The last few days have been crazy! As you may have seen, I decided to look for another developer once again. I have gotten a surprising number of responses from this and have spent the last few days just talking to people. I am trying to take it slow and be as certain as possible when/if I decide to bring someone on board. I did manage to get some work done on Crea earlier in the week.

The first change I made is truly a game changer. It will now be possible to see monsters information when mousing over them. This includes the name, level and HP percentage. The big one here is the level. With this you’ll be able to gauge how strong the monster is relative to you. Additionally it will finally explain why monsters have different stats. The support is mostly implemented for displaying this information at different times. Users will be able to choose to display the monster’s HP bar always, during mouseover, only when the monster is damaged, or never. I just need to hook it into the settings but first I think I need to revamp the settings UI to nicely support more options.

Another welcomed change is that now you get item notifications on what you picked up or crafted. I really like how this turned out.

I have also been working on adding support for animals. They are now hooked into the conflict system. When a region has higher hostility less animals will spawn in it. Now it has an interesting good/bad balance. So far I have got the first animal implemented – Speep!

I’m trying to wrap up what I’m currently working on so I can publish a new update with these changes and all of the bug fixes and balance changes I have made this week as well. I am hopeful this update will be available very soon!

For this upcoming week I will be continuing to interview people for the dev position. I will also be working on adding more animals and refining the underground some. I’d like to make it more cavernous and less holey, with more monsters underground as well as some other interesting things. I’d love the underground to be a really intriguing place to explore.

We are back from visiting family and ready to refocus ourselves completely onto Crea. We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a good time with family! Even though this last week was quite eventful, I managed to sneak in some work in on Crea, preparing for the big upcoming update.

First of all, there is a new equipment tier. This new tier includes 4 new swords, 4 new bows, and 3 new equipment sets. As with past equipment, we’ve tried to make each piece unique. There’s the Executioner (sword), which deals more damage the lower HP the user has. There’s the Ricochet Bow, which not only carries over the triple shot of the Winged Bow but also causes the arrows to bounce off walls. There is also the Beast armor set which grants some tasty dash cooldown reduction.

The other noteworthy progress is the introduction of difficulty modes. Right now we only have two modes: Normal and Hardcore. Hardcore has some lovely permadeath, which is going to sting much more than in Terraria because of character progression and you do not drop your items. Over time, I’d love to have Hardcore to be a completely different experience from Normal.

To start with, Aaron and I came up with a “death penalty.” It is not the typical death penalty though. After staying alive for some amount of time you gain a “Perseverance” buff which grants you additional XP and TP. The penalty for death is that you temporarily lose this buff. This has a nice side effect in that Hardcore characters will progress faster than Normal characters. I’m playing around with the idea of the Perseverance buff growing stronger the longer you’re alive. What do you think of that?

This next week we will be implementing three new monsters as well as a new biome. I’m really excited to get these in Crea. They will be great additions!

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!

Spoiler Inside	SelectShow

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!