The bug fixing continues! More than two dozen bugs have been fixed this week. We also managed to make some impactful gameplay changes: Researching was overhauled, blocks now can go on both the ground and wall layers, the tools (mattocks) were redone, and we implemented some other feedback from our testers. Oh, and multiplayer is supposedly working now!

It was all too common to drop a pile of materials into your research window, click “Research” and go on your merry way. This is not how I wanted researching to function. I wanted it to be more hands on – you’re engaged and making decisions. Consequently, researching needed some heavy modification.

Now in order to research items you must first craft a “Research Desk” and be nearby it to research. When researching a material you must select the item category to focus on. For each research you can now learn multiple recipes instead of always one. The number of recipes you learn is based off of your craft level and the level of the item(s) you will learn.

Researching is feeling much better than before! One remaining change we want to make is to avoid having a single item used in too many recipes. As it stands lumber is used in 56 recipes! That is way too many. In the future we will be limiting a single material to be used in at most 20-25 recipes.

Another massive change is that now blocks can be placed on either the ground layer or wall layer. Before we had “Dirt” and “Dirt Wall”. Now it is just “Dirt”. There are a few major benefits to this approach.

• The first and foremost is that we have nearly twice as many blocks in the game – meaning more customization.
• This saves on inventory space.
• Now all wall tiles are consistently shaded and more easily distinguishable from the ground layer.
• We can now place ores and other rare resources on the wall that will make for more interesting world generation.

Complimenting this change to blocks, we did a complete makeover of our mattocks (tools) to be more in line with our equipment. Now mattocks have equipment attributes and are upgraded from one to the next. Also now all blocks can be destroyed by any mattock. I believe this will have a very positive impact on gameplay. Previously we needed the rigid block restriction rules to gate players; however, this is no longer the case. Instead we have the nice side-effect of gating progress by having most items upgrade from earlier versions.

Anyone got any lumber?

Even though I don’t always have the time to reply to all our beta players feedback, I’m reading it! Here are a few things that you can see that already made it in the game that was player feedback.

• Allow placing items directly from the inventory, without having to put them in the action bar first
• Clicking on a material in the craft UI should take you to that material’s recipe
• Make it possible to remove wall blocks from behind the player, trees and other things.
  
• Better world generation with more caves and ores

Finally, after much toil, I have gotten multiplayer to a working state. I am sure it still needs much love before I would consider it complete. Why did multiplayer take so long and what was wrong with it? Sooo many things… I had solely tested multiplayer on my local connection and things worked perfectly fine; however, once in the real world it immediately broke down. I investigated for days and continued to bug the good people on the IRC for assistance in testing and then yesterday I finally discovered the cause for all my troubles.

One feature I will be working on soon is a dedicated server. Imagine how nice it will be to have dedicated server software for a game for Linux!

Over the last two weeks since we launched beta, I have been working hard to get Crea to a good point with all features to be working well. I imagine there will be several more bugs for multiplayer to come in, but now it is finally time to turn my focus to do some of this work to get official modding support in. I will likely be going back and forth between this and bug fixes/small enhancements over the next few weeks.

This last week has been a whirlwind of progress and flew by so quickly! In order to prepare Crea for beta release, we took this last week to focus on polishing. Lots and lots of polishing. Here are some things we did.

Kelley and I finally cleaned up the main menu. Not final but still a much better placeholder than before.

Without quality loss

Explosives!

Normal Bomb

Sticky Bomb (work in progress)

Equipment names are now based off of the best attribute.

Game settings work nicely now as expected.

And some other notable tasks:

• Added more sound effects and some music
• Kelley added description and flavor text for nearly all the items
• Added a few more items.
• Fixed several bugs

For this upcoming week we will likely dedicate a large chunk to launching the beta and providing support. Other than that, Max and I have planned to greatly enhance the modding API. Our goal is to get mod support up and running. This will most definitely span multiple weeks but I’m going to try to timebox it in order to keep more content coming.

Expect more news soon!

Another week has already gone by! This last week was quite eventful. On Thursday I discovered that, amazingly, a TIGJam event (indie game jam) was taking place in a nearby city. It was Max’s last day of his stay at our place, so together we spent Friday at TIGJam. We got a lot of work done on Crea and also met some really cool people. We played Munchkin with Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace the composer of Fez). I even briefly met Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy and Binding of Issac), Derek Yu (Spelunky and Aquaria) and several more people. I’m absolutely looking forward to the next TIGJam. In the meantime, more Crea!

We have just about wrapped up the item tooltips. They have received a major style overhaul and several other enhancements. Researchable items now have a nice little icon on them, equipment now has colored names based on its quality, and the positioning of tooltips is improved. We’ll continue to work on tooltips next week.

Max spent a large chunk of his time cleaning up the world generation. We managed a massive win with handling the underground generation. Previously, we would define a rectangle that would be considered the underground section of the world, but since the surface of the world is not flat there was always at least some space between the visible surface of the world and what the game considered underground. This lead to a large “fun-free zone,” as Max called it, large swaths of earth with nothing interesting going on. We came up with a solution where now we know exactly where the underground starts across the entire world. The difference is quite visible.

Old Underground vs New Underground

Water has finally been added to the world. This required a surprising amount of work. First I had to add in the concept of breathing and checking to see if the player was underwater. Along with that was the need of some type of visual indication of how much breath you have left. I decided to add it to the HUD.

After that I had to add the water to world generation which was not too bad thanks to the changes Max has been making to it. Immediately after doing this though I discovered that having 30,000+ water cells in the world was a little too much for the cellular automation system. I then went to work on optimizing it even more and am pleased that now the game can handle an immense amount of water at a time.

A segment of a world with water in it.

Lastly, I have been working on finishing up the Way Crystals. Now Way Shards will slowly grow nearby the crystals and players can harvest them. Players are able to attune themselves to a single crystal and immediately transport there at anytime by using a shard. Additionally, shards can be used to quickly travel to other crystals when nearby a crystal. Progress has been good and we are looking to keep it up this week. Here is what we have planned at the moment:

• Implementing more sound effects
• Implementing some music
• Fall damage
• Adding window icons on HUD (Talent, Craft, Research)
• Help Tooltips
• Bug fixing and general cleanup

We are getting amazingly close to a public beta release. I’m both excited and nervous. It is very likely beta will be happening in the next two weeks.

I (Jasson) am going to kick off these weekly recaps with a big one – we have a lot of catching up to do!

Back in March, I brought a new developer on board to help with Crea, Max. He is a freelance programmer and self-described “monster hunter” who supported our Kickstarter and ran a successful Kickstarter of his own. Two weeks ago, Max flew out from the East Coast to stay at our place for a while to make some serious damage to Crea’s task list. This is what Max looks like:

As I mentioned in my last post, we are working on refining existing content and systems. Since Max got here we started doing a lot of designing and planning out how everything in Crea fits together. This includes things like items, game progression and bosses. Lots of fun stuff. This last week we heavily focused on equipment (weapons and armor).

There is so much to talk about regarding the equipment that I’ll save it for its own post. What I will say for now is that we completely scrapped all of the existing equipment in favor of a much more interesting system. Before our equipment was in tiers awfully similar to Minecraft and Terraria – i.e. “Copper Sword” -> “Iron Sword” -> “Gold Sword”. There is beauty in the simplicity but after talking we realized we wanted something else; something new. Now equipment will be upgraded and provide more unique attributes that will actually have an impact on gameplay rather than only increasing stats. Ok I’ve already said way more than I was wanting to…

Some sketches for the weapon progression

The majority of our week was spent designing the new equipment and implementing it into the game. Kelley worked on the equipment art assets, Aaron helped implement the equipment content files and I finished off the equipment by working on the unique attributes.

The Winged Bow shoots 3 arrows at once!

Beyond equipment I did a plethora of small to medium changes:

• Finished up a completely new physics system
• Added in movement sloping (so players can run up one high blocks)
• Trees and blocks emit particles when hit
• Added tile placement preview
• Fixed a handful of bugs

Look at those particles bounce!

Max spent the first half of the week finishing up some world generation enhancement with a focus on making the underground more interesting. The second part of the week was spent working on reworking the monster spawning system some because there was some fundamental problems with the frequency at which monster spawners were created. We are still going to have spawners but we are trying to get the rate at which monsters are around to fight to be just right. In the current beta version monsters are rather scarce and it breaks the pacing of the game completely.

Some of Max’s monster idea doodles

This next week we have lots planned. Here is a quick highlight:

• Crafting system needs to be updated to enable the new equipment upgrade system
• Monster spawning is going to be wrapped up
• Design and implement some equipment accessories
• Water – Simulation is done but needs to affect gameplay
• Waycrystals – Quick travel system

Alright, that’ll do it for this week’s update. Let me know what you think and if there are any parts you’d like us to go into detail more/less.

Max and Jasson hard at work

Aaron making a cheesecake, which directly goes towards fueling Crea’s development.