Hey mates,
Although the past month was not very rich with new content for Craftomation 101, it was very important for the game. We released one very long-awaited feature and took some time to reflect upon what was already done, add the outcomes we took from your very generous feedback, and lay out long-term plans.
What's New
Perhaps the biggest star of May was that bot-management interface that so many of you asked for so many times. It is still a work-in-progress feature: we'd like to allow you to control the bots using that interface. But already it lets you to organize your Craftomates into groups and name those groups, so you could have a dedicated fire-making team, food-providing team, etc.
After shipping this crucial feature and eradicating the most vile bugs, Ivan the programmer went on a vacation, during which he enjoyed the magnificent views of Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Could this be an inspiration for our next game? Given the cyberpunk cityscape and the amount of robots in the streets, the answer is - maybe:
But before Ivan embarked on his journey, he and our studio head Oleg discussed the intricate details of writing a game on Lua programming language in general and making a game with it and Defold engine in particular. It's easy-peasy: just took us a couple of years, and 60 000 lines of code. And then we wrote this article:
What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60,000 lines of code? (15 minute read)
We published it separately because it contains a lot of technical details, and if you're into coding and making video games - we suggest you check it out!
Shortly after Ivan returned from his journey, another one happened - a journey of mind! We updated the version of Defold to v1.8.1, which (among other things) fixed that pesky bug that caused the game to crash if a controller not supported by Defold was plugged in.
Additionally, it increased game performance for ARM Mac users. But for us, the devs, it meant a lot of QA stuff - transition to a new version rarely happens without any stress. But thanks to that, Alex the artist had time to make a loading screen for the game, so it no longer looks like it froze when starting a new game or loading a saved one:
But all in all, we're very excited about this transition! Among other things, it introduces a native module for in-game camera, which is a pretty big deal, as it comes to replace the unofficial one. Of course, we're infinitely grateful to the devs of the latter, because it made Craftomation 101 possible in the first place! But unofficial is unofficial, it has its’ issues… And the brand new camera module will allow us to introduce smoother camera zooming within weeks! We'll keep you posted.
And this is not the only thing that will keep us occupied this summer! Speaking of which…
What's next?
Believe it or not, but we're just getting back from processing all the feedback you sent our way since the Early Access release. Craftomation 101 turned out to be bigger than we were prepared for!
And that means it's time to elaborate on our development plans for the upcoming months. Upon studying hundreds of reviews, forum threads, and comments, we picked two major directions:
- Interface & QoL changes. Not many surprises here, there's a lot of work to do, even the aforementioned bot-management interface needs polishing. Another subject for improvement is the programming editor: we need to make connections between programming blocks more graphic and less intricate. We'd also like to give you, the players, more control over this part of the game. As of now, lines are just sprites, a way to display the connections between things. Their next-level version will allow interaction with it, which will give us a whole new area to of potential features to explore!
If you want to know how it might look, here's a screenshot from Tinkercad, which is one of our main references:
- The gameplay. Thorny bushes, which we introduced a couple of months back, were implemented to solve the lack of challenge in the second part of the game, but they're not enough. In order to analyze what parts of Craftomation 101 are underdeveloped, we drafted a matrix of all the gameplay elements and how they influence each other. As it turns out, the most alienated part of the game were the ales, the ones made in the Brewery!
At the same time, we were bothered that Bonfire management mechanics exhausted itself by the second half of the game. And that, in turn, made us remember the concept of area-of-effect buildings that we were contemplating at early (very early) stages of development. Check out this fountain, for example: it was supposed to recharge all of the Craftomates that were in its’ area of operations:
So, our next crazy idea is to create more of those AoE buildings AND use Ales to make them work! It's a very early concept, so we're just sharing our wildest ideas, but: imagine a building that would consume a special Ale, that influences the growth of surrounding plants. Or a building that can be charged with an Ale to provide a buffing effect to any robot around. We've got a bunch of ideas, and if you want to discuss them, you can find us online on our Discord server… or just leave a comment below! We're always happy to chat.
And if you're more fond of the programming part of the game, we've got a teaser for you too: more diverse variables! In their current state, they only accept coordinates as arguments - this is the remains of a very early concept of Craftomation 101, when we planned to treat the map as a memory unit. We took a different direction eventually, but the feature is still here. So, we're planning to make variables more flexible, to take your robot programming routines to the next level! Using numbers and object types as values for variables would be a good start.
Once again: the aforementioned features are just concepts. That's the drill in video games: we come up with an idea, we will prototype it into the game, we gather feedback from our players, and only then decide if we were right or wrong. Because with games, nothing matters if it isn't fun! Duh.
Before we wrap up for today, we've got a real exciting piece of news! We suggest you listen closely to the news from South America on June 26-30, because Craftomation 101 was selected as finalist at BIG Games Festival, which is currently known as Gamescom Latam:
We even have an official badge on our Steam page, so it's very serious! Wish us luck.
We hope you'll have a good rest this summer, and come back to see a better Craftomation 101! And if you're not planning to go offline for these months, feel free to stay tuned for more news about the game in the upcoming weeks.