Hey all, hope everyone is well. It's been a rough few months, I'm barely making enough money to get by, and well, that's pretty demoralizing. I started playing with other projects and thinking I needed to try and get something new and decent out, and quick, with all the skills I've gained over the past 4-5 years. That's of course kind of silly, and after spending some time working on some different projects I realized more clearly that that's just not who I am nor what I want to do. I may have to take up some supplementary work to keep all of this going, but the third option of just releasing as 1.0 early and seeing how it does would honestly be a disservice to the game and everything I've worked on these past years. So I'm back, working to polish up and integrate on the road to 1.0. For starters this patch introduces a few small performance improvements, as well as one pretty large one that was running very redundant checks, especially when hungry or thirsty. There's still room for improvement, but this patch is already much better with handling passive stats and quickly repeating buffs. I've also done a fair amount of what is called profiling, where you put an application under the microscope and really watch each piece to see who's slowing things down. While doing this I have identified shadows, grass, and sky rendering to be the three main culprits damaging performance. With this knowledge via actual hard numbers I've implemented Low, Medium, and High video quality preset buttons to the in-game video settings. Each button has a tooltip as well, but will in short primarily tone down grass, shadows, and cloud rendering in those orders. I don't have a super fast machine (hence the poor frame rate of the trailer =o=) but can range from 45-130 fps depending on the settings. There's still very much a number of things to be done for improving performance, and I consider that entire profession a constant work in progress. I would like to focus on a few different things these next couple weeks, one of which I brought up in Discord and would appreciate more input on.
Character customization
The current system is "neat" in that it allows you to stretch your arms and tummy and things like that, but mostly just ends up with silly characters rather than being some sort of high level customization engine. In short it's really kind of a gimmick, though I've been proud of it's presence as it is something that's not all that easy to do. My main question being, how would you feel about a less robust, but more performant, likely prettier, character customization system? This would likely be reduced to things like height, skin color, hair, hair color, some different faces and easily enough things like fangs, horns, etc., though probably nothing fine tune-able like arm size, foot size, etc. Facial features could be a thing without interfering with what would likely be entirely new weapons and armor, but probably not something included in the initial system. I would also likely be able to add a much greater variety of weapons and armor as the current system requires things rigged specifically for it.
Character controller
The current character controller uses a mix on non-root based animations and physics, to the effect of very smooth movement that doesn't necessarily reflect what is actually going on in the animations. I get a lot of reviews that people feel it's "clanky" for example. Personally it's not something that bothers me, but it's clearly something quite a few people notice much more than I do. I am looking into replacing the current controller with a root-based system which means that the animations would actually be driving the movement of the character.
Standing out
A lot of Unity games have kind of a Unity look to them. I've, partially subconsciously, tried to make the game look a bit like reality, likely because that's what I'm used to looking at. I'd like to play around with altering the colors more extremely to create a stronger fantasy feel and to help screenshots stand out further from other games. So, there's a bit of uncertainty in the near future, with a number of possibilities still up in the air. It's a big project and there's still some things left to do to tie it all together. Hopefully a 1.0 release is received well enough to merit continued work on the game post-1.0. Thank you as always to everyone that has supported the game thus far, and my apologies development has been slowing down as the months add up. v 0.8.1.0 2022.06.06 - Fixed some performance issues, several primarily related hunger and thirst - Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin. To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. Join us in Discord! Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon! Check out the bug / suggestion tracker
[ 2022-06-06 13:27:11 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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