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!