After a massive amount of work, the first boss for Crea is just about done. I am really happy with how she turned out. I will do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum but this post will contain some boss spoilers.

This boss, is essentially a few monsters and a new biome all in one. Now that she is finished the code weighs in at 700 lines just for her. With everything related to the boss fight, I’d say it is more like 1000-1200 lines. To put this in perspective, the entire game is roughly 50k lines of code. This means that the boss is roughly 1/50th of the game code thus far. Crazy!

The fight plays out more like a Zelda boss fight. It is more than seeing how fast you can deal damage. Also, since the fight is in another realm we were able to make it so you cannot run away once the battle commences and if you die then you have to start over. In other words, we mean business!

Without further adieu, here are some screens!

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Now that the boss is done, I am moving onto NPCs! I’m really looking forward to finally getting some in since I know they’ll add much to the game. I’ll go into much more detail about them soon.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving – Kelley and I did. Got a few things to update you guys on.

First of all, tomorrow Kelley and I will be joining the 12 Days of Indie livestream event that is going on to support Toys for Tots. You can check out the livestream here. We will be on between 3-5PM PST. I’ll be sure to post it on twitter and facebook at that time. Someone will be playing Crea and we’ll also be giving away some copies. If you can help spread the word about the event that’d be amazing!

Next up, another 100 games have been Greenlit. This moves Crea that much closer to being selected. We are now at 73% of the way to the top 100. We have slowed down immensely to 1% every few days but I’m not worried. I know it’ll happen eventually. Just got to keep pushing it and hope we get picked up by some sites or larger youtubers/streamers. In case you have not voted for Crea on Greenlight yet, you should do that now!

Speaking of youtubers. On our forums, beta tester Dragoneer asked about our video policy and we decided to make a dedicated page on the topic. You can find that over here. In summary: Make videos! Do it!

As for game progress, things are moving along. I finally have Realms working smoothly with being able to move between then. I started adding in Realm options (rules). The first realm for the boss has several different rules, such as it does not loop horizontally, it is not saved to disk meaning it is regenerated every time you enter it, it also doesn’t use the conflict system or allow for mining.

With that working I moved onto putting together the boss realm. Thanks to the world generation code it was really easy to get things setup. I have a giant “stamp” that represents the entire realm and lots of rules for the different colors. Each pixel represents a tile or item. Here is what it is looking like so far. Lots of work remaining!

The nice thing about this is that I can very easily edit the image and have it be reflected in the game without any additional work. This will make it very easy for players to put together things such as a battle arena.

Another thing we did was go back and cleanup the Imbuing Chamber some. Now it has a cool animation that represents the progress of the imbuing. Two lines grow inward and once the imbuing is finished the colored area glows. It even changes color based on the type of remna being used!

Lastly, I threw together the mannequin item today. I really like how it turned out. I managed to avoid adding any new UI but still you can do several things with it.

• Interacting with it while holding equipment will place that equipment onto it.
• Using “collect” and clicking on a piece of equipment on the mannequin will make the equipment drop
• Interacting with it can swap the gear from the mannequin onto the player

That last one is awesome because it’ll make switching gear sets very easy. Want to change your gear from warrior to mage? One click!

I have one last thing planned for mannequins that is amazing but I’ll save that for when I get to implement it. Don’t worry though, it wont be long!

This next week we are working on the first boss more. Hopefully will get close to finishing that up. We’ll see how it goes. I’m still considering when I want to release this next update. It is going to be big but I’m not sure how big. I’m kind of considering holding out for awhile longer since things have died down and then release with the first big boss, NPCs, new biome and several new monsters. It would mean a longer wait but lots of new stuff to experience for those that have played several times over.

One last thing, how do you feel about spoilers? Are screenshots of the first boss area (and maybe with first boss) too much? I may be posting those in the future unless everyone wants to experience them in game first.

This is a little late but it’ll have to do. Yesterday and today I became consumed with a fun feature I will be showing off tomorrow. Now that it is done I wanted to give a brief update of what has been going on this last week and what is coming up.

Most of this last week was spent fixing bugs and working on multiplayer, as well as a few features. Multiplayer is finally coming along. The largest victory with it so far is that I managed to reduce the horrible lag considerably. It still needs work but it is much more playable from my limited testing. There are still several crashes I have yet to track down, as well as a few oddities that occur when the connection experiences a hiccup.

Standalone server running with client in background

I finally spent some time working on the standalone server and that is in pretty good shape already. It is working on all platforms and has some basic commands available. The best feature about it is that it is mod friendly – I made it easy to add new commands to it. There is still more I’d like to add but my initial goal was to get the basic server working for now.

Some of the code for the standalone server

Another cool feature I got in was the ability to provide a world seed during world creation. If you provide the same seed and select the same world size then it’ll create the same world (with a few small differences). Starting with the next version you will be able to find the world seed by opening worlds/world_name/seed.

World generation now with seed option

Yet another 40 games were greenlit today which gave Crea a little bump. We are now 55% of the way to the top 100 Greenlight games. Not too bad, but we’ll need more exposure if we want to be greenlit in the near future. I’m continuing to reach out to people who can provide some more publicity for Crea.

As for this next week, I am getting tired of fixing bugs and working on multiplayer. I know I need to finish multiplayer, but I’m getting to the point where it’d be much more productive if I took a break from it and worked on some new content or fun features for the next big release. I will persevere a little longer and try to get multiplayer to a state worthy of another update in the next few days.

Don’t forget that I have something awesome I’ll be showing off tomorrow. Be sure to stop by!

I am getting quite anxious with the approaching release. Crea is currently in the hands of about 500 people. When I give access to all the remaining Kickstarter backers, which is soon, that number will double. Additionally, Crea will become available for $10 and there were many people who said they would preorder it at this price.

This is very exciting because it means many more people playing Crea which translates into even more feedback. Our Kickstarter backers have been beyond patient with me getting Crea into their hands, so I am happy to be finally delivering this part of our Kickstarter. While Crea has come a long way since the Kickstarter, it still has further to go. I hope players will keep this in mind when they run into bugs or see areas that need improvement. Also I’m a little scared because I will once again be handling all the bugs by myself.

One step at a time. This last week has been about trying to wrap things up. The newest version of Crea is now in the hands of the omega testers and thanks to their help many issues have been fixed. I am once again working on multiplayer. There are some latency issues most noticeable when fighting monsters but beyond that it is finally coming together.

Kelley and I have been working on a new website landing page to help introduce people to Crea. We are also starting to sketch out our thoughts on some new videos.

This week will be dedicated to finishing up all of these tasks and getting the new version out. Lots and lots to do!

Another week filled with much progress, bringing us closer to the next game update. The remaining skills were finished this week. They turned out great and will really make a difference in game! I also worked on several miscellaneous tasks some of which had been floating around in the icebox for months. Here are some of them.

• Collect skill can be used to harvest some of the small plants. No punching trees though.
• Engine now supports image masks which will be used for pixel perfect collision. Some things, such as small plants, were hard to hit since they are so skinny.

• Dialog placement is now saved with the settings
• Added a timer for status effects

Yet another thing I managed to work on was the underground. Now lava and pots are spawned underground, which looks awesome. Lava now causes massive damage when you fall into it – don’t do that! Pots can be broken and occasionally drop some loot. Gotta break’em all!

Oh, I also fixed a handful of issues that our amazing testers reported. As I said, this was a good week for progress!

I am now working on cleaning things up and trying to balance combat. Everything was extremely loose before and with the addition of 30 new skills it is now completely awkward. Once I make at least one pass on balancing, I will push a build to the omega testers. While they are testing I will be working on a spiffy new landing page for our site and fixing up multiplayer. I also want to fix up the underground more and do some polishing before the next update. Lots to do!