Creo - A Solo-Developer's Passion Project
Hey there everyone. First off, I'd love to thank the community over on our Discord for following up with me regarding Creo's development. I wanted to give the rest of the Steam community an update on the current progress of Creo's development, and why there's been a large gap in development.
To start off, please know that Creo is indeed still in development—it has been on my mind every day for the last few months. I'd love to give you all a brief look into a bit of my personal life, to help explain a little as to why we had that lapse in development over the last few months.
A Candid Look
As many of you know, I'm the sole developer and creator of Creo, in addition to being an (in my opinion) involved 24-year-old Dad and loving husband. I began work on Creo about a year ago when I had a part-time job and was going to school. Since I had a ton of free time, work on Creo was feverish, and I was able to crank out 8 hours of development a day on it. But as time went on, I had to take on additional work in order to afford to live in my rather expensive state, and supporting a family too.
We decided that it would be best for me to attend a coding boot camp for web development since the completion time would be much faster than University, and there were well-paying jobs waiting for me to graduate. So my boot camp began in early June of 2019 and ended in late August. It was insane. Around 9 hours a day in an intensive program. Fortunately, I was able to successfully complete the course and land an interesting full-time position at a manufacturing company designing much of their software.
The Grind
Though my new job helps pay my family's bills and keep my interest, it has taken a large portion of my time, and after coding for 8-9 hours per day at work, it's hard to come home in the evening and code for another 3-5. However, one thing I can't stand is leaving things unfinished, and though it is hard for me, I try my best to get at least a few hours of Creo development in every day, in addition to other software projects I'm working on.
So there you have it.
My life, briefly summarized.
Is it an excuse for the lack of development? Perhaps.
But trust me, it's been driving me crazy.
Recent Progress
Now that we've gotten much of that out of the way, time to get to the juicy stuff—what I've been currently working on. Over the last few months, I've been thinking about new ways to make Creo interesting and replayable, and I realized that I haven't been focusing on what I really wanted to make in the first place:
A procedurally-created story driven by the settlers that worship you
What that means is that I want the settlers to naturally make decisions and act on their "own". So in light of that, I've began to "refactor", or rewrite, lots of the code for the setters, in addition to providing large performance improvements. Currently, this is what's been added to the version of Creo I'm working on:
- Settlers have a much nicer looking model
- Settlers now have unique hair, skin, shirt, and pant colors
- Settlers now age, and their hair turns white with age
- Settlers now have hunger, and once hunger is low enough, they eat, decreasing your food amount
- Created a new name generating algorithm, which can currently create around 5000 unique names for settlers
In addition to these changes, I've also begun work on a new "decision/event" engine, which will allow settlers to interact with each other, and potentially trigger fights, friendships, memories, revolts, etc. It's in the early stages, but it's certainly coming along.
For whoever made it this far in this post, thank you. Really, I could not have gotten this far in the development of my passion-project without your support. Please, if you haven't yet, leave an honest review of the game on our Store page. I try my best to respond to questions you may have as well, so please, feel free to reach out to me here on Steam or on our Discord channel. Thank you!
- Esteban Hernandez
Developer/Creator of Creo