weekly recap | Siege Games

Here again with a new recap. I am pleased that we managed to finish most of what we set out to do this week.

I finished upgrading the crafting system to make it possible to provide equipment as an ingredient. While I was at it, I cleaned up the crafting, equipment and talent UI. Both the crafting and talent UI used dropdown menus to select your current category/talent. At first I thought this was a wonderful idea because it is extremely expandable making it mod friendly; however, after time I have realized that this is a pre-optimization and 99% of new items could fit into the existing categories.

Max spent the majority of the week working on monster spawning. Now spawners are permanently placed in the world and, when taken down to 0HP, instead of being destroyed the spawner is temporarily disabled for 15 minutes. We have plans to give the player the power to destroy spawners and have them respawn much more slowly than what we had before. This is one of those things that needs lots and lots of tweaking to get just right.

Boom!

The other big task I worked on this week was adding in water to the world. The simulation was a little broken from months of neglect and once I did get it back up I spent some time smoothing it out. A large chunk of my time was spent on getting the water to be saved with the world and transmitted to clients during multiplayer. I began to incorporate it into gameplay but only got as far as having it affect player movement when I made the decision to wrap up other things so we could release a new early beta build today.

Water (work in progress)

Wrapping things up involves lots of tiny tasks remaining from the larger features such as ensuring that all new items can be obtained one way or another. There is also the task of fixing the bugs that we have created over the last few weeks; fortunately there aren’t too many of those!

Over the next week we are going to be focusing on finishing up several features that need some love.

Way Crystals
Water
Tooltip visual overhaul
The “underground” biome, which is being reworked by Max

We will hopefully get to a few smaller things on our list as well but we have lots of planning to do before Max heads back home on Saturday. We have a great momentum and if we can keep it up then the next beta phase is just around the corner.

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.

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