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Patch 0.8.0 now live + Development update
At the bottom of this post there is a condensed list of patch notes that lists the changes between the current live version and the new live version, and I've covered these topics in greater detail in previous posts, but there are a couple of big changes that I'll go over. The math behind all systems in-game has been updated to a shifting scale of values that adjusts itself based on the level of the player. This means that at level 0 having 1 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty, and likewise at level 50 having 51 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty. If however you have 75 strength at level 50, you will be receiving a variety of bonuses including increased health, increased melee and ranged damage, etc. The reason for this is two fold. For one, the old system was a form of linear progression where an attribute bonus difference between levels 0 and 1 would be something like 100%, but over time, the difference between two levels would drop down to numbers like 0.1%. Secondly, because levels are infinite, health and damage numbers were capable of going beyond the capabilities of 32-bit numbers. This new system solves these and other problems by having a base set of values that any "balanced" character will have, and a scale of possible bonuses and penalties that keep the math under the hood at manageable and balanced numbers regardless of your level. It is however fun to see your damage and health numbers go up, so these numbers are scaled, though only visually, when presented to the player.
The 4 Archetype skill trees have been redesigned and 8 Job skill trees have been added now as well. This amounts to around 240 skill nodes now available, and all characters upgrading from the live version will have their adventuring skills reset so they can reassign their points as desired. Monster classes and abilities have also been added to the game, though there are still only a handful of monsters that have been equipped with varying classes and abilities. Almost all of the old animations have been entirely replaced with new animations. Animation has always been a weak point of mine, and in studying up a bit I came to understand that a lot of the animation I was using were built for more "toon" shaped characters and so don't properly translate when fit onto standard human shaped models. The new animations that have now replaced most of those old animations are built specifically for human models. I also completely did away with the old animator, which is a compilation of state machines that blend what animations should be playing on the player at any given moment, for a fully scripted animator. Manually creating an animator can involve hundreds if not 1,000+ mouse clicks, and locating a problem can be just as difficult. To avoid that, as I do want to add more animations and more "categories" like 1-handed melee, 2-handed melee, etc., I wrote a machine that can construct an animator purely from code. As such there may be an animation state or two that I have overlooked, but can address easily if enough once brought to my attention.
Being honest here, this is not everything I wanted to get into 0.8.0 before pushing it to the live branch. There is a lot still under construction, including unfinished skills, a lack of skill animations, audio, and visual effects, as well as some lesser features that have been temporarily disabled. This patch has been in the works for months and with every week that passes the differences between the live branch and the beta branch grow farther apart. This has led to an increased difficulty in managing bug reports among other things, and I really need to push these changes live to get a better grip on the current state of the game before moving forward. Because of this there may some small problems that were fixed on the live branch that get reintroduced with the
I've also spoken a few times over the past 12 months about a growing heaviness in regards to development of Solace Crafting. The project has over 180,000 lines of code, and I've spent something like 10,000 hours on it, in this chair, at home, alone. It's been a very difficult journey thus far, and I have no intention of ending it. Having said that, over the past couple months I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am extremely burnt out on working on a single solo title for a straight four and a half years now. When I put together the game's core design back in 2017 it was full of a lot of great ideas that I was never able to realize on my own and over time had to repeatedly shorten the roadmap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a learning process that I had to go through. Despite repeatedly redesigning the roadmap, my optimism of being able to put together all things that I wanted to in maybe a couple years max, we're still here and SC still needs quite a few more hours even after 50 months of dedicated development. In truth, the first month of early access back in January of 2018, was one of the best selling months I've ever had, and it fueled my optimism that I would very much be able to afford more paid freelance work than I ever actually was able to. In reality, one month not long after that I made less than 500$, and overall it's been an ongoing struggle, not necessarily to pay my bills, but to refrain from doing more of the things that we all want to do. This over time is a weird form stress that I never really had experienced prior to starting my own business. I have been aware of these different angles of stress slowly building up on me and pledged at the start of 2021, that 2021 would be the year that we would leave early access, for better or for worse. Then later in the year, after wrestling with whether to go through with it or not for several months, I decided to start the 0.8 branch by revamping the game math and adding more skills to the game. This was a massive undertaking, and I should have been more aware of that truth by then. The skill trees are something I designed back in 2017, and have always been something I've really wanted to implement, but in hindsight, they may have been better left for a post-1.0 release patch. Sure enough, after several months working on 0.8, I was completely exhausted. I tried for months to take breaks during the week, but no one is more aware of the bugs and shortcomings of the game than I am, and the desire to create better is a constant thorn in my head when I'm only "stepping away" for a bit. A few weeks ago I was generously gifted a VR kit and finally decided to put Solace Crafting down for real, albeit of course temporarily. I "officially" have started working on a new title and did nothing but that for two weeks straight, and have already made a lot of progress in the game itself. That four and a half years of experience has made a very big difference, not only with the speed at which I can develop things, but my ability to judge what's important, what's not, how long something is going to take, and so on. I'm still only a little over two weeks into development of the game, and not ready to start blabbering about it, but I need, not want, need to be open my actively working on something else, as that has become a necessity for my own well-being. Having taken a few solid weeks to do something else, my burnt motivation for SC has had some time to heal and I've been gathering bug reports and reassessing the current situation and how to best approaching going forward from here. I do believe that just slapping the "good enough" sticker on it and seeing what happens if I release out of early access is not something I can morally get behind, but I do also think that for my own well-being, both mentally and hopefully financially, that focusing intently on adding nothing else to game, but rather polishing and improving what is so that I can release a version 1.0 and temporarily switch into "maintenance mode" where I only address problems and bugs, while I work on something else for a while. If the game generates enough interest (sales), then I can continue to put my resources (money & time) back into the game in the hopes of turning it into all of the things I want it to be. What I've come to realize recently though is that Big Kitty Games is more important than Solace Crafting. If Big Kitty Games can thrive, then I can always come back to Solace Crafting regardless of what happens over these next few months. But there seems to be a very real chance that I will dry up and run out of money if I stubbornly keep trying to "muscle" my way through development of my first love. I've spent the past couple days working again on SC, and am planning to work on SC for the next few days, but it's likely I'll be working on my second title on and off from now on. I hope I'm able to get SC to a solid 1.0 release in working condition over the next few months, and hope it is able to make enough money for me to keep working on it well beyond 1.0! Best wishes as always, Kyle Postlewait AKA Malkere v 0.7.8.10 -> v 0.8.0.21 condensed patch notes - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Added poison to several animals - Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person - Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried - Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20 - Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS - Added a monster/animal ability system - Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps - Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log - Improved block and parry logic - Changed fonts to the alchemy profession - Removed Recall mana usage - Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress - Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI - Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets - Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI - Added ascend and descend specific key bindings - Changed attribute and statistic math to new system - Increased flattening around procedural towers - Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro - Added a /checkheightmaps console command - Fixed paper being unstackable - Improved the strong harvesting skills descrpitions to explain that they share a single hotkey - Improved terraforming performance - Enabled terraforming in multi-player - Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings - Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor Latest changes to beta: v 0.8.0.21 2022.03.31 - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Repositioned tool/weapon holding position/rotation You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
[ 2022-03-31 14:43:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
This patch has been a long time in the works, and in truth is not yet 100% complete. In this post I'll go into What's new, why this patch is being pushed live incomplete, and what's been going on here at Big Kitty Games.
- What this patch brings to the live branch
At the bottom of this post there is a condensed list of patch notes that lists the changes between the current live version and the new live version, and I've covered these topics in greater detail in previous posts, but there are a couple of big changes that I'll go over. The math behind all systems in-game has been updated to a shifting scale of values that adjusts itself based on the level of the player. This means that at level 0 having 1 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty, and likewise at level 50 having 51 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty. If however you have 75 strength at level 50, you will be receiving a variety of bonuses including increased health, increased melee and ranged damage, etc. The reason for this is two fold. For one, the old system was a form of linear progression where an attribute bonus difference between levels 0 and 1 would be something like 100%, but over time, the difference between two levels would drop down to numbers like 0.1%. Secondly, because levels are infinite, health and damage numbers were capable of going beyond the capabilities of 32-bit numbers. This new system solves these and other problems by having a base set of values that any "balanced" character will have, and a scale of possible bonuses and penalties that keep the math under the hood at manageable and balanced numbers regardless of your level. It is however fun to see your damage and health numbers go up, so these numbers are scaled, though only visually, when presented to the player.
The 4 Archetype skill trees have been redesigned and 8 Job skill trees have been added now as well. This amounts to around 240 skill nodes now available, and all characters upgrading from the live version will have their adventuring skills reset so they can reassign their points as desired. Monster classes and abilities have also been added to the game, though there are still only a handful of monsters that have been equipped with varying classes and abilities. Almost all of the old animations have been entirely replaced with new animations. Animation has always been a weak point of mine, and in studying up a bit I came to understand that a lot of the animation I was using were built for more "toon" shaped characters and so don't properly translate when fit onto standard human shaped models. The new animations that have now replaced most of those old animations are built specifically for human models. I also completely did away with the old animator, which is a compilation of state machines that blend what animations should be playing on the player at any given moment, for a fully scripted animator. Manually creating an animator can involve hundreds if not 1,000+ mouse clicks, and locating a problem can be just as difficult. To avoid that, as I do want to add more animations and more "categories" like 1-handed melee, 2-handed melee, etc., I wrote a machine that can construct an animator purely from code. As such there may be an animation state or two that I have overlooked, but can address easily if enough once brought to my attention.
- Why this patch is being pushed live now
Being honest here, this is not everything I wanted to get into 0.8.0 before pushing it to the live branch. There is a lot still under construction, including unfinished skills, a lack of skill animations, audio, and visual effects, as well as some lesser features that have been temporarily disabled. This patch has been in the works for months and with every week that passes the differences between the live branch and the beta branch grow farther apart. This has led to an increased difficulty in managing bug reports among other things, and I really need to push these changes live to get a better grip on the current state of the game before moving forward. Because of this there may some small problems that were fixed on the live branch that get reintroduced with the
- Regarding the current state of development
I've also spoken a few times over the past 12 months about a growing heaviness in regards to development of Solace Crafting. The project has over 180,000 lines of code, and I've spent something like 10,000 hours on it, in this chair, at home, alone. It's been a very difficult journey thus far, and I have no intention of ending it. Having said that, over the past couple months I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am extremely burnt out on working on a single solo title for a straight four and a half years now. When I put together the game's core design back in 2017 it was full of a lot of great ideas that I was never able to realize on my own and over time had to repeatedly shorten the roadmap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a learning process that I had to go through. Despite repeatedly redesigning the roadmap, my optimism of being able to put together all things that I wanted to in maybe a couple years max, we're still here and SC still needs quite a few more hours even after 50 months of dedicated development. In truth, the first month of early access back in January of 2018, was one of the best selling months I've ever had, and it fueled my optimism that I would very much be able to afford more paid freelance work than I ever actually was able to. In reality, one month not long after that I made less than 500$, and overall it's been an ongoing struggle, not necessarily to pay my bills, but to refrain from doing more of the things that we all want to do. This over time is a weird form stress that I never really had experienced prior to starting my own business. I have been aware of these different angles of stress slowly building up on me and pledged at the start of 2021, that 2021 would be the year that we would leave early access, for better or for worse. Then later in the year, after wrestling with whether to go through with it or not for several months, I decided to start the 0.8 branch by revamping the game math and adding more skills to the game. This was a massive undertaking, and I should have been more aware of that truth by then. The skill trees are something I designed back in 2017, and have always been something I've really wanted to implement, but in hindsight, they may have been better left for a post-1.0 release patch. Sure enough, after several months working on 0.8, I was completely exhausted. I tried for months to take breaks during the week, but no one is more aware of the bugs and shortcomings of the game than I am, and the desire to create better is a constant thorn in my head when I'm only "stepping away" for a bit. A few weeks ago I was generously gifted a VR kit and finally decided to put Solace Crafting down for real, albeit of course temporarily. I "officially" have started working on a new title and did nothing but that for two weeks straight, and have already made a lot of progress in the game itself. That four and a half years of experience has made a very big difference, not only with the speed at which I can develop things, but my ability to judge what's important, what's not, how long something is going to take, and so on. I'm still only a little over two weeks into development of the game, and not ready to start blabbering about it, but I need, not want, need to be open my actively working on something else, as that has become a necessity for my own well-being. Having taken a few solid weeks to do something else, my burnt motivation for SC has had some time to heal and I've been gathering bug reports and reassessing the current situation and how to best approaching going forward from here. I do believe that just slapping the "good enough" sticker on it and seeing what happens if I release out of early access is not something I can morally get behind, but I do also think that for my own well-being, both mentally and hopefully financially, that focusing intently on adding nothing else to game, but rather polishing and improving what is so that I can release a version 1.0 and temporarily switch into "maintenance mode" where I only address problems and bugs, while I work on something else for a while. If the game generates enough interest (sales), then I can continue to put my resources (money & time) back into the game in the hopes of turning it into all of the things I want it to be. What I've come to realize recently though is that Big Kitty Games is more important than Solace Crafting. If Big Kitty Games can thrive, then I can always come back to Solace Crafting regardless of what happens over these next few months. But there seems to be a very real chance that I will dry up and run out of money if I stubbornly keep trying to "muscle" my way through development of my first love. I've spent the past couple days working again on SC, and am planning to work on SC for the next few days, but it's likely I'll be working on my second title on and off from now on. I hope I'm able to get SC to a solid 1.0 release in working condition over the next few months, and hope it is able to make enough money for me to keep working on it well beyond 1.0! Best wishes as always, Kyle Postlewait AKA Malkere v 0.7.8.10 -> v 0.8.0.21 condensed patch notes - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Added poison to several animals - Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person - Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried - Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20 - Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS - Added a monster/animal ability system - Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps - Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log - Improved block and parry logic - Changed fonts to the alchemy profession - Removed Recall mana usage - Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress - Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI - Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets - Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI - Added ascend and descend specific key bindings - Changed attribute and statistic math to new system - Increased flattening around procedural towers - Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro - Added a /checkheightmaps console command - Fixed paper being unstackable - Improved the strong harvesting skills descrpitions to explain that they share a single hotkey - Improved terraforming performance - Enabled terraforming in multi-player - Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings - Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor Latest changes to beta: v 0.8.0.21 2022.03.31 - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Repositioned tool/weapon holding position/rotation You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
[ 2022-03-31 14:43:22 CET ] [ Original post ]
Solace Crafting
Big Kitty Games
Developer
Big Kitty Games
Publisher
2018-01-16
Release
Game News Posts:
416
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
Mostly Positive
(776 reviews)
The Game includes VR Support
Public Linux Depots:
- 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!
MINIMAL SETUP
- 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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