Tag Archives: progress

Weekly Recap #26

This was a good week! We’re moving right along for the next update, which will be massive. Over the last week we’ve been focusing on implementing NPCs – finally. Anyone that has been following Crea since our Kickstarter knows that things are constantly evolving and sometimes changing completely. Well, NPCs are no exception to this and we’ve completely redesigned how they work.

In the past, gaining access to new NPCs would involve triggering an event in the world. Once available, managing NPCs would be done through a complex system. After a great deal of redesigning Aaron and I came up with something fresh and simple.

Occasionally players will find a scarce material known as Remna Core. Using this, special NPC outfits can be crafted and once an outfit is placed onto a mannequin, it comes to life.

For this next update we are introducing the four NPCs: Merchant, Scavenger, Researcher and Healer.

Merchant – As you would expect, this NPC buys and sells goods. The merchant has a regular supply of wares that are replenished everyday as well as daily specials.

Shop UI (prices not final)

Scavenger – Don’t leave items laying around for too long! The scavenger will pick up and sell any items left dropped on the ground after a day. Keep in mind though that he must throw out the old to make room for the new.

Researcher – Occasionally players will find recipe scrolls, which hold the secrets to crafting unique items. However, they must be translated by the researcher and he does not work for free!

Healer – Well, she heals you. We’re also considering having her provide a buff or something along those lines.

We have at least a few more NPCs planned: Grafter, Cartographer, and Dungeoneer. We’ll be introducing them over the next several updates.

The NPCs wont move around but you can choose where to place them and if you ever want to move them then just punch them a few times! (Use the collect skill). Do not try this at home, kids.

Take that and that and THIS!

I’m really happy to have NPCs finally in Crea. We are now moving onto adding new equipment. Fortunately this should be fairly quick and we’ll swiftly move onto adding some new monsters in. Next week is Christmas so we will be busy spending time with family but I’ll try to sneak in as much development as I can!

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

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 #10

Double digits for weekly recaps! Yay! Some good stuff has been happening this week. A decent chunk of my time went into admin stuff like looking for a new developer, which has gone really well. But more on that later. The rest of my time has gone into designing combat related things.

Proving just how much I really follow my timeline, the first thing I did after some design was implemented the “inventory condensing” that I had earlier planned to be done in about a month. I realized it wouldn’t take that long and have a large positive impact as well as clean up the toolbar. Now your inventory is all on one window which you can now open with ‘i’.

This inventory change is a welcome change but not nearly as impactful as the change I made to the toolbar, which was given a major makeover! I scrapped the secondary toolbar. Now each toolbar slot has two items assigned to it – left and right mouse click.

The right click item is only shown for the active item. I’m hoping that players will be able to remember what is assigned to the right item by looking at the left item in the toolbar. If that doesn’t work out then I’ll have to rethink the design some. So once the next beta update rolls out definitely let me know what you think!

The rest of my week is being dedicated to continue my efforts on refining combat. More specifically, I’m working on getting timing down for the Oil Slime as well as adding a new attack. My goal is to get the Oil Slime to be a good example to build the rest of the monsters off of. Beyond refining monsters, I plan to tackle monster spawning which I will go into more detail next week.

Other than that, I might be spending some time helping get the new developer caught up to speed. However, I can already see I wont need to do this too much since he appears to be quite brilliant and very self-sufficient. I will give him a proper introduction soon.

Crea’s Current Status

For awhile now I have been giving weekly updates with a narrow viewport into Crea’s progress and what is coming up. I figured it’d be good to provide a broader status update. I’ll go over what is in, what will be enhanced and what will be added. This is not an exhaustive list.

Implemented Features

Basic world and character creation
Crafting
Researching
Combat currently with 6 monsters
Multiplayer
Lighting
Water Simulation
Realms
Mod Support

Enhancements

Main menu will receive a major facelift. Such as the last character/world you played will be displayed with a quick play option. Character creation will have more choices and better color selection and character selection will have a preview of the characters. World creation will receive several more options such as being able to provide a seed and specify parameters such as biome frequency. World selection will also be given a quick preview with some interesting stats such as time played.
Functionally, crafting is nearly done. The majority of the remaining work lies in balancing recipes.
Researching is also mostly done however like everything, I’ll keep refining based on feedback.
Much work will be done on Combat. The goal is to get it to be a little more strategic but also faster. This means less hits to kill but using a shield and dodging will be encouraged and sometimes required.
Additionally, monster spawning will require some additional love to resolve existing issues such as difficulty in finding needed resources and spawner exploitation is too easy.
Multiplayer is barely functional at the moment so it will be receiving much more attention. The obvious goal is to get multiplayer smooth and stable.
While there is already a lot for mod support further attempts will be made such as some decent documentation and tutorials. Eventually I’d love to have workshop support in as well but this requires being on Steam.
The primary/secondary toolbar concept is currently under scrutiny and may change in the future. One idea I’m considering is showing both and having them be assigned to left/right mouse buttons. Or possibly I’ll scratch the idea completely and only have one toolbar.
Inventory is planned to be condensed to a single window. This window would also be used for changing bags. Speaking of which, bags will be made upgradable and obtaining new bags will be somewhat similar to finding bottles in Zelda games.
Better underground area
- More plants, foliage and small items like jars and pots
- Natural lights such as bioluminescence from plants and monsters
- More small biomes like the treasure rooms and mushroom tree forests
Prettier water. I would also like to have some type of water pressure and water flow but these are lower priority.

Planned Additions

More items (Armor Sets, Weapons, Materials)
3+ more biomes
6+ more monsters
4 bosses
NPCs
Realms
- Includes dungeons among other things.
Movement
- We want to add in additional ways to move about in Crea. We need to prototype our ideas but the top two ideas are: an air blaster that pushes you in the opposite direction that you shoot the air in; springs that you can bounce off of.
Remna
- Remna is a resource commonly dropped from monsters. One of its uses is to upgrade basic materials to higher tiers. Such as Lumber would become Refined Lumber.
Grafting
- Through this system, you will be able to graft Remna (mentioned above) onto equipment which adds attributes. This is essentially a enchantment system. It will be reasonably indepth and require some planning to get the desired effects.

Eventual features

Will be expanded upon later

Cartography (maps)
Food and Farming
Weather
Another playable race
Mounts

Priorities and Roadmap

My highest priority is to continue to enhance existing systems. I try prioritize the systems that have the most impact overall. To keep moving forward though, I do add in new features when appropriate (or if I just need a break from bug fixing). Here is a rough roadmap/priority list.

Combat Refining
Monster spawning
Beta Update
Multiplayer work
Bug fixing
Inventory condensing
Beta Update
First Boss
Remna
New weapons and armor sets
Beta Phase 3 and Greenlight
NPCs
More monsters
More biomes
Beta Update
Dungeons in realms
Beta Update
… and so on

You’ll notice no dates are mentioned. I think I have finally learned my lesson that there are simply too many variables to take everything into account, and there are external factors that I have no control over. So I am going to stop trying to predict when things will be finished. However, what I do know is that I am going to make Crea the best game I can make and it will be awesome.

Introducing Clark and Imminent Beta Release

We’d like to introduce the newest member of our team, Clark Powell. He looks like this:

He is composing the music and sound effects for Crea. You can hear some of Clark’s work at his bandcamp page. We were introduced to Clark through our team member Max. Clark has composed for Homestuck, such as “Symphony Impossible to Play.”

During our Kickstarter, we had originally enlisted Charlie of Robot Science as our composer. However, for various reasons, things did not work out. We did part on good terms and still love his work. We wish Charlie all the best with his promising career.

We realize that some of you backed our Kickstarter in order to support Robot Science, and we apologize for this disappointment. If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from the experience of developing Crea, it’s that things rarely work out as planned! However, we are really pleased with the music Clark has conjured up thus far for Crea, and we think you’ll like it too. You can listen to few Crea tracks right here!

Big news: the long-awaited beta will be available this week! If you are a $25 Kickstarter backer then we will provide you with information on how to get access soon. If you missed our Kickstarter now is your chance to help support us and get in on the beta. A preorder page with immediate access to beta is coming soon!

We know that Crea is way behind our original release date. So to thank you for your patience, we are going to give our $10 backers access to “beta phase 3,” estimated in mid August. If you are a $10 backer and would like beta access before then, we are looking into ways for you to “upgrade” to gain access now.

When we do release beta, we’ll provide another update with much more information.

Crea on Linux

This means that we are now running on all 3 launch platforms! Yay!

Upcoming Beta in Humble Store

Beta (phase 1) is finally in sight. We hope to have it released in about a week. As we mentioned in our earlier roadmap post, Phase 1 will include Windows/Mac/Linux support, multiplayer, leveling, skills, combat, crafting, randomly generated worlds with several biomes, character customization and our beautiful day/night cycle. Note that this phase of the beta is private. Crea will become publicly available starting with phase 2.

So far we have had only a handful of people regularly testing the alpha. Meanwhile, there are about 70 early beta testers eagerly waiting. Going from 5 to 70 testers could be a bit overwhelming for us, so we are planning to incrementally add beta testers. This will help us keep up with bug reports, so there isn’t a huge deluge of reports all at once. Also by doing it this way, we can fix any big game-breaking bugs without exposing everyone to them. We are planning to invite a group of early beta backers ($50+ Kickstarter Backers), if you are an early beta backer and want to be subjected to the earliest beta stage then send Jasson a message on the forums.

Starting with the beta, Crea will be distributed through the Humble Store! This does not mean we are going to be in a Humble Bundle. What it does mean is that you will be able to download the game through your Humble Store account. Steam keys can be easily claimed through the Humble Store if/when Crea is published on Steam. Also we will be selling Crea through the Humble Store via a widget on our site, siegegames.com. The widget will look something like this.

Crea Humble Store Widget

We know that you guys have been patiently waiting for a chance to play Crea, and we are super excited to be able to finally start sharing it with you. Thanks for your continued support and encouragement!

Update Time!

It has been far too long since I posted an update. I don’t have too much exciting news to share at the moment; however, I figured I could mention what I have been working on at least.

For the last month I have been slowly figuring out how to make multiplayer better. It has been a long road involving switching from TCP to UDP and all the insanity that contains. Things are finally starting to shape up though. I have it mostly stable while testing with myself and will start stress testing it soon.

Shared access to Treasure Chest

All other features are in place for the first beta phase and we are working on adding in more content (biomes, monsters, items, and so on). In fact, this is exactly what our new developer is working on now. We will introduce him properly on the blog once we are past the trial period.

Some much more exciting updates are just around the corner. Stay tuned!

Updated Roadmap

It has been awhile since I posted an update regarding our release schedule. I want to thank everyone for their patience. Here is what we have planned.

Beta Phase 1 (Early Beta)

Time Frame: Early April
Duration: 4-6 weeks
Availability: Only $50+ Kickstarter Backers
Features: Windows/Mac/Linux support, Multiplayer, Leveling, Skills, Combat, Crafting, Generated Worlds, Character Customization, Day/Night Cycle

Beta Phase 2

Time Frame: Mid May
Duration: 4-6 weeks
Availability: $25 Kickstarter Backers. Publicly available for $25. (contains game, digital soundtrack, and digital artbook.)
Additions: NPCs, Researching, Grafting and additional Biomes, Monsters, Equipment, Items, Skills, etc.

Beta Phase 3

Time Frame: Late June
Duration: 4-8 weeks
Availability: $10+ Kickstarter Backers. Publicly available for $10. (game only)
Additions: Official Mod Support, Bosses and more content.

Release

Time Frame: August
Availability: Can be purchased by anyone for $15.
Additions: Quests, Mounts, Second Playable Race and more.

Some things to note

Any of this is subject to change but I have waited to post it until I was reasonably certain on the time frames.
Updates between releases will be posted on a weekly basis
Beta Phase 3 marks the official mod support. At this point I will do my best to provide all details regarding mod changes, provide mod API documentation and additional features such as in-game mod management. Before this it is still very possible to mod Crea.

EDIT: I have updated the original estimates to better reflect our current status.