Happy New Year!
From the land of the rising sun. I hope everyone had a safe and fun New Years. I want to take a few minutes to talk about how things have progressed up until now, and how I'd like things to progress from here on.
2018 in retrospect
In the Fall of 2013 I started teaching myself how to use Unity and C# as a hobby from scratch. By the start of 2017 I had worked out the basics of what it was I was trying to create and started piecing together the first rendition of Solace Crafting. On January 16th 2018 I released Solace Crafting as Early Access on Steam, and on February 21st 2018, I quit my day job and started work as a full-time developer.
Initially the game was riddled with small problems I simply hadn't thought about as an inexperienced developer. Problems with different types of machines, keyboards, and graphics cards. Things that were too difficult to understand if you didn't simply "know" everything about the game front to back as a developer does. The player-base then and now have always been the primary source of information as to what needs work, and I can't express my thanks enough to everyone that has posted here on the forums or joined our Discord server to post screenshots, share files with me, and engage in discussions about the design and style of Solace Crafting with other players and myself.
Over the first few months I learned more than anything that time management is absolute top priority at all times, both in the sense of what to be working on, but also how to. In programming there are dozens of ways to approach any problem. Creating a flexible framework that you can add a wide variety of different pieces to is extremely important as things are always changing and evolving. I have been silently updating most things to work in a much more modular, settings based, fashion, though some of the earliest systems still need improvement to better handle all the forms of modding planned for the coming months.
Graphics were improved and downgraded a number of times, but in the end really are tertiary when compared to fun and performance. My wife painted a picture for me by request that I keep next to my monitor which says "tanoshisa ha ichiban" or "fun is number one".
Crafting, building, adventuring, and exploration have all been vastly upgraded since the initial release, but one problem persists: a lack of content. And as they say, content is king. I hope to remedy this problem with the addition of modding support, which will not only allow players to offer optional content for download, but make things much easier for me to create and add in myself.
When it rains it pours
By the end of 2018 I had finished around 70% of multi-lingual support, something that required me to go through and refurbish thousands of lines of text content. This ended up being an exhausting process and I decided to put it down for a while to try and spread the stress of it out over time. The next step I had planned however was multiplayer, which has by long and far been the most stressful task to date. In order to test any sort of change to multiplayer code it's generally necessary to export a fresh copy of the game, start up a server, and connect to it, which makes testing even small changes very time consuming. With the language system still on hold and multiplayer less than half-way finished, a string of unfortunate events, hardware, software, and personal, threw me into a burnt out funk.
You don't often see it talked about here on Steam or gaming web-sites, but we are people, developers and players alike, and sometimes the world is not as kind to us as we might prefer. I ended up taking more days off to be with my family for the holidays than I had originally intended to, but I feel much better now here on the 2nd of January, and have redefined my short terms goals. In my continuing efforts to be an open and honest developer I'd like to make my plans clear and open for discussion.
One of the primary goals as a corporate entity remains: to make enough money to hire additional staff. I do not however believe in running ads, subscriptions, or micro-transactions, despite the very real fact that they can be a boon to development finances. It would be nice to have some cosmetic items for sale, but that would take time to setup and populate. I believe that when Solace Crafting is a better game than it is today it will make us more than enough money to hire additional staff so that we can take it to the next level. These are the three broad features currently in development and I'd like to give my reasoning for each:
1. Multi-lingual support
Most of the world doesn't actually speak English. The base Google translations that I'm implementing aren't perfect, but it's still 90% better than not being able to read anything at all. Already we've had a number of player help improve machine translations, and several requests for more languages. Once this system is finished and I setup language specific Steam Store pages, I hope we see an increase of players around the world. My apologies that this was left unfinished for almost all of December.
2. Multiplayer
This is something a number of players have expressed their concerns with, primarily as something too difficult for a solo developer. Development has definitely stalled since I began working on multiplayer, however that was largely due to hardware and personal problems than actual difficulty. We have successfully tested multiplayer a number of times, and just need a few more solid 8-10 hour days to get things polished up. Many players over the past six months have made it clear they are waiting for multiplayer, and I completely understand that. I too much prefer to play at least in the same world as my friends and other people if not in real-time together. Hopefully this will help us attract some more streamers as well!
3. Modding support
There are a number of well-tested reasons why modding support is great for any game. One reason is the simple fact that I can't get nearly as much content in-game as I would like to by myself. Recipes, items, encounters, plants, monsters, buildings, almost everything has been upgraded over the past few months so that it can be turned on and off with ease. Making it so that additional content can be added in is only a few steps away and along with Steam Workshop integration I hope for this to help generate a wide variety of optional content. This will also in general make it much easier for me to plug in new "official" content as well instead of the hard-coded methods that dominated 2018.
What I'm treating as most important here for #1 and #2 is accessibility, and for #3 is content. Hopefully these 3 with another wave of marketing will help bring in enough new players and funds to bring in a programmer smarter than yours truly, and let me focus on design, interface, and content.
In any case, modding support will most likely be followed by a period of me focusing on content generation, but once these are in and working, there are a few features I've been very excited to get into for a long time:
4. Dungeons
The caves system that we currently have is a work in progress, and certainly has more planned for it. However, room based dungeons, both above and below ground can be generated, created, and manipulated much easier. With the addition of monsters, traps, and treasure, procedural dungeons are one thing, but player owned complexes are another feature to this system I've long wanted to setup. In short, to allow players to create and extend upon a complex via the management of rooms instead of individual pieces as we do when creating structure/buildings. This will allow the creation of complexes both above and below ground, allow player pre-built dungeons from the Steam Workshop to spawn into any world, and could also lead to a better system for spawning town NPCs.
5. Quests
This is a long requested system that I have continually put off until there is more content in-game. I think that once modding support is working well and I am able to add more "official" content, it will be easier to set up reward based tasks.
6. Elemental Planes
Adding other "types" of dimensions such as a fire plane, or an ice plane, isn't much of a technical difficulty as much as it is artistically time consuming. The basics of world generation, monster spawning, flora, encounters, etc., are all in and working in the base world. Extending that in different shapes to create different dimensions is not so difficult. Once we have more monsters and loot in and working, this is something I've wanted to get into from day one.
These are just some of the broader categories on my todo list that I'm looking forward to. There are a number of smaller things yet to be addressed such as improved animations, movement of data management to a database structure, freeform building placement, and more.
Please let me know what you think should be given priority, or what has you waiting before giving Solace Crafting a try.
Thank you!
Thank you again to everyone that bought into Early Access in 2018!
I'm sorry Early Access didn't sell as well as I had hoped, preventing me from hiring help. I'm more capable than ever, and still confident I can fill Solace Crafting with the features and content it needs to attract the funds necessary for a small team of dedicated staff so we can take it out of Early Access and beyond!
Best wishes to you and your loved ones for 2019
Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games