It's been a weird year, I don't think anyone would argue against that. For me it's also been a weird few months as I fought hard to get the new world generation engine out and working. On top of that it's been a weird couple of weeks here recently. I actually started having trouble swallowing and was unable to eat my dinner without taking a drink with every bite for a couple weeks. After confirming that there's nothing wrong my neck, they told me I'm probably just stressed out of my mind. I've been taking a nerve relaxant for a few days now and dinner has become much less stressful, so I am grateful for that. So what's causing my stress? Is the big question I've had for the past few days, and I think the majority of my "stress" really stems from a lack of organization. I get e-mails, I get Steam notifications, I get private messages, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, every day. Often times these are questions, sometimes they're bug reports, sometimes they're friendly suggestions. Some of the information I receive takes weeks to respond to. I've had some suggestions in the "suggested-features" channel in our Discord server for over a year now. Not to mention 130,000 lines of code that I page through daily trying to make Solace Crafting better and better without breaking something I may have written back in 2017. Indecision is definitely a big part of that as well. Should I go back and fix this old chunk of code? It might take six hours, and it might break something that could take another 3-4 hours to debug. Should I start looking to add a new feature knowing it will take at least a couple weeks to implement? Sometimes the mix of indecision and new information pouring in every day feels a big overwhelming, to the point that it looks like my body wasn't dealing with it as well as my mind/heart are. In lieu of which, I've spent some time reevaluating what's most important to the game in its current state, but always want to bring the community on board in giving me ideas and guidance as to what version 1.0 really needs to be, and what path we should be taking to get there. To do this, I've setup two things: 1. Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020 Please feel free to write as much as you can in the "anything else you'd like to add" box, I do read all of them, or get a conversation going in Discord. I don't always participate in or respond to every conversation in Discord/Steam, but I do read all of them even if I'm late to the party. 2. Solace Crafting - Bug Tracker I've setup a bug tracker on bitbucket. Up until now I've been manually keeping track of bugs in Discord, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. Bitbucket isn't necessarily my favorite for bug tracking, but it does allow anonymous logins and/or logging in with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account, which I think is important to ensure people willing to post bugs don't turn away the moment they're asked to make a new account. Some of our Discord users have already migrated the majority of the bugs listed in Discord onto the tracker, thank you for that. I'm hoping this will help me keep bugs better organized, and it certainly has shown me that I was indeed starting to lose track of them. The "Bug Tracker" also allows for the posting of, as well as commenting and voting on suggestions. From here on it seems as though there are two general paths to choose from, though both lead to the ultimate goal of version 1.0.
Path A
I continue to add new features following the roadmap. 0.7.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality 0.7.2: Randomly generated towns 0.7.3: Town quests and unlock 0.7.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI 0.7.5: Town defense 0.8.1: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities 0.8.2: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills 0.8.3: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters 0.9.1: Broad scale optimizations 0.9.2: Improve animations 0.9.3: Finalize language support, add full controller support
Path B
I work to polish and solidify that which is already in-game before moving further down the roadmap. I prioritize content that interacts with and expands on already implemented content. 0.7.1: Broad scale optimizations 0.7.2: Improve animations 0.7.3: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities 0.7.4: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills 0.8.1: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters 0.8.2: More recipes/materials/enchants/drops 0.9.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality 0.9.2: Randomly generated towns 0.9.3: Town quests and unlock 0.9.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI 0.9.5: Town defense 0.9.9: Finalize language support, add full controller support Through talking with players here on Steam and on Discord I'm leaning towards Path B more than I ever have. There's a "people pleaser" in me that is constantly trying to get something out every week so to keep my customers (that do pay for my dinner and electricity, thank you so much!) from burning me at the stake. Then on the other side of the mirror I'm usually fine with big names delaying their release dates, because I want them to get it right. I'm not sure what it is inside of me that wants to try and please people quick and fast, but it's definitely a good thing that I've recognized it and am now keeping an eye on it. I do believe that in general quality is more important content, but still, with gaming, fun is number one. That was a wall of text. I almost made it into a video, and do plan to do a video just talking about my thoughts of where we are and where we're going. In any case, we've had an open discussion on the direction of development for a few weeks now. I'm hoping to further that conversation with this post, and hope to reach a conclusion I can latch onto and not look backwards with, at least for a few months. Please do share you opinion on the different possible paths, and thank you in advance to everyone that fills out the survey! Kyle Postlewait
[ 2020-11-02 07:18:41 CET ] [ Original post ]
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
- Solace Crafting Linux [2.77 G]
Background
My name is Kyle Postlewait (35) and I got into game development years ago because I can't find the game that I want to play. I am not a veteran game developer. I do not have any published AAA titles. I am self-taught and I make mistakes. Having said that, I'm tired of survival crafting games being abandoned, focusing only on PvP and guns, or turning into major time sinks. I quit my day job in February of 2018 to focus on Solace Crafting full-time, and am doing everything I can to make a great fantasy survival RPG despite the tremendous challenge that is game development. Please don't buy into early access expecting a fully polished AAA game and then give it a bad review. In return, I promise to make sure that this game is NEVER ABANDONED. If sales are more than enough for me to survive, then I can hire more help. First and foremost I will always work to secure financial longevity and legal stability, and maintain all intellectual rights, never selling power to sponsors, publishers, or anything that could endanger continued development.
Early access ends when there is enough content to constitute selling the game without the above warning. Even after we leave early access the game will continue to be improved and expanded on, and has a long list of planned features post early access including other dimensions and multiplayer.
All features listed on this page are undergoing constant improvement and are subject to change.
Short description
Solace Crafting is a crafting and building heavy survival RPG focused around player crafting, building towns, and summoning NPC townspeople. With an open class system, open-recipe crafting, customizable enchanting, modular building, defensive structures, town management, distance-based difficulty, and an infinite game world, players are free to move and level at their own pace. With an uncapped leveling system you can try to push further than anyone ever has. You can try and make the ultimate sword, staff, or anything, thanks to complete control over all recipe settings. Build massive towns full of NPCs not limited by physics-based construction. Seek out rare enchants and exotic resources.About the game
SurvivalSolace Crafting starts out much like similar survival games: you need to make clothes to avoid freezing to death, you need to find food to keep from starving to death, and you should build shelter from the dangers of nightfall.
Crafting
Once you are surviving it's time to evolve. Build resource processing and crafting facilities to create improved weapons and armor. Leveling up your professions levels up your recipes and allows you to unlock new recipes and crafting abilities. Our crafting system is quite unique, allowing even the creation of custom sets. I definitely recommend you watch the getting started video available above.
Role-Playing Game
Once you're armed and ready it's time to push back against evil and it's minions. Level-up and develop your character using an open-class system of evolving skill trees. Mix melee, ranged, magic, and heals however you like. Skills are being designed with fun and visual uniqueness in mind, not minimalism and strict balance.
Solace Crafting
Crafting and placing a solace will allow you to instantly return to it from any other solace in the world, letting you create your own points of interest. Be careful though as the further you travel in any direction, the more difficult everything becomes. In order to level up a solace you'll have to defend it from waves of attackers that will try and stop the procedure. Build static defenses to help protect your solaces during upgrades.
Town Management
An upgraded solace allows you to summon townspeople. In order to summon higher level NPCs you'll need to push deeper into the wild, setting up towns of various sizes as you go.
Astral Travel (not yet under development)
When the time is right you will find your way to the Elemental Planes. Most heavily affected by the infectious anger and hatred, these have becomes dimensions of extreme danger, both environmental and sentient. You must find out where the hatred stems from and find a way to put an end to it once and for all. The Elemental Planes are also the birthplace of all resources mundane and exotic alike. Only here will you find the purest, most powerful resources for crafting and enchanting equipment worthy of a hero.
Developed by a gamer
I started learning how to make games years ago because the design decisions of so many of the games I played often made so little sense to me. Here are some of the design decisions I refined over the years that I do my best to uphold:- No pay-to-win, no pay-to-play, no paid DLC, no gacha or gamble mechanics
- No metered progression
- Level any and all professions freely, no arbitrary caps
- Minimal sub-ingredients, minimal crafting and refining timers
- Completely open, point and level based branching skill trees
- Multiple, incremental skill points every level
- Classic roles, not forced balance. Some classes may be harder than others.
- Unlimited player levels
- Completely open physics-based world, no off-limits
- No "realistic" building physics that destroy everything
- Unlimited access to parallel realities (alternate seeds)
- Shape and color your avatars freely instead of using preset races
- Allow alternate characters in the same world
I know how to, and will accomplish everything written here. It's only a matter of time. If the game sells I can hire help with what I'm bad at and focus on what I'm good at.
I know a lot of fans of the survival genre are pretty jaded, myself included, after so many titles have lost their leadership, changed projects, or plain given up. I'm here every day hoping to heal that sore and would very much appreciate your $15 support if any of this interests you. There are months of frequent patch notes and forum discussions between me and players here on Steam as proof that I'm capable of more than a couple new items after weeks of silence, something far too common in game development!
Multiplayer, and all of its many features will absolutely be implemented when a much more content rich single player experience has been achieved. Multiplayer like single-player will be PvE oriented and grief prevention/anti-cheat will always take top priority. Turning single-player towns into multiplayer guildhalls complete with defense quests and special achievements is something I very much look forward to, and have quite a few plans for.
Unix and Mac support will be tested and released soon.
The best is yet to come!
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+
- Processor: Dual Core 3 ghzMemory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 680
- Storage: 8 GB available space
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