It's been a weird year, I don't think anyone would argue against that. For me it's also been a weird few months as I fought hard to get the new world generation engine out and working. On top of that it's been a weird couple of weeks here recently. I actually started having trouble swallowing and was unable to eat my dinner without taking a drink with every bite for a couple weeks. After confirming that there's nothing wrong my neck, they told me I'm probably just stressed out of my mind. I've been taking a nerve relaxant for a few days now and dinner has become much less stressful, so I am grateful for that.

So what's causing my stress? Is the big question I've had for the past few days, and I think the majority of my "stress" really stems from a lack of organization. I get e-mails, I get Steam notifications, I get private messages, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, every day. Often times these are questions, sometimes they're bug reports, sometimes they're friendly suggestions. Some of the information I receive takes weeks to respond to. I've had some suggestions in the "suggested-features" channel in our Discord server for over a year now. Not to mention 130,000 lines of code that I page through daily trying to make Solace Crafting better and better without breaking something I may have written back in 2017.

Indecision is definitely a big part of that as well. Should I go back and fix this old chunk of code? It might take six hours, and it might break something that could take another 3-4 hours to debug. Should I start looking to add a new feature knowing it will take at least a couple weeks to implement? Sometimes the mix of indecision and new information pouring in every day feels a big overwhelming, to the point that it looks like my body wasn't dealing with it as well as my mind/heart are.

In lieu of which, I've spent some time reevaluating what's most important to the game in its current state, but always want to bring the community on board in giving me ideas and guidance as to what version 1.0 really needs to be, and what path we should be taking to get there.

To do this, I've setup two things:

1. Solace Crafting Fall Survey 2020

Please feel free to write as much as you can in the "anything else you'd like to add" box, I do read all of them, or get a conversation going in Discord. I don't always participate in or respond to every conversation in Discord/Steam, but I do read all of them even if I'm late to the party.

2. Solace Crafting - Bug Tracker

I've setup a bug tracker on bitbucket. Up until now I've been manually keeping track of bugs in Discord, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. Bitbucket isn't necessarily my favorite for bug tracking, but it does allow anonymous logins and/or logging in with a Google/Microsoft/Apple account, which I think is important to ensure people willing to post bugs don't turn away the moment they're asked to make a new account. Some of our Discord users have already migrated the majority of the bugs listed in Discord onto the tracker, thank you for that. I'm hoping this will help me keep bugs better organized, and it certainly has shown me that I was indeed starting to lose track of them. The "Bug Tracker" also allows for the posting of, as well as commenting and voting on suggestions.

From here on it seems as though there are two general paths to choose from, though both lead to the ultimate goal of version 1.0.

Path A

I continue to add new features following the roadmap.
0.7.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality
0.7.2: Randomly generated towns
0.7.3: Town quests and unlock
0.7.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI
0.7.5: Town defense

0.8.1: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities
0.8.2: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills
0.8.3: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters

0.9.1: Broad scale optimizations
0.9.2: Improve animations
0.9.3: Finalize language support, add full controller support

Path B

I work to polish and solidify that which is already in-game before moving further down the roadmap. I prioritize content that interacts with and expands on already implemented content.
0.7.1: Broad scale optimizations
0.7.2: Improve animations
0.7.3: Improve monsters pathfinding. Add procedural monster generation and monster abilities
0.7.4: Improve combat math. Rework adventuring skills

0.8.1: Improve and add new dungeons and encounters
0.8.2: More recipes/materials/enchants/drops

0.9.1: Expands on town buildings and functionality
0.9.2: Randomly generated towns
0.9.3: Town quests and unlock
0.9.4: Villager equipment, clothing, naming, skills, AI
0.9.5: Town defense

0.9.9: Finalize language support, add full controller support

Through talking with players here on Steam and on Discord I'm leaning towards Path B more than I ever have. There's a "people pleaser" in me that is constantly trying to get something out every week so to keep my customers (that do pay for my dinner and electricity, thank you so much!) from burning me at the stake. Then on the other side of the mirror I'm usually fine with big names delaying their release dates, because I want them to get it right. I'm not sure what it is inside of me that wants to try and please people quick and fast, but it's definitely a good thing that I've recognized it and am now keeping an eye on it. I do believe that in general quality is more important content, but still, with gaming, fun is number one.

That was a wall of text. I almost made it into a video, and do plan to do a video just talking about my thoughts of where we are and where we're going. In any case, we've had an open discussion on the direction of development for a few weeks now. I'm hoping to further that conversation with this post, and hope to reach a conclusion I can latch onto and not look backwards with, at least for a few months. Please do share you opinion on the different possible paths, and thank you in advance to everyone that fills out the survey!

Kyle Postlewait