Skills to make the kills

Last week I got biomes working in my new level system, currently with a snow and a desert biome mixing in with the main ocean/grassland/moutain biome. This way I can spawn biome specific resources, monsters, encounters and more.

I also simplified my cloud system to just do what I need it to right now, and it's working great. Mixed with a little sun and some minor post effects and we're not looking too shabby.

I also put in some of my speedtrees, which do look a lot better than normal unity trees. I'm not spending much time on them yet, but it's easy to make tons of them once you get one set up.

While on vacation the week before I set out to implement the first tier of skills for the four starter classes called Archetypes. These are made up of the Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each Archetype starts out with six possible skills choices which are primarily attack focused skills to assist in the first few levels of combat and leveling.

Even before I started writing any code I knew I would need a very flexible system as skills in Solace Crafting are numerous and extremely varied, include player buffs, direct attacks, timed spells, passive abilities, and so on. My system is also a bit unique in that every skill has unlimited levels and needs to be able to scale and blend with other complimentary skills. I more or less had built similar systems before, but it's always great having a chance to start over and really know what you're going into.

The main obstacle is how to initiate skills that are not instant. The Scout has a tier one skill called Double Shot for example that fires two ranged attacks in quick succession. The second arrow has to launch shortly after the first arrow meaning we can't just call single function in one frame. Using coroutines and their yeild capabilities we can create loops for damage over time spells, wait for casting times to finish for complex spells like Meteor, or do a series of completely different things over time like teleport, attack, and warp back.

I have gained a ton of inspiration from League of Legends and their massive array of over five hundred skills, as well as from the classics like Dungeon and Dragons, Everquest, and many others. I plan to build a wide array of skills over time aiming to grant players the ability to be unique and interesting, rather than just cookie cut.

I'm starting now to work on two videos for Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter! Fun times! I will be signing up to IndieDB and more things as I build these two and other screenshots over the next couple weeks.

Vacation with work?

I am in Hawaii right now! My first vacation other than visiting my family in the states since as long as I can remember! Maybe seven or eight years since I went to Mexico. There are wild chickens, lots of different flora, and half naked humans everywhere!

It's vacation, but only from my day job. I love working on Solace Crafting and hope to get plenty time to code in the sun. I got a lot done last week, but here I am, up before sunrise while everyone else is still asleep. Coffee in hand I'm ready to code, but I'll post a little update as Saturday flew past me.

This week I implemented a universal equipment/buff/attack stat system, so that I can add more types of damage and stats over time; a few skills that can be learned, equipped, and used; basic pathfinding with A*, though it needs work; monster drops; improved inventory/item stats display; added character creation/loading to the start screen; as well as adding player buildings into the save/load equations, which took a little thinking; I also added monster scaling over distance, though it's just levels and hp/damage at this time.

I wasn't sure how I was going to go about the player building saving, but it turned out to work just fine. I had to move rotation into the storage script and was able to optimize the class a bit while I was in there. Being able to save progress is one of the biggest requirement of an RPG type game, but also a pretty complex deal when you start having thousands of items slots in the form of chests, and rewards scattered throughout dungeons or houses you've built over time.

Currently I'm working on implementing the first tier of all four early skill trees, called the Archetype trees. These are Squire, Scout, Apprentice, and Disciple. Each tree has six skills in the first tier and are action/attack heavy as this is where you want to pick your main attacks for the first few levels. I've got some ranged magic skills in, some power attacks, and am working on buffs/debuffs, as well as ranged projectile attacks at the moment.

After that I'll be working on some crafting improvements to make sure the set enchants work, as well as building placement checks to stop floating walls, and that kind of stuff.

The importance of good planning

This week, once again, I got a lot done: rare resources are spawning; crafting professions are leveling up; the reworked enchanting system works well; harvesting tool strength; reworked stat system with equip/unequip controls; stone and metal building materials; combat armor and damage calculation; dimension crystal crafting, placement, resource storage, and teleportation; encounter monster and loot spawning; as well as combat experience and levels.

That's not to say that all of those features are finished, but that they are all in and working.

Currently I'm finishing up the reworked skill system which is already working fine, I just have to finish the skill point management and "purchasing" of skills.

The past few weeks I've been talking about my minimalist approach to development, I thought I'd explain that quickly.
Imagine you have:

50 sections or feature genres in your game, and each one has
100 stages of completion. If each stage of each section takes
1 day to finish (that's 5,000 days)

you can spend 30 or 60 days on just one subject no problem, but then all the other 49 sections of your game, all important to it's playability and overall fun, go completely neglected. That was more or less how I was handling development before making a clear todo list and sticking to it. Now I'm making sure everything is level one before moving on to level two. A couple items might get an extra level or two here and there, but overall everything is evolving in an even fashion.

Sometimes it's hard to to settle for less than what you know you're capable of, but sometimes that's a smart decision when time and resources are extremely limited.

Next Saturday I will go on vacation (from my day job) for a week, and hope to get a decent amount of development time in. I will be out of the country for the entire 9 days, so there will definitely be lot's to do, but I'm counting on a fair share of downtime as well as two ridiculously long flights.

Tiny but lots of steps

Ever since taking on my minimalist stance of just getting everything working no matter how bad it works, I've been making great progress! This has probably turned out to be my most important lesson over the years. I could fuss on making the sunset perfect for months if I wanted to, but that's no way to go about developing a fun game.

This week I got basic saving and loading in, a simple starter screen, monster spawning, resource generation (requires some tricks for terrain based trees), weapon damage, some crafting features, encounter spawning(towers), and a simple recall spell in. I did spend a little too much time messing with biomes and terrain generation, but I learned some lessons.

This isn't the best screenshot... but I don't like posting without at least one picture. Pretty much everything you can see in this shot in unfinished, but the basic programming is all in and working. I have a speedtree license, and hope to use all original trees, but for now have some basic Unity Trees spawning in.

Dimension crystals, like the one in the screenshot, are the basis of long range travel, respawn points, and several other features. That's mostly what I hope to be working on next week. I have a 2d minimap I was using to show crystal locations throughout a world, but I might change that to an easier to use list.

The towers in the screenshot are far away, but you can absolutely run straight to them and climb up them. They don't spawn their own monsters and loot yet, but that's their main purpose and we'll get there soon enough. Eventually I plan to have different towers for each biome such as pyramids for desert, and endless mineshafts in the mountains (which might be hard to see from far away).

The biggest problems looming on the horizon at this point are monster movement/combat AI and pathfinding. I'm pretty confident in the rest of what I'm doing, I might be looking into some third party tools to cover those that area up rather than take up a bunch of my time at this point in development.

Lots of tiny steps, but all necessary, and adding up towards the big picture!

On the shoulders of giants

Minecraft spawned a huge wave of voxel based games, some of which were very poorly received as mere "clones," but it's important to understand that big titles like that change the gaming world permanently. Once a sound idea or a better way of doing something has been proven to work it would be wrong to not take that knowledge into account when designing something new.

Along those lines I have dozens of pages of ideas for improving different systems from many games I've played over the years. I'd love to incorporate all of those system into Solace Crafting with a magic wand, but two of the biggest skills an indie designer must never forget are prioritizing and time management. Understanding how important something is to your game and at what stage it should be implemented is difficult at first. Sometimes realizing that something doesn't fit with your game at all can come after hundreds of hours of trying to force it in.

I am often asked what kind of game Solace Crafting is and I have the long winded genre title: open-world, procedural, crafting based, survival, role-playing game; but those could mean any of a whole array of different sub-genres, and I like instead to point out several of the giant titles whose systems I'm incorporating and expanding on.

1. Diablo 2
The Diablo 2 skill selection trees offered a level of freedom that could both make and break your character. Over the years people built unorthodox characters that proved to work great in different situations. From this freedom the developers gave to players, original content was allowed to grow. I hope to expand on this system heavily in Solace Crafting with a very flexible class system and the ability to master any of a large number of skills, for better or for worse.

2. Rust
My favorite aspect of Rust is their method of player buildings. Their system was the foundation for the current building system in Solace Crafting, though it has been changed in more than a few ways, and still has a lot of implementations on the drawing boards that differ from the path Rust seems to be following. The ability to construct outposts, home bases, and connect everything across distant locations is one of my highest priorities for Solace Crafting.

3. Minecraft
Some of my favorite experiences playing Minecraft are from finding strange landscapes, like jagged mountains and deep caverns. Then of course not only finding them, but building stuff on and around them. Bridges, tunnels, towers, castles, you name it, I built it. The biggest problem for me was always not being able to see far enough away. That was the inspiration for my distance engine which in the latest screenshot I uploaded is showing a 60km range, or 120kmx120km landscape letting players set their eyes on a mountain or desert from very far away rather than just wandering aimlessly to see what shows up. Currently the starter world, Khora, is a rather "normal" fantasy landscape and doesn't have at all as much strangeness as I hope to include in it over time, but rest assured there will be magma.

I reworked a lot of the crafting and code based item generation this week to be much simpler rather than plan for everything I have ever wanted to create all at once. It has been a real challenge for me to keep things simple rather than trying to account for every possible upgrade that could come about over time. This weekend and next week I'll be working on collision detection for the building system, and teleportation between dimension crystals.

New tools, simplification

So I bought an old house with my wife and that ate up a lot of time/money over the past few months. Still have so much to do with it too, like, ten years worth XD

I worked for a while on a side project with a friend, and it really showed me how finicky I'd been with Solace Crafting. Paying attention to things that don't yet matter, working too hard to perfect tiny details etc. The end result being there are things not yet implemented that are core to the game mechanics. In otherwords, it's not yet playable, and that should really be goal one.

I've also ditched some tools that just really weren't updating in the ways/schedule that I was hoping they would, and have picked up a new tool instead:

I just bought this generator a few days ago, and made this scene this morning in about four hours. Most of that time was just trying to get my distance engine, and RTP to work properly with it, but it more or less works now, so on to more important things. The barely visible mountains on the horizon are 60km out in this picture.

I'm going through and simplifying things, for example I've ditched animations/custom armor for right now. Crafting and building and harvesting and what not work fine, but they're all lacking in a layer or two of content. Mobs are in as well, but they are not yet procedurally leveling up like they need to, and their spawning mechanics are pretty lackluster. Once I get those four systems working at their most basic levels (harvesting, crafting, building, monsters) I will get back to implementing Dimension Crystals (vital for storage and travel), and towers (vital for loot/crafting upgrades).

One those systems are in we'll at least have a fully playable system. Then it's content. And LAST is polish. I've played plenty games with horrible animations/models, because they are FUN. I'd love to have AAA animations and a million custom armor sets, but that's just not realistic at this point and time.

Back on track

I have achieved a lot more than I initially knew I was capable of with my struggle to make Solace Crafting the best crafting game on the market. It's still a long ways from completion, or what I consider completion in my head, though there are already some really fun and unique aspects to the game. A part of me considers it a crime to hoard these new ideas and not put them out in the hands of players, for better or for worse. Another part of me wants to wait until the game is AAA quality, fully staffed, and the best thing since tuna sandwiches, though I realize more and more that is not something I can realistically expect from a solo project.

I also started a new project with a friend several weeks ago we're tentatively calling Insulation. It is much more PvP related than Solace Crafting, and focuses on construction, gathering, and all around hoarding. We'll get a website up for that soon. What I've done with Insulation though is really starting from scratch pulling all of the best things I learned how to do from Solace Crafting and squeezing them into a new shape. The progress I made in very few hours spread out across several weeks was much greater than I had been making with Solace Crafting for quite some time. Precisely because I abandoned the desire to have everything be AAA, super smooth, and worth a million dollars. I hope to bring that mentality into Solace Crafting now as I come back to it and progress, rather than fuss, through the many things left to make it fun before it's pretty. Here in Japan there is a famous saying "Hana yori dango," which means food before flowers. Tweaking sunsets and generation algorithms is a lot of fun, but if the game doesn't have the basic hundred components needed for players to get in and start playing, it's little more than incomplete.

I am currently applying to a large game company I am very excited to hear back from and have been brushing up my skills on all fronts in hopes of securing myself as the best candidate for the position. Amidst that, our new house, and a stray kitten fiasco it's been hard to find time for Solace Crafting and Insulation. The ultimate goal was always to get funded through Kickstarter so that I could work on it full-time, though a job with this company could powerfully snuff that desire as I would love love love to be working for them. With that dream dominating my thoughts I've been able to put Solace Crafting back in its proper place as a side-project, and not something I should be trying to make AAA quality piece by piece. I'm certain this will speed up the development of the still necessary yet incomplete portions of the game, as again, I work towards getting it out to prospective players as soon as possible.

I'm sorry for the lack of updates, and appreciate all the follows and likes I've received on Twitter. Whether I get hired or not, development will continue, so stay tuned!

Biomes in biomes in biomes!

I'm sorry it's been so long since my last post!
My wife and I bought a house, and I've been testing TerrainComposer2 which is now out in beta!

TerrainComposer was already my go to tool for terrain creation with a lot more power than any other tool out there for my specific needs. Usually several artists will hand paint levels to look good as players move through them. In Solace Crafting the game world(s) is(are) 100% procedural. This means that I can't fine tune a mountain, or reposition a tree by hand, everything is different every time!

With TerrainComposer2 I've now got the tools to add biomes within biomes within biomes for extreme control of the near infinite worlds I'm designing. I'm working directly with the develop to get some extra features in that will make my life much easier, though we're still a week or two away from getting the bugs fixed and really being able to plug version 2 into Solace Crafting's engine.

In the meantime I've made big improvements to the building system. I'll have to go more into depth on this with a post of it's own when I'm finished with it, but you build big and fast with this really easy to grasp building system. The buttons rotate with you as you move and switch between keyboard controls and back to movement simply by holding the right-mouse button down (used for look in most RPGs anyway)

Once I get upgrades in and add stone and metal I'll post a video showing just how easy it is to get things moving.

Hope everyone is enjoying the nice weather!

Monsters, Programming, and Epiphanies

As a crafting heavy game I've spent hundreds of hours thinking of, taking notes, and testing ideas about how to make crafting more controllable. One thing that I knew I wanted to improve on from the beginning, though I didn't figure out how until this week, was a problem made very clear in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I love the Elder Scrolls series and of course enjoyed crafting my own gear in Skyrim, however, with limited resources and a little testing it quickly becomes clear that repeatedly crafting daggers is the best way to level up smithing.

Now, we're not trying to make a "realistic" game, this isn't a simulator, but crafting 300 level 1 daggers to become a master smith just seems silly. But how do you do better? Game development is not easy. I tried requiring five different items crafted per level. I tried requiring different categories within a profession to be leveled up individually. I tried many things. But ultimately it comes down to how much metal did you bend. If a 3 metal dagger gives 3 exp, why not make a 6 metal sword give 6 exp. We also have tiers of metal, and other factors, but I'm finding this to be a -now- obvious system, though it took a long time to stumble across.

Speaking of crafting, I rewrote all of the crafting code this week into a much more compact system, in some cases reducing over a thousand lines of code into roughly one hundred. How? I'm now using what are known as machines in the code. Rather than "hard coding" the stats for a Sword, a Longsword, and a Shortsword each individually, several variables are input and the machines outputs what is needed. The greatest part of this method is that a new item can be added into the game with one a few lines of code. I hope that this eventually leads to opening the door to community created items by the dozens.

Monsters are in and working well. Spawning with different, skills, stats, and colors based on their biome. They're not the brightest when it comes to pathfinding, but pathfinding in a procedural world is never easy. If anyone is a genius in that field please let me know ;p

The UI has improved a lot. I hope to get more tooltips in over the next week to show information when requested rather than filling the screen up with levels and stats.

My wife and I are buying a house! So I've been pretty busy. And Terrain Composer 2 has been delayed, so I'm not currently working on level graphics. I hope to have more flashy graphics to show off soon =]

Refining and Crafting

Over the past few days I brought the refining system and the facilities used for refining raw resources to a much more robust and interactive system. Though the basics of the refining system were in and working, setting up all the ifs ands ors and buts required quite a bit more time. It's always amazing how simple a concept can seem until you really start hammering it out. Even now there is a fair share of things put off for later.

As all facilities, items, buildings and everything are player crafted in Solace Crafting, there needs to be a recipe, a model, icon art, defined capabilities, and other settings for pretty much everything. If Smithing was the only profession just programming a forge and an anvil wouldn't be that hard, but we've got
Hunting / Skinning / Leatherworking,
Forestry / Woodworking,
Reaping / Tailoring,
Quarrying / Masonry,
Divination / Enchanting,
and Mining / Smithing.

Starting out we're allowed to do pretty much anything besides Smelting, Smithing and Enchanting with just a workbench letting players get early armor, weapons, and tools before the night gets cold. This only works with the first Tier (levels 0-4) of resources and limits item quality to a maximum of 40%, so getting proper facilities setup can make a big difference, but isn't required early on.

Refine raw wood into lumber for building your first house and some chests. Refine raw stalks into yarn for clothes and a new bag. Gather enough stone to build a forge and refine ore into metal for a shiny sword. A level 0 sword isn't an awesome weapon, but it's a lot better than no weapon. Or maybe your more of a magic staff kind of person. And there's sure to be some enchants waiting to be found just over yonder.

Once you're equipped well enough to handle the first few kilometers of the enormous world that is Khora, the starting dimension, you can head out to find rare resources and recipes, special encounters and quests. A flaming weapon enchantment from the desert towers, or maybe an ice reflecting shield from the mountains? With 10,000 visible kilometers the freedom of what to seek and where to look is yours.

Setup your Solace (your main Dimension Crystal) and travel as far as you want, knowing you can recall home at any point. That way you can work on upgrading your base if you like rather than building new ones as you go. I personally like to build bases all over, next to waterfalls (we don't have waterfalls yet), atop mountains (we have really big mountains), one can be a castle, one can be a summer cabin.

Ahh for the days when I get multiplayer working =]

Taking Global Inventory

I find that I don't like to make posts without fancy pictures, but at the same time I don't like to let as much time pass between posts as has the past couple weeks. I did have a hard couple weeks with a string of headaches as the seasons and weather changed drastically here in Japan, but I have also made important progress on parts of Solace Crafting.

Originally I was just reworking the User Interface (UI) though to get it where I want it, for now, I needed to improve the global inventory control system. That being how world items, player items, items left in facilities, storage chests, loot chests, etc. are all managed.

Inventory is not a big deal when you are simply moving things from A to B, but in Solace Crafting we actually have quite a few systems that required quite a bit mode code to get working properly. For one, as shown in the attached screenshot inventory has special slots for raw resources which are upgradeable both in total slots available as well as stack size per slot. These are part of the "Void Storage" system which is important to streamlining resource gathering throughout the Multiverse of Solace Crafting.

The other major user of Void Storage are Dimension Crystals which are player built facilities that let us teleport between locations we deem important. Any dimension crystal can be equipped with void slots for resource storage allowing the transfer of resources between locations as well as remote access for crafting facilities within range. Normally just storing the items on the gameobject itself would be enough, but this way we can track and make sense of where all of our items are throughout the Multiverse.

Now that the inventory system is fully equipped and running well, I have the tools to make persistent objects anywhere in any world. In pregenerated worlds this wouldn't be a problem, but in Solace Crafting we are free to travel thousands of kilometers making the programmed destruction and respawning of everything in the Multiverse necessary.

As I polish some final steps in the crafting UI I'm moving more and more into polishing up the skill system. Soon I'll have my hands on Terrain Composer 2 and then we'll be getting ready for Kickstarter with the dream of developing full-time!

Environment, Health, and Skills

The User Interface (UI) for Solace Crafting has gone through many different stages of evolution. Recently it has merged into a single cleanly divided overlay. Initially I thought it best to have multiple windows that were movable letting players customize, but to be honest it was a hassle Now as a single static overlay with different tabs things are now much more clear, consistent, and concise.

While implementing the new UI I also added in satiation, hydration, nutrition, and temperature. Each of these four systems is controlled by several different factors, for example when a player is too hot, diseased, or poisoned, their hydration decreases faster, though the end result is displayed with a simple percentage and colorbar.

Most of the weather mechanics are in a flowing freely. They can mix and match a wide variety of stages from hurricanes to monsoons, heatwaves to cold fronts, etcetera. The minimum and maximum
rain or snow, wind, and temperatures are decided by the weather stage, but then move independently making no ten minutes of weather the same.



Temperature becomes very important to survival, though starting out doesn't need to be bothered with much. Come first nightfall you might freeze to death if you're still not wearing anything at all, but that can also be averted with a warm camp fire. In Solace Crafting we manage body temperature whose lengthy exposure to cold or heat will push the player past their limits but skin temperature is handled separately. Thus even a naked player could warm up by a fire enough to gather for a while out in the cold rather than having to sit by the fire until sunrise. Player core temperature and the limits we are capable of withstanding can be managed with armor, as well as special clothing known as underwear, which we'll get into in the future.

In other news, the skill system has gone under a bit of evolution. Rather than creating a skill for everything, I've cut the total number of skills in three, and added related upgrades to almost all skills. Thus a shield bash doesn't become obsolete when shield slam becomes available, instead a chance to stun can now be added onto the shield bash. Further points can be spent to increase the damage, or the stun chance, with a percentage of each point being shared with all related upgrades. This maintains the high level of class customization while keeping the hotbar from getting too cluttered.

I also created a couple monsters and played with a lot of animations and animators, but I'll polish them a thousand fold before we go into that ;p

I'll post more screenshots soon!

Early edibles

As a survivor game we start in Solace Crafting with almost nothing. Over time we can rise to Hero of the Multiverse! or just build lot's of fun stuff, it's all up to you.

Having said that, players need to be sure to eat well if they want to last through their first night! Nutrition isn't complicated but it is important so evolving past just mushrooms and carrots is an important step for anyone, but that doesn't mean mushrooms and carrots don't have their place.

I made and textured these two models today. They're nothing special, but I don't like working with primitive placeholders. Until a player has better facilities and the tools required to get better food, raw edibles can mean the difference of life and death!

Building beginnings

Two of my favorite games are Minecraft and Rust. Precisely because you can build freely and design you own homebase. This has always been a necessity in the world of Solace Crafting and it's been a lot of fun getting the system in game.

Currently the the system works through a UI that is quite different than Minecraft and Rust, though the end results are similar. The UI still needs a lot of growth visually, but I'll post pictures soon. Basically it's from a third person perspective as most of the fantasy RPG world is. This allows building from a greater distance than when placing things by hand.

As for the mechanics Building is a profession like smithing or mining. We get better at it the more we practice and this let's us learn new building styles, shapes, as well maximum height and others.

The Building profession also opens up to the traps and tower system in which players are going to be able to build defensive and offensive tower and rooms to protect important areas. This leads to lots of fun in PvP and friendly maze building, but is also often a necessary for upgrading Dimension Crystals, the main form of transportation, during which waves of enemies spawn to try and interrupt the process.

I also learned a lot about PBR materials and found a great normal map builder: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ .

Looking forward to getting more building options in and improving the building UI. Building is really one of my favorite aspects of any survival game.

Website now linked to blog!

The website is now linked to this blog so I don't have to manually update news objects!

Part Time Dev

As I am new to the business I still have a day job. My real passion, game development, happens during my breaks and at night. This causes a lot of problems to be honest. For one, rarely do I get a stretch of more than an hour or two of solid focus, usually on the weekends. I have two ten minute breaks and about 45 minutes of my hour lunch break free, then usually a couple hours, more or less, at night. Time management becomes a paramount skill.

Lately I've been doing largely math and 3d modelling/texturing when free at work, then focusing on furthering/implementing game code and mechanics back on my computer at home. The laptop I bring to work is far too slow to handle a full scene of 3d graphics, but it works good for modelling things in Blender, and texturing through Photoshop and Unity. Today I modeled a new crude hatchet which is one of the first items a new player goes for.

Another problem is somewhat similar to humility. As a solo dev with no funding, yet, it's important to know where I am and what I'm capable of with the time given to me. I'd love to create a lot more than I do, but that's not being realistic. Many games nowadays are made with dozen of staff focusing each independently on specific tasks. For the aspiring developer, the ideas and passion can be real, but the time and budget restraints are as well.

It's important to take time for leisure, the youngest of my three cats is not happy I don't play with her 24/7, and of course rest, exercise and nutrition. I eat well, including a healthy breakfast, and no fast food. I also do around 50 chin ups throughout the day bringing my knees all the way up to the bar, as well as five or ten minutes of morning exercises as is a common practice here in Japan.

Last but not least, motivation!
When motivated everything falls into place.
So let's get to it!

Tools and facilities

I got the basics of harvesting tools and processing facilities in and working today.

Harvesting tools are like any other recipe meaning they can be upgraded to any level, any rank, any tier, and socketed with enchantables for customization. This lets us harvest higher tiered resources and at a faster rate. Later on they will also be able to help boost our harvesting spells and talents for much more engaging harvesting.

Once raw resources are harvested they need to be processed, such as when ore is smelted into metal. Facilities are also planned to be upgradable and customizable, mostly for quality control, but also for some forms of specialized crafting.

As I mentioned yesterday all of these system are the foundation for adding additional items in. Once one tool works a dozen more can be quickly added in for further customization, and/or more stuff to find exploring!

The biggest problem with adding new items at this point in development is art. As a solo, and part-time, developer I don't have the time to model, skin, and create 2d art for everything I put in. Hopefully when we go live we will have funds in the form of sales that will allow me to outsource original artwork. I'd very much like to be paying young aspiring artists in the online gaming community, I know there are a lot of them out there!

Google! Google! Google! "It's only a model... shh"

Time to start posting regularly, which is a bit daunting when you're coding and uploading and managing everything yourself. I've decided instead to let Google help me out, and look forward to posting on this site much more regularly that I have on my own. Links to be set up shortly of course.

As far as Solace Crafting goes, progression is steadily moving forward. I've been dabbling a bit in marketing and have learned a great deal at the cost of precious development time. I've also read a lot into company formation and management, or in other words law and taxes, as I take steps towards forming a legitimate legal body to handle sales and that side of things.

Today I simplified a fair share of the recipe databases to make adding in new content and managing what's already there even easier. The structure that all crafting is built on top of in Solace Crafting has a very serious need to be flexible and accepting of new and changing content. Luckily it was built that way from the start!

Though to be honest I spent a lot of my free time cleaning today. Our apartment was getting messy and I gave a lot of our appliances a good scrub. Clearing the clutter is important for focus! Which the next four days will have a lot of.