Introduction

While taking a break from bug fixing I have been focusing on redesigning the research system. I have been revisiting the underlying design for the research system and wanted to share my thoughts and plans with the community.

Initial Research System

The original motivation for the research system was simple: provide the player with a means to learn new item recipes without having to look them up on a wiki. With many of the games In the crafting sandbox genre it is almost a necessity to use a wiki. Recipe discovery alone is hard enough and then on top of that there are hundreds of items to memorize. I was never a fan of this so I wanted to avoid it in Crea. The idea for researching was to allow players to discover new items and then from those items learn what they are capable of making. In the beginning the initial design worked out reasonably well. There were few items and it was rewarding to come back to your base and learn what you could now make. However, this was definitely not without fault. Too many materials were being consumed - especially your more coveted ones. There was also the problem with the growing number of items in the game it was a grind to learn all the recipes. To combat these problems new features were added on top of the researching: item sets, researching multiple items per material, and scraps to name a few. With these changes though some underlying fundamental issues were revealed.

Feedback on Researching

Thanks to everyone's feedback I compiled a list of issues with researching which I used for the redesign:

• Too many items consumed for no clear reward
• Seemingly random - a blackbox
• Unclear when an item can be researched. Sometimes it can and other times it can’t
• Players don’t learn what they can actually craft which defeats original design purpose
• No clear progression
• Too many items hidden behind researching

After much deliberation I realized that two design goals were at odds with each other. I wanted players to be able to discover new items and discover new recipes that they can craft and I also wanted a sense of progression with direction. Since there is already a great deal of discovery in Crea I decided to sacrifice the extremely open discovery aspect in exchange for more consistent direction and progression.

Redesigned Researching

There are now more basic recipes that player's will start with. Besides those and recipes learned from scrolls, all items are now split up into item sets. Each item set contains a list of recipes that will be learned and the materials required to research it. The required materials will be consumed when researching and only requires a single button click. At the beginning, only a few item sets are available to research. New item sets become unlocked by researching sets and defeating bosses. This means researching will be much faster, consume less materials, each recipe is learned all at once, and you will know exactly what you need (materials) and will be getting (recipes). This also means no need to display partially learned recipes or material research progress. The best part is you wont have to keep checking to see if old materials can be researched again.

Conclusion

I'm overly excited about this redesign because I believe it will fix many issues that Crea. Additionally, it gives me good reason to re-evaluate many other aspects of Crea's progression such as the boss leveling, equipment level requirements, materials in item recipe, and crafting station progression. I am going to try to group all of these changes together but before I can get too deep into that I will be returning to bug fixing mode soon.