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.

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Have a nice weekend!