Tag Archives: indie game

Weekly Recap #22

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!

Crea Release v0.6.3

A new version of Crea is now live on the Humble Store! This is mostly bug fixes with some feedback incorporated. Next build will be focused around multiplayer support (stability).

version 0.6.3
Features:
- Reenabled underground water and lava (accidently disabled)
- Add settings to main menu

Other:
- Added light source to fire spell
- Ensure UI dialogs are on screen when resolution changes
- Text fields in character and world creation are now autofocused

Bug Fixes:
- Resolved issue with changing to fullscreen
- Resolved issue with some UI dialogs not being initialized properly
- Resolved issue where active item was not correctly deactivated when toolbar changed
- Resolved issue where active items on toolbar would not be unequipped properly
- Resolved issue where a skill could be used with right click when grabbed
- Resolved issue where item delay could be set to 0 causing oddities with animation
- Corrected typo with Enchantment Robe requiring service “Workspace” instead of “Workstation”
- Resolved issues with slop physics resulting in unexpected behavoir
- Resolved some issues with UI not functioning properly with resolution change and alt+tab

Weekly Recap #21

So much going on, it is hard to keep up with it all! Last week we rolled out so much new stuff: website, two videos and a Greenlight page. Since the launch I’ve been fixing bugs and trying to gain publicity for our game. I also went on an excursion this weekend to the in-laws and day of the devs in SF.

Our Greenlight page is going pretty good so far. We are at 42% to the top 100 games – not too bad for one week. However, things are slowing down now that we are no longer on the first page. If you have not voted for us yet, then please vote now. If you have voted, first of all, thank you! Secondly, there are lots of ways to continue to help support us.

Put the word out wherever you can, especially in communities that you frequent. I try to post in some forums, but promoting Crea is always better when it comes from fans than from me.
Mention us to youtubers, livestreamers and news sites. I can provide a press copy to anyone willing to cover Crea. You can direct them to here - http://playcrea.com/press/
Help create a positive environment on our Greenlight page. Right now there are lots of people shouting that Crea is a Terraria clone. I would appreciate it if people would discuss Crea on it’s own terms rather than whether it is or isn’t a clone of something else. It would help a lot if Crea fans post constructive comments, questions, and feedback.

Crea has started to get publicity. At the top of the list is John and Landon of Bigsushi.

These guys host a podcast where they talk with indie devs about their projects. Yesterday they released an episode where they interviewed Kelley and I. We had a great time talking to them and it turned out to be an entertaining episode that I think all Crea fans would enjoy. If you enjoy it, be sure to check out some of their other episodes.

Gullofdoom put together a very funny video of himself playing Crea. We really got a kick out of it.

There are several other videos I’d love to share but I have much more to cover in this update. If you want to see more, follow @SiegeGames. If you do make any videos or posts about Crea, be sure to mention @SiegeGames.

With so much to keep track of, the only time I really get outside is when I go for a bike ride. I normally only go somewhere between 15-20 miles; however, I have done longer distances a few times but I am generally used to riding on flat ground.

This weekend I wanted to go on a ride with my father-in-law, who is a serious cyclist. I was feeling reasonably confident I could keep up and at the beginning of the ride I even said “we can go faster.” I spoke too soon though. After a slight dip we began to climb what seemed like forever. My young heart was about to give and my lungs cried out. It was obvious that some demon had constructed this hill purely for its amusement. As soon as it flattened out I bailed and flopped about for 10 minutes trying not to hurl. Alas, I am but a mere indie dev.

After I recovered and we began our descent to a more friendly route a group of 50 chattering carefree cyclist passed us going up the slight incline. I only managed to do 15 miles – half of what I wanted to do. Next time though, I will conquer the demonic hill.

Kelley and I had some other fun this weekend down in San Francisco at Day of the Devs, which was hosted by DoubleFine. After waiting in line for 45 minutes we got in and quickly discovered that this event was more of a club – so dark you could hardly see and so loud you could barely hear. Being introverted game developers, this was not exactly our scene. We were hoping for more of a chill environment where we could meet other developers and chat. Still, it is great that the event was put on and I commend all of those involved.

We are back home now and focused on working. A new build is coming very soon (tomorrow?) with lots of bug fixes. I will be working on refining multiplayer more now that things have calmed down and I have more time to invest into it. Some really great stuff is coming up in Crea’s development. I’m really looking forward to it!

Crea Release v0.6.1

A new version of Crea is now available on the Humble Store! This version contains lots of exciting changes. Most notable is the addition of 30+ new skills mostly consisting of magic. I would love to hear your thoughts in this version’s feedback topic. If you run into any bugs then please post them in this version’s issue topic.

Here’s the change log.

Crea v0.6.1
Features:
- Added lava
- Breakable pots underground
- Reworked talent UI
- Replaced Magic talent with Arcane and Divine talents
- Introduced many (30~) new skills most of which are usable
- Added simple tutorial dialog covering the controls
- Changed settings file format to JSON (editable) and moved controls into settings

Other:
- Replaced M.ATK and M.DEF stats with INT and MIND
- Implemented elements into combat
- Made monsters and monster spawners not able to spawn in areas with unnatural walls (such as wood walls)
- Reworked lighting
- Made it possible to only open one treasure chest at a time (May be changed back in the future)
- Made projectile spells break fragile tiles (pots, vines, foliage, etc.)

Bug Fixes:
- Resolved issue with bow animation now playing properly when held
- Resolved issue with stats not being properly removed when equipping an active item
- Resolved issue with trees sometimes not being harvestable
- Resolved issue where tiles could not be placed directly above the player
- Resolved issue where plants would sometimes be represented by the wrong stage of life graphics
- Resolved issues with opening treasure chests resulting in a crash
- Resolved several issues with multiplayer

Weekly Recap #20

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!

Weekly Recap #19

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!

Weekly Recap #18

We’re edging closer and closer to the next release and finally beta phase 3! At our current pace it’ll be about two weeks depending on how demanding the bug load is and how much more work multiplayer support is going to be. Multiplayer is so close to working but needs another push.

This entire week was devoted to adding new skills. Kelley and I have made some great progress and only a few remain. One thing to note is that these new skills are not merely an extension of the existing skills. Much more has been going on!

Cleaned up Talent UI

First of all, we gave all skills an unlock level. Once your talent reaches the skill’s unlock level then that skill becomes available to level up. The primary motivation behind this is to limit the number of options the player has to choose from. I believe it was a little too overwhelming for a player to have to choose between all of the skills up front. Not to mention this was for 4 different talents totaling nearly 40 skills. Now each talent starts with 3-4 skills unlocked at level 1 and more unlock at levels 5, 10 and 15.

There was another major change to the talents. The existing “Magic” talent was split it into two – “Arcane” and “Divine”. Arcane magic focuses on elemental offensive magic and Divine magic focuses on support magic.

Arcane talent has a total of 16 skills at the moment. There are 4 different types of magics and 4 elemental types of each. The spell types are: projectile, enchant melee weapon to do elemental damage, area of effect around the player, and pillar magic. I decided it would be easiest to treat all elemental types equally and that is why each element has a similar magic type.

Casting Freeze

Divine talent has 12 skills which consist of healing, positive status effects and a few passives. Just because they are support doesn’t mean there are not game changers! Stoneskin will absorb some damage, making it possible to take harder hits or fall further. Invisible makes you invisible and monsters wont aggro you. Fun stuff!

Casting Invisible

The Arms talent has also received many new active skills to keep up with the magics. However, Gather and Craft talents are more or less the same. For now, I’m happy with where they are at.

As you can see, lots of good stuff! This next week I’m wrapping up the remaining skills and moving back onto working on the underground. I’ll also start looking into some bugs that are in 0.6.0 and beginning to prep things for v0.6.1. Most likely, there will also be a v0.6.2 to fix issues in v0.6.1. Then I plan to launch Crea’s greenlight page and the next beta phase.

Rolling over some very low level monsters with Firestorm

Weekly Recap #17

Wow the weeks are flying by. Already at week 17 on these recaps! Are you guys enjoying these recaps? I appreciate the comments you leave on these posts.

This week I worked on fixing up colored lights, gave lava a light source and started reworking the talent skills. I already showed off the colored lights and lava earlier in the week in this post.

The skill rework is fairly extensive. Much of it has been behind the scenes so far. I am restructuring some things and prepping for many more skills to be added. Not all of the changes are in the infrastructure though.

The Talent UI has been needing some love for quite some time. Here is what I came up with so far.

In addition to looking much better, there are a few other improvements. The character’s current skill level is now displayed in the upper right corner. I may change the placement in the future, but I just wanted to get it in there and move onto more important things.

Another improvement is when hovering over the skill icon, a tooltip for the current level (or level 1) appears. When hovering over the button to level the skill up, a tooltip will appear to explain the next level. Soon tooltips will include the cost and cooldown time for active skills.

This next week I’m going to continue working on the skills. There are many new skills that will be added. These will likely keep me busy for the entire week. If I do manage to finish them up then I’ll move onto working on the underground once more.

Tribulation of Colored Lights

I was hoping that the issue with colored lights would slip under everyone’s radar. Oh how foolish I was! Nearly everyone who played for more than a few minutes would not only notice but feel compelled to point out the oddity of the Way Crystal’s blue light.

There are a few parts of Crea’s engine that I try to avoid due to the inherent complexity of the system – lighting is prominently at the top of this list. I was tempted to leave things be but when I started working on lava I realized lava wouldn’t look right without giving off a warm red glow. Thus began my tribulation with colored lights.

My first attempt was kind of a mess with the lighting affecting the background

I managed to hack my way around it though.

Mostly working lighting with many colors

Had some fun playing with the brightness, saturation and contrast of lights

After playing around with the lighting I found two small issues with it and both were due to my hack. One is that when something was transparent it would look weird at night. The other issue was that sometimes the background would show through the ground. It is hard to see since it is a few pixels scattered about.

Death particles with weird black edge

Background bleeding through

After hours of attempts to resolve these issues I conceded defeat. While beginning to write this blog post I had an epiphany and managed to resolve the core issue and abandon the hack. Yay!

While I had these two issues I reworked the lighting system some to enable light sources coming from anywhere instead of only entities. Now particles can be a light source or even lava!

Weekly Recap #16

Progress! This week has been a productive one. Kelley and I are now settled in to our new home and have been putting our new workspace to use.

The long wait is finally over – the newest Crea beta build is available to download from the Humble Store! If you don’t already have beta access, you can preorder here. Shortly after the next big patch (2~ weeks from now) the price will drop from $25 to $20 for the bundle, with an additional $10 option for just the game. At that time, we will also finally launch our greenlight page and give access to the rest of our ever-so-patient kickstarter backers. Exciting times are just around the corner!

Two months of development has gone into this newest build. As you’d expect, there are quite a lot of additions and changes! Here is a preview of the v0.6.0 changelog.

New Monster Spawning – ‘Conflict System’
Monsters are now more aggressive and frequent at night
Added new attacks for some monsters
Completely rework content files
Engine now supports Realms
Reworked inventory UI
Add dashing with double tap in direction

As usual there are some known bugs but nothing too major. One downside for this release though is that multiplayer is not functional at the moment. I did not want to delay this release any more. Multiplayer will be a high priority for the next release. Seriously!

This week I spent most of my time working on bug fixing. However, I did manage to work on the underground biome. I began working on playing with the distribution of holes, caves, stone, ores, and gems – mostly increasing them. I worked on optimizing water simulation some and even began to work on lava.

Latest World Gen Map

This next week I’ll be fixing any critical bugs that are found, working on more underground changes and starting to work on revamping talents and skills.