Weekly Recap #1

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.