Sorry about missing last week’s recap. I don’t know how but I did something to my neck about 10 days ago and evey since I have had a constant migraine, and did not feel up to writing a post. Fortunately I’m just mostly better now. Anyways, enough about me. Lets talk Crea!
This last week saw some nice additions. The largest is the newly introduced remna and material imbuing. As you progress through the world some events are triggered which unlock remna, which is a mysterious energy source that can be used to enhance items. This process of imbuing materials is quite simple.
Drop remna into one slot, the material into another and you’re off! The two sources move inwards to the center and once they reach it the two items are converted into a higher quality material. For example, lumber embued with remna creates refined lumber.
Any remna element type can be used for item imbuing – elements come into play in another upcoming system, Grafting. However, imbuing does take a minute so if you have a lot of materials to enhance, it might be worthwhile to get a few chambers up and running. Think laundromat! (chambers are not coin-operated)
The other major change I made was limiting the recipes you can research based off of your craft level. After watching some lets plays and listening feedback from other players I realized that this was the final issue with researching. Everyone would get 30 pieces of lumber, sit down at their research desk and research until they’ve exhausted either all their lumber or recipes. They’d be learning parts of recipes they’d not finish for hours.
Now instead you’ll learn what you need to know and what you’ll actually be able to make and save your resources for building and exploring. If there are remaining recipes to discover for an item then the category will have a red ‘!’ over it and the tooltip will mention requiring a higher craft level.
Research UI with a few enhancements
This does mean that your craft level is much more important now. The craft level of items are also much more important now. So I am working on finding the right balance and pace for its progression. I’d prefer to avoid grinding but also keep players learning recipes for items they’ll be needing soon. I’m sure this is something I’ll be fine tuning even after release.
Lastly, what I’ve been working on the last two days and what I’m continuing to work on is more Realms support since this next big update will see the introduction of a new Realm. This means I have to move things from theoretically to actuality. My two big milestones I’ve passed thus far is being able to travel from one realm to another (hacked together) and adding in a modified terraform generator to be able to easily generate realms. There is still lots to do around realms but fortunately this update is a nice halfway point.
One other thing I’ve been thinking about that I’d love some feeback on is my release cycle. I’m having trouble deciding the frequency that I should release updates. I can see merits in both a shorter term release cycle (1-2~ weeks) and longer term (4-6~ weeks).
Shorter term means faster feedback but potential for fatigue where existing players don’t have time to play the game again every week. Longer term means longer turn around time but more time to look forward to the update and many more changes in an update. One thing to mention is that releasing an update is usually about half a day of work for me. Sadly it is not instantaneous.
Thanks for reading and let me know what you think! Until next time.
cant wait to brake this stuff now!
Sounds like some interesting mechanics are on the way!
As for the updates…. I don’t think you should release them too often. I really only have time to play indepth every other weekend, and some bugs might be missed or skipped over if you upgrade versions too fast. It seems like right now you update when there’s a bigger feature being introduced or if there’s some immediate bug fixes, so I think that is best.
Thanks for the update there jason, on the quick front of doing updates i suppose even a small and i mean even half of what you have done here could be done quickly or even a quick screenshot from a new thing like your Remna, could start talk of what it could do for the game and has given me plenty to think about.
As for updates how about think on the longer term if your willing but if your excited about something maybe a small coment under a certain thing thats going into the next update to get more talk out of us :P.
Sorry that you have been filling somewhat horrible for that headache, do you get these frequently ?,
If your feel bad about feeling bad you could just tell kelley to jump on and just let us all know, we are all watching and love progress no matter how it goes thanks again for the update.
Great recap
4-6 weeks are good: we have time to play and you can make bigger update.