solacecrafting

Solace Crafting v1.0 - Now Live!

After some fussing with a Steam bug I have released the game from Early Access. It's been a roller coasters of emotions all year, and at this point, I still have no idea how this is going to turn out. There were and are many different arguments in many different directions for "what's best," but more often than not, you need to just jump in the river and see where it takes you.

The next few weeks will likely determine how I am able to move forward from here on, so it's kind of just a wa...

Development Update - July 2022

It's been a long slow year thus far for an intense few reasons, and it's time to make some decisions and hope for the best.

Due to declining revenue, compounded by a still quite large number of loose ends generated by poor foresight and a general lack of experience during the early years of development, I have decided to release Solace Crafting from early access at the end of the month.

There's still a lot of work to do between now and then, and quite frankly for quite some time a...

Big Kitty Games, Solace Crafting, and myself

I recorded a video in January to welcome in the New Year with, and to update the community on myself and the game, but I really wasn't happy with it and over the course of January I re-recorded it twice. Eventually I uploaded this video to YouTube, and thought that I set it to unlisted as I still wasn't happy with it, and started to realize I wasn't really even sure about what it was I was really trying to get...

Entering v 0.8

Finishing up the 0.7 branch, I'll be starting today on 0.8 which is primarily focused on combat, player skills, monster abilities, as well as an in-depth overhaul of combat math. I thought I'd go over the planned changes a bit here and there as player input makes all the difference!

Player Skills

The current skill trees in-game are the four main Archetypes. Each Archetype is planned to branch off into two different Jobs at a minimum level of 10, with each job then...

Development update

Hello lovely Patrons.
I'm so sorry this page has been so dry this year.

This video has been in the works for a long time and covers a number of topics I've been scared to talk about. My continued determination to stay away from publishers, the mental stress of working on a single title by yourself for four years that I am deep in the effects of, and how I am trying to cope and improve amidst a lot of indecision and difficulty.

It's not a video I can summarize very well into tex...

Just got to say thanks!

I really just wanted to take a few minutes to stop and say thank you to everyone here on Patreon. Your support has really kept my head above water through these tough times.

Yesterday I streamed 8 hours of my work day and today I streamed 9 hours, and honestly I'm really enjoying it! It's been a bit of a lonely job just answering people posts and chatting in Discord from time to time. Working, with people making comments in real-time has been really motivating me this week and I'm reall...

Roadmap, survey, videos, and merchandise!

I need to start making names for milestones so I can stop saying "0.6.4", but 0.6.4 is finally live and working well. Still some problems being reported I'm keeping an eye on, I always try to prioritize bug fixes, but honestly 0.6.4 took a lot out of me and I'm very pleased to be planning and working on new features once again.

Today I've mostly been reviewing my development road map and better detailing out how to go about the actual programming and implementation of NPC villages and s...

Incoming 0.6.4 - World generation upgrades!

It's been a crazy start to the year! We've got an outsourcing agency working on reskinning the UI, adding UI sounds, and programming the fishing system per my directions. I've also been hard at work on a number of big changes to different systems that the game uses both for performance reasons, bug fixes, and looking forward towards the future of Solace Crafting. I want to go over some of the more major improvements quickly, and hope to have to patch out in within the next couple of days.

Looking forward to 2020

As the New Year approaches we often take time to reflect on the year that has passed, and set goals for the year to come. Setting and refining goals for Solace Crafting however is something I do every week. Instead I am preparing to enter a new phase of development for 2020. I want to share what I mean by that, and make clear the roadmap I'm following towards version 1.0.

Sales
Financially I had some pretty hard times this year. In March it was looking like I would h...

New music! New models!

Now in on the beta branch and looking to get pushed live here very shortly is our first original background music track! This is thanks to the duo team know as:

To quote Dana from Pixel Noise in our Discord server:

" Hopefully, the track gave you a sense of quiet loneliness - that was definitely the intended vibe. I think we accomplish this with the opening/closing. However, we also wante...

September/October contract update

It's been a very slow start with the monthly contracts unfortunately, though the September and October contracts are indeed in motion.

The 3D artist I'm working with for the September contract is just finishing up moving to a new location so I've been giving him all the slack he needs to get things sorted out. He did send me a shot of some of the work he was able to get finished before the move started:

2019-10-21 00:39:35 +0000 UTC View Post

How to improve our Patreon

Ever since the beginning of starting a Patreon for Solace Crafting I've had a hard time figuring out how to keep Patreon posts unique rather than just copying updates from Steam and posting them here. It's a unique form of generosity from patrons and I have always wanted to do something special with the page, rather than just reiterate the content of updates from Steam. Unfortunately that has often led to me simply not posting about updates, and I'm sorry that's how things have been recently....

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-playe...

Programming smarter

Over the recent weeks, there have been a ton of small improvements, new additions, even new monsters and encounters, but here I want to talk more about the flow of what I've been working on and why.

Modding

First of all, a note on mod support, or user created content. The idea behind modding comes in a lot of different flavors, from small changes like monsters damage, to ...

Catching up

I got so busy with multiplayer and multi-lingual support in November-December that I never posted an update here of all the changes that went in during that time! My apologies for that.

It's a bit condensed, but here is a list of some of the features that have made it in-game since my last post in October:

World Settings

New worlds are now highly customizable to mak...

2018 in retrospect

Happy New Year from the land of the rising sun. I hope everyone had a safe and fun New Years. I want to take a few minutes to talk about how things have progressed up until now, and how I'd like things to progress from here on.

2018 in retrospect
In the Fall of 2013 I started teaching myself how to use Unity and C# as a hobby from scratch. By the start of 2017 I had worked out the basics of what it was I was trying to create and started piecing together the first...

Terraforming, farming, and towns

Terraforming received a solid update fixing a number bugs, but more importantly adding a way to quickly flatten out large patches of land. This is fun not only as one of the many steps of building the perfect village, but also to make way for farming.

Farming added a number of new concepts including tilling, planting, watering, water containers, and basic containers. This also brought up one of the fi...

Version 0.3 live!

 Now with boats, crossing that water between you and glory has never been easier! Boats are persistant and can be picked up for ease of use, and are currently the fastest and safest way to travel. We certainly plan to add storage and upgrades and much more to boats over time, and with the new small boat in and working all of that will be much easier when the time comes.

 Caves, both cold and hot are also new and very useful. Within caves is the only place to find gem veins making...

Version 0.2.1

Now live on Steam, version 0.2.1 brings in new animals, plants, and several new recipes, along with many new skills.

Each archetype now has five tiers of skills with up to three skills per tier. Utility skills such as freezing ice the impairs enemy movements make a huge difference to the Apprentice and Scout archetypes, while damage and movement abilities make combat much more engaging all around. All in all this has ended up making most fights quite a bit easier.

2018-07-30 03:06:36 +0000 UTC View Post

New video and Linux support

I've added a couple new videos in redoing most of the graphical content of the Steam store page, as well as added Linux support for more potential customers!

Version 0.2.0

Now live on Steam, version 0.2.0 brings in a lot of new features, as well as a complete rework of world generation. With each new development branch I try to find a balance between new content and improvements. This build includes several changes to my development workflow, increasing productivity, and making it much easier to add in more encounters or points of interest in the near future.

The new de...

Version 0.1.09

Version 0.1.09 is now live on Steam! I spent a little more time on this branch than I like to, in part because of a string of national holidays here in Japan and my birthday, but there's a lot of new features now in-game!

As seen in the title image I added a new obelisk model and have them visually shooting at demons and monsters. This is still very much a work in progress tied close to town management via the solace upgrade fights.

2018-05-21 01:08:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Version 0.1.08

Version 0.1.08 is now live on the public branch on Steam! This branch brings in a number of new systems into the game including footstep audio, a new monster, and premade buildings to conquer and gain control of.

These towers are generated using the world-wide encounter manager meaning they exist prior to your actually visiting their location. This lets them be seen from very far away as in the pictur...

Login problems!

At last! My apologies on the recent silence! I was unable to login to my Patreon account the past couple weeks. I don't know if my original support ticket got lost or what but I wasn't getting any replies from support via the ticket I started last week. I started a new one this morning asking them to just plain turn off my two-factor authentication as it was preventing me from logging in! Switching my phone into airplane mode for a bit and then back seemed to remedy whatever was going on though....

Weekly Update #11

The current build live on both the main and the beta builds is working quite well! There is still a "zombie" bug where players die, but don't actually die and get stuck where they are, but I was able to finally reproduce it and fix it for next patch.

The past couple days I have been, somewhat regrettably, stripping out the current 3rd party vegetation management system and implementing a custom solution in it's place. I'm still working on improving the grass, as you can see in the picture. The...

Weekly Update #10

I was hoping to get in the first medium encounter this week along with more buildings, but turning the small encounter count way up led to a massive increase in monsters, bringing up two major flaws in the game.

For one, the rock elementals which are skinned meshes, that is, mesh rigged with bones for animation, were too costly with tons of them on screen all at once. This has been remedied in tomorrow's patch using a more performant form of LOD grouping, which decreases their details the furt...

Weekly Update #9

 The results of the survey are in! Thank you to everyone that participated in the survey. Please understand that the survey was not intended to make me drop everything and do what it says, but for me to get a better understanding of what players feel is most lacking in the current version. All of the systems are interconnected and there are certain things that definitely need to be improved and/or incorporated before we dive head first into some of the topics.

2018-03-21 14:40:21 +0000 UTC View Post

Weekly Update #7 - 2018.03.11

With the new pathfinding in and working despite a small bug or two still to be addressed, I have started working on adding some new features in. First up and already well on its way is building (structure) saving and loading. This is being worked on largely for two reasons. One being Steam Workshop integration which may still be a ways away, but is ultimately something I hope to integrate heavily into crafting, building, quests, points of interest, avatars, even voice packs, cooking recipes, the...

Weekly Update #6 2018.03.03

Coming at you on a Saturday night, this week was a busy one as I implemented a vastly improved pathfinding system. There are several methods to chose from and then several ways to go about using each of the methods, I'm working with the latest and greatest from Unity called navmesh. Navmesh isn't a new concept, nor new to Unity, but procedural runtime navmesh has only been officially implemented in the past six months and is still largely undocumented. That means there were a lot of questions th...

Weekly Update #4 2018.02.12

Roughly six years ago someone I knew put a game on Steam. It wasn't just "someone else," it was someone whose house I had been to as a child, who grew up in more or less the same environment as I did. I lost my excuse for not getting into game development, which up to that point had seemed "out of my league." But I was not a game developer. I had no formal education in the subject and of course no professional experience either, nor did I need them. I had 30 years of gamer frustration, and a fie...