Hello everyone, and welcome to the fifth Producer’s Letter for Solace Crafting.
I’m Fab, and today we'll take a moment to contemplate the journey so far and look towards the future for our next step.
We embarked on a hell of a journey with this overhaul, one that will likely take us late into 2025 for all the core changed envisioned to fully materialize. As you’ve seen from work gone into the beta branch over the past few months, this is a complete rebirth of the game. It is also a structural changes to operating procedures, both things in full respect of what keeps some of you so faithful: the actual soul of the game, and the personality of its creator, Kyle.
After causing substantial chaos on the beta branch through autumn and the first part of winter with all the stuff we’ve rewired, we’ve used the past couple months to bring the branch back to its original playability in line. The goal is then to update the main branch and resume the game’s regular life cycle, while continuing its profound transformation into a better, sharper, tighter version of itself.
As the latest post announced, two areas of focus will be tightening the gameplay loops (or bringing them in when they’re missing) and deploying user content and modding tools. To us, this is really the essence of this next phase: making Solace Crafting and its worlds, yours.
Remember the world customization screen when you create a new world? Well, what if that kind of control was not just a one-off thing at world creation. Rather, we envision it as an entire relationship with the world extending not just to biome setup, difficulty, resource abundance but contents, lore, rules, you name it. We want to make you architects of destiny within the planes Khora.
In the latest patch, we’ve updated the graphical elements for houses and towns; this is just a small beginning. Not only are we going to improve their looks and config, but we’re overhauling the building system to be more responsive and easier to produce beautiful homes with.
Dungeons should soon follow, with new assets coming in. As part of the user generated content approach, we fancy the concept of you being able to build and share your own dungeons too. We’re not quite there yet but it’s certainly on the horizons. Either way, sharing your creations is going to be a key dimension of this next update cycle.
The foundational updates to the world creation system continue with the implementation, shortly, of new tools enabling us to dish out a lot more new areas to populate worlds. I’ve kept on referring to this as “static islands in a procedural ocean”. The idea being that right now, the world is fully procedural, right? PoIs were the first step in a transition. Just the same way you currently encounter PoIs, which are static (as in they are pre-built objects with built-in variability), you will encounter entire world chunks, mini-worlds, in effect, giving your experience a lot more anchoring and familiarity as each biome acquires its set of locales. We’ve been validating tools for that, so finalized development and implementation will be coming this spring. The goal is to give your Solace Crafting world a sense of wonder and exploration, a sense of grounded and tangible and at the same time enhancing replayability by making worlds more meaningful and surprising.
Additionally, one more word on gameplay loops, which have been mentioned a few times here previously but it’s really something that is going to be key to take Solace Crafting to its potential. By gameplay loops, we certainly do not mean theme park-like play circuits. Simply, we mean the flow of goals, tasks, incentives and underlying systems into one another that give structure to your experience. Whether you decide to step out into the wilderness or go craft a new weapon, each should organically take you through a sequence of events, thoughts and emotions that is much more purposeful and rewarding and is more than “stuff to do in the game” and more like building Solace Crafting-specific experiences.
This also means further updating the RPG aspects of the game, starting with character creation, to give it that “assign stat points and create your build” experience.
And finally, another word on visuals. We are still transitioning to more marked and game-specific visuals. Currently, we’re very bright and somewhat cartoony at times. Understand that what we want to keep is the freshness and vibrancy that make the visuals more catchy and easy on the eyes but the style will evolve. This is still a kind of reset phase. Our ideal scenario is to pay homage to the 90’s rpgs and old school fantasy we grew up with while achieving a crisp, modern, enchanting look. Tall order but we’re preparing that meticulously, collecting refs and hands to help us through this process.
That’s it for today!
We have so much to do but as you’ve seen over the past few months, we are committed and bold. As you’ve seen with Kyle for the past few years, he is relentless. So one by one we’ll clear all the necessary steps to take the game where it needs to go and deliver you many great experiences both along the way and at destination.