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!

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Have a nice weekend!