we’ve been up to. Below you’ll find the changelog, notes about the update and more on the new requirements.
Read more on the dev blog!
Hello all,
We just wanted to remind you that the new update for Crest goes live tomorrow, in the mean time you can watch our new fancy trailer. Please share it around, it would help us a great deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Y_RQIWnj8
But, let's keep the rest for tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Never before has the Crest sounded so eloquent as it does now. With the trailer almost done and with a steaming fresh Faith update, there is much to look forward to. Stay tuned, and tell your friends, because soon you will get to participate in new dimensions of Crest.
Read all about it in our dev blog
This week we have been particularly productive. With a steaming fresh Expertise interface, a nearly completed City doctrine system and an expanded Commandment GUI, we feel a certain satisfaction. If this was not enough, we have taken further steps towards finalizing our latest trailer.
Read all about it in our dev blog
With sights set on the release of the Fatih module, we are now working at full speed to make the gaming experience as interesting and flexible as possible. Along the way we will offer you a few surprises, in various forms and expressions. Because you are curious and we’re excited, we let you read more about it!
Read all about it in our dev blog
As we plan to make Crest available for as many of you as possible, we’re currently working on translating the game into Russian. At the same time, on a continent far far away, the Americans now have the opportunity to experience Crest at MomoCon in Georgia.
Read all about it in our dev blog
This week we’ve all been focusing on preparing for events such as Gotland Game Conference and MomoCon. While Martin have been working on how to be a pro on local television news, the rest of us had to content ourselves with bug fixes and cow taming.
Read all about it in our dev blog
In Crest, cities will go to war under certain circumstances. The reasons however, may vary. Whether it is due to a lack of own resources or envy of other cities’ prosperity or, if they have a low enough disposition towards the other. Keep on reading if you want more bloody details on war, sassy doctrine sculptures and reasons to visit Atlanta, US.
Read all about it on our dev log
In Crest faith is not meant to be absolute, what you tell them will actually impact on how they think of you. We have gone a long way to implement the systems that supports that followers react differently to your commandments, depending on how they feel. They can also get better at things with Expertise. You will be able to read more about these and look at some tasty gifs. Also, what is that bird figure supposed to be?
Read all about it on our dev blog.
In this update you can see the true face of every ideology in Crest, a curious bunch! We’ve also been working on the interface, writing and documenting mechanics and written beautiful tooltips. Read more on the dev blog.
It´s time to introduce these feathered creatures that inhabit desert areas and eat grass, spreading the desert over the islands. So it´s good to keep them in check! Read more about Ostriches, proud Lions and funky Priests on our dev blog.
We’re now deep into the production of the Faith module, which can be reflected in all of the images shown. Read about the upcoming ideologies and other tidbits. Also, we’re in need of proofreaders, please read further on our dev blog!
We can finally give you a more detailed look at what’s to come in the upcoming module. You’re probably interested to know when it will be out as well, so let’s get that out of the way, the module will be out in June! Also, we have a surprise patch! Version 0.35 is now online and you can read the patch notes below, as well as the details about Faith.
Road to the dev blog
New patch is up, and the most interesting news we think you’ll like is that we now have commandment tooltips in the game, and that is certainly no joke!
Read the changelog and other new information on the dev blog.
A new expansion is coming to Crest! For the Love of God, or FTLOG for short is a dating app that will be available inside of the game. With it you can date other gods (real human players) and use our commandment symbols to communicate with them. Dating has never been this easy and fun!
This will be a free update that will automatically be installed. We will release the expansion on the 14th February, 2017 so keep your eyes peeled!
We wish you a pleasant day.
Hello, For the next 10 days you can buy Crest at a reduced price (26% cheaper), the discount will end on the 7th April. http://store.steampowered.com/app/341710 In other news we will update the game on Friday with another patch, but more on that later.
Hello all, This just in, we've decided to sell Crest cheaper next week, so if you want to get it at discount this will be a good opportunity. Starts on Monday.
The cries for translations of god’s word have been many throughout the months on Early Access, but now your prayers have been answered! Tooltips for commandments at last. Also new settlements. And what’s this about an update next week?
Read more on the dev blog.
Welcome followers! Read about our new hotfix (which is now out) and you can also meet our latest newcomer to Crest - the priest! Read more on our dev blog.
This week is full with interesting tidbits, such as that we will grow our team with two new members (producer and another programmer). And of course we have spent a lot of time among fixes. Also, saves will be re-enabled next week, you can also read our explanation why saves sometimes break between big updates.
Read the details on our dev blog.
Hello all, Our first hotfix for the City States module is now live. The most important things to note is that we have fixed bugs in the follower AI, which means that they will now listen to your commandments better, and are not as prone to drop dead immediately. You can check the changelog in the game for all the details. And please keep the bug reports coming, we will spend another week with balancing and bug fixing so your assistance is much appreciated. Enjoy the new hotfix!
Crest
Eat Create Sleep
Eat Create Sleep
2018-03-08
Strategy Simulation Singleplayer
Game News Posts 168
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Mixed
(302 reviews)
http://eatcreatesleep.net
https://store.steampowered.com/app/341710
The Game includes VR Support
Crest Linux [307.61 M]
Crest - Art Book
Pitch
Welcome to Crest, a god game where you are as a parent to your children. Your only way of communication with your subjects is commandments you write for them. How these commandments are interpreted and remembered are not set in stone. What you write and what experiences they have with the environment is the basis for their religion. You might find that your people will change on their own accord over time and use your commandments for their own devices.You have an indirect control of your people with your commandments; consequences of your actions may not always be clear and you will need to be aware of the ever-changing environment and your people's disposition, amongst others their disposition towards you. Expressing yourself is the key of Crest; you will do so through your people and the world they shape.
Key Features
- Write rules for your subjects which will have interesting consequences.
- Many different ways to express your divinity which will be reflected in your followers.
- Immersive feedback which will show you the progress of your people and create a rich history.
- Procedurally generated game world which changes over time and shows wear and tear.
- An expressive game without end-goal where you can focus on building your legacy.
- Your people have free will, focus on leading them rather than controlling their every move.
- Emergent world where weather, vegetation, mineral deposits, drought and animal behavior will create surprises.
Progression and Losing
Every new world you start is unique; you can't have multiple saves of it so you will have to think carefully of what you want to do. If your people die off that world is gone forever as a playable save file. However, you will be able to view the legacy of your old worlds. As long as your people live you can continue playing, and as you progress create your own history.Setting
Crest is an Afrofuturist game that reimagines how humanity arose in the cradle of humankind on the African continent. It's a historical themed game that tries to emulate an advanced iron age civilization that could have existed a few thousand years ago. The setting for the game world, its flora and fauna is based on African biomes, with rainfall determining the tug-of-war between desert, savanna and jungle.- OS: Ubuntu 12.04 or newer
- Processor: 3 GHzMemory: 8 GB RAM
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: 1 GB VRAM and shader model 4.0 compatible
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04 or newer
- Processor: 3 GHzMemory: 16 GB RAM
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1060 or equivalent
- Storage: 1 GB available space
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