Greetings Adventurers!
I'm sorry that my personal life has repeatedly delayed this momentous patch, which I intend to explain, but we've got a lot done these past few months, and we've got a lot to talk about, so let's get into it!
First and foremost, I need to make it very clear that
this patch is not at all intended as a playtest.
This patch is intended as a preview for players to take a look at, to feel the new controls, and to provide early feedback. This patch contains thousands of new lines of code, hundreds of new assets, and focuses primarily on the following:
- Overworld biome graphical assets
- Enhanced player movement
- Action based combat
- Enemy artificial intelligence
- World generation technology improvements
This preview patch is only available via the beta branch and has several features that are temporarily turned off, or simply have no effect, such as:
- Avatar creation: no matter what you create or wear you will be a guy with a cape.
- Weather is completely absent. The day/night cycle and skies are also being reworked.
- Harvesting is largely impossible as again, this is not a playtest patch.
- Combat. In the overworld nothing can hurt you. If you travel elsewhere, you will likely not be able to hurt anything else.
So, what is the purpose of this patch?
The above mentioned new features all reach deep into the core of the many systems that make up Solace Crafting, and are foundational in moving the game from it's old haphazard design into the new well oiled machine we are planning for it to become. That means, defining and upholding an expandable art style, and improving the many different ways that players interact with the world. Movement, combat, harvesting, crafting, leveling, exploring, all of these systems are heavily dependent on how the world is shaped and presented to the player, which is why we have added a number of new technologies to bring hand-crafted points of interest into the game world, from a small copse of trees, to an entire mountain village.
These foundational changes set the framework for us to move onto the next step of rebuilding the many different types of content that already exist in Solace Crafting.
For example, we have now a wolf and a bandit working with out entirely new AI systems which means we can add any type of humanoid creature using the bandit's AI as a starting template, and though a bit trickier we can use the wolf template for other non-bi-pedal creatures.
The large mountain that you should be able to see near the start area is hand-crafted, and hand-painted. It's the only mountain in the game right now, but now that the system works we can use it to bring in dozens of mountains, canyons, oasis, islands, anything we want using the same systems.
The player character will now always start with a claymore so that you can try out either weapon combat or the hand to hand combos. Likewise, these are proofs of concept for how weapon animation sets will work. Magic and healing will of course be added in very shortly, now that these foundations have been put in place. Climbing, sliding, mounts, and other features are also being built into and tested with these new systems and will be brought online as we progress.
So what's next?
Now comes the fun part. New monsters, new animals, new skills, new weapons, new resources, new locations... content! Content can't exist without systems, and now that we've got the first major group of systems in and working, it's time to make proper use of them. And that doesn't mean reinstating all of the old content, we will be introducing almost entirely new content that better aligns with our long term goals of a well populated fantasy multiverse filled with things to do and lore to explore, as well as a variety of play-styles to go about experiencing them with.
There is a long list of advanced features that we will be talking about and implementing as time moves on, but we are going to take things step by step. Having said that, we are working on a roadmap and would very much like everyone's input on that when we're able to reveal it, as our vision for the future of Solace Crafting is entirely dependent on pleasing our community and attracting new adventurers from all around the globe!
The current build is also lacking in performance in some areas yet. There are a lot of tricks and puzzles to making Unity perform better, but now is not yet the time to be spending much time on that area.
What happened?
There's no real point in going too deep down this discussion, but we had a kind of perfect storm of unfortunate events one after the other. Our git account went over the limit imposed by its developers, not by like our account tier or anything like that, and became completely unusable right as all three of us currently working on the game tried to merge all of our work together. While waiting for support to help us out I tried a few things to fix the problem, but actually made things worse. Once support picked up our case I was deep into trying to put things together, when my wife's water broke! Our son is happy and healthy, but my wife met several complications and is unfortunately still in the hospital, though it's looking like she will be released in another few days. I lost nearly a week trying to repair the damage and ultimately having to redo several days of work.
Such is game development though, problems come and problems go. I have ample time to get us back onto our original schedule, and we've already made a lot of good progress.
In closing
I really hope everyone enjoys the new art style and can understand why the old style was really just making everything much more expensive and difficult to work with. I'm confident the new combat system will grow into a feature rich, player choice driven class system. And above all I look forward to bringing out new content, quests, stories, and treasure for players to engage with and uncover as we move through the next stages of Solace Crafting development!
Best wishes and happy gaming!
Kyle
This preview patch is only available via Beta branch.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
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