Multiplayer, towns, and villagers

Multiplayer is definitely all the rave at the moment, and for good reason. I too much prefer to play on an online server, even though I'm a solo player, as it's just neat running into other player's creations, and knowing that there is more going on in the world than just whatever I'm doing.

Multiplayer is also quite draining. It's not the type of development one might call "creative," but more like patching up hundreds of small holes, and upgrading things that already work single-player so that they also work multiplayer. After about 200 hours of working on it in December, and again here the past 3 weeks, I find myself extremely demotivated and grasping for sanity. Though the sense of accomplishment is very rewarding.

So I'm putting multiplayer down again, or half-down anyway, so I can get back to developing the core game and maintain my sanity.

A number of recent additions, and what I talked about in the last post (which was a dreadfully long time ago, my apologies for that), have been in preparation for the next step in towns and villagers.

At its core Solace Crafting is about harvesting, crafting, and building, but there have been a number of shortcuts taken to get in content that have bypassed the need for more harvesting, crafting, or building. For example, money is used to upgrade most anything to do with towns and villagers, and sure, money is acquired best by selling crafted equipment, but I believe the upgrades themselves would work better requiring crafted goods themselves.

1. Harvesters

Harvesters will currently harvest away without rest producing an infinite amount of resources, regardless of where they are. Recently I have started introducing systems so that each town now understands what biome it is located in, and from that, estimates how many resources are available for harvesters in the area. This system is intended to make having a mining outpost in the mountains a worthwhile effort for securing a steady source of ore. I also think it would make more sense to have harvesters gather a single sum of resources per day, say around 6PM, rather than 1 per 30 seconds, for example.

However, the goal here isn't to force players to build a ton of harvesters, in fact I believe we should only ever need 1 of each. Once you have a miner, you will only need to "connect" them to whatever your best mining outpost is. Not to say that you couldn't summon more if you wanted to, but not that you should need to.

2. Outposts

Currently the need to build proxy outposts is primarily generated by the need for resource scanners. Without a village of harvesters upgraded with resource scanning, it's very difficult to find higher rarity resources. In the long run this means you end up with a variety of scattered villages that you never actually return to. I want to remedy this need so that you only ever need one main village to grow into a city, which then makes use of harvesting outposts, like extensions, to expand your harvesting capabilities. Resource scanners can then be built and setup around these harvesting outposts without the need for summoning and training new harvesters.

3. Villagers

Summoning villagers right now is just the push of a button, but I want to develop this into a much more robust system and have had some good conversations about how to do it with players in our Discord server. Here's where my thoughts are at present.

Villagers should be scattered throughout the world in villages that a player can complete tasks for to increase their reputation with, allowing them the opportunity to recruit villagers to come and work for them. If no villages have been found yet, "primitive" villagers can be always be summoned, but will be limited in their abilities.

Villagers should be viewable via a global list that shows all of your current citizens, where they are, and what they're doing. Each citizen can then have their details viewed including skills, stats, and equipment. Skills can be developed over time the longer a villager is assigned to a specific job, equipment can be crafted by players and given to villagers to improve upon their stats, and not unlike resource rarities, some villagers will have better base stats and skills than others, though finding them may not be easy. If however you find a legendary villager that already has mining skills, that doesn't mean you can't use them for quarrying or whatever you like, simply that it will take less time for them to level up whatever skills they may already have to begin with.

4. Building Progression

There are already building prerequisites in the form of a storehouse is required before building any harvesters, for example, but I would like to expand this system to also require special crafted materials to be acquired before higher tech buildings can be placed. A carpenter for example will be able to turn lumber and metal into wooden construction materials. A number of construction materials will then be required for most higher tech buildings, and for upgrading lower tech buildings. A mason will then be able to craft stone construction materials, and so on.

5. Trainers

This may still be a bit down the road, but rather than just locking crafting recipes and abilities behind levels, I think it would a more engaging and fun experience if there were research items that needed to be gathered and crafted in order to unlock special skill points to be spent on crafting recipes, villager upgrades, and so on. Eventually I would like to add adventuring "jobs" and classes, likewise locked behind upgraded trainers and quests.

Some of the special resources and "town encounters" required for the purposes of research and construction materials are already in-game as I work now to tie things together, expanding on the city-building aspects. Supporter input is important to me, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on these subjects!