Producers Letter #1

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first Producers Letter for Solace Crafting. Im Fab, and today Ill guide you through the plan elaborated to take Solace Crafting beyond its current limitations and into a future where its creators original vision for this game is fully realized. Through this, well be creating for you an experience that takes everything youve enjoyed about the game and gradually takes it to the next level.
First off, lets celebrate the longevity of this project and the dedication put into it by its solo creator and developer. Creating a game like Solace Crafting is no small feat, bringing it to the market and ensuring its ongoing support and further development, all by oneself, is definitely a tall order. Many of you have put yourselves behind this game in appreciation of its creators hard work, ceaseless commitment and transparent character. It is the reason why I am here as well today.

Acknowledging the Journey So Far

First, lets recognize the dedication behind Solace Crafting. Created by a solo developer, its no small feat to build a game of this scale and depth. Kyles relentless hard work and transparency have won the loyalty of many, and its also why Im here today. Over the past few years, Ive supported the game in various ways behind the scenes and some might have seen my name mysteriously featured in the no less mysterious Associates section of the Discord. Recently, Ive taken a more active role in structuring the next chapter of Solace Crafting, where Ill be pooling more and more of my resources into helping bring the game into its future.

Whats Next: A Roadmap for the Future

This letter is a glimpse into the key areas well be focusing on as we move forward, with clear goals to enhance your experience.

Gameplay Enhancements

The first order of business is improving the core gameplay. Right now, the game offers a vast world to explore, but some aspects, like character movement, combat, and interaction with the environment, feel limited in various ways and for various reasons. Well be making those experiences more seamless and enjoyable, allowing you to better navigate the vast worlds and interact with everything in them with greater freedom and satisfaction. Creature AI will also be revamped, making encounters more varied and exciting, whether youre engaging in combat or using stealth and, ultimately as well, interacting with and relating to NPCs.

A More Meaningful Procedural World

Procedural generation has always been the absolute core element of Solace Crafting, offering endless exploration. However, procedural worlds can lack a sense of meaning or narrative or finality, by their very nature. To address this, were improving the quality of the content generated, focusing on tighter, more thematically rich environments. Youll discover more engaging landscapes with distinct biomes that make exploration more rewarding. Resources will be found in logical places, encouraging more immersive and purposeful discovery. The soul of Khora, the dimension that Solace Crafting takes place in, its history, and its mysteries will also be woven more deeply into gameplay, ensuring that youre not just collecting resources, but uncovering the narrative layers of the world as you go, and weaving your own story into them.

Visual Uplift

Visuals will be a key area of improvement as we replace, one by one, every asset in the game, as well as the games post-processing and visual flair towards something more cohesive, richer, colorful and atmospheric. We have long been aware of the fact that the games dated look has put a ceiling on its ability to provide the visually immersive experience we want, and in a game like this, immersion is key. Open worlds dont need AAA treatment nor do they need the latest technology to satisfy and some very old games in that genre still deliver very rich experiences. So fear not, we arent going to overload the game with a lot of fancy high end visual features. But from the way the terrain itself is generated and structured, to what 3D models, textures and shaders give it its appearance; what atmospherics play out to express light, shadow and weather, and finally the look of characters, NPCs and enemies, everything will be reviewed and improved. This is going to be a long process but one that is vital for your comfort as well as to keep people wanting to come and experience Khora for all that it has to offer.

Enriching the Lore

We spoke of contents previously. Also among the revamp is the worlds identity, its themes and its overall mood are also going to feature in this uplift: currently, the game does not quite have room to make you feel as though you are in an actual world with a fullness and richness of lore and character. The game plays out within a very potential-rich multiverse concept which has yet to be mined for its wealth. The way we will be approaching lore is not merely by dropping tidbits of information here and there for your consumption but rather by restructuring from the ground up the purpose, meaning, place and history of everything in that world. Your identity as a game character, the reason youre here, the long-term of your goals, the resources that you collect, the creatures that you fight, the structures that you build, the NPCs that you attract and encounter, as well as the very process of creating new worlds: all this will mesh together into a grand narrative that well roll out over time. Again, Solace Crafting will not shift genres or turn into something it never was nor was ever meant to be. Simply, we will make sure to enhance and tighten what is current to the game into a richer and deeper presentation where things no longer exist in isolation or simply for gameplay purposes.

A Vision of the Future

If all of this seems ambitious, well it is. We have spent the past few months planning it all out, writing pages upon pages of planned updates and material. My personal belief is that the work initially done for Solace Crafting is massive and, just as your patience and passion, deserves to be honored with a vision for the future that is sharp and decisive and takes you and the game into new territories. We all play games like this for adventure, escape, achievement, discovery and the satisfaction of some fantasy fulfillment: fighter, explorer, builder, storyteller the list goes on. On the back of Kyles work and the wealth of systems and technology put into Solace Crafting, we will build something that resonates with the best that fantasy and RPGs have to offer, to bring the game to its full potential. Thank you for being part of this journey. Were excited about this reveal, about the coming updates, and to continue building something extraordinary together. Stay tuned as we not only deliver more updates and clarity but also find ways to involve you more in this exciting new phase of the games existence. Fab

[ 2024-10-10 12:35:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

Survival
Solace 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!