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.

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Have a nice weekend!