This video covers a lot of what I want to get across in this post, but it ended up turning into an hour so I will try and summarize a bit via text. If you'd like to watch the video though, it covers 5 topics:
1. What's been going on
2. The money situation
3. Talking about hiring on freelancers
4. The survey results
5. My long term vision of Solace Crafting
1.
To summarize, I've been swamped with all of the contacts coming in, alongside working on getting the project more ready to welcome onboard other developers. It's a 50+GB project folder full of thousands of assets that I know how to navigate because I've been working with them every day for the past 5 years, but I want to get things better organized to ease the onboarding process I'm planning to get into at the start of next month.
2.
As previously talked about the initial sales boost is in large generated by a "visibility round" wherein Steam boosts the games exposure so that a lot more people than would normally are recommended to look at the game. That ended on something like Sept 1st, so there was the possibility that sales would go back to pre-1.0, which case I would need to be more careful in my spending. Thankfully these past two weeks of post-1.0 sales have not reverted to pre-1.0 numbers, so I'm more confident in planning how to spend my earnings to improve the game.
3.
There are four different developers I am looking to pay in some capacity once the August sales make it to me at the end of the month. One is a girl I've paid in the past to do building pieces for me, and another is our audio team. These both are not necessarily hourly or "part-time" positions, but more milestone payments where I ask for a package of things like a package of desert theme building skins, or harpy combat sounds, for example. The other two are more part-time positions focused on revamping the in-game user interface, and converting the current targeting/combat system to a click to target system similar to games like Everquest or World of Warcraft. This will both better allow for grouping and being able to click on other players to heal, buff, or interact with them, as well as remove the need to aim fireballs and arrows, while adding in things like channeling abilities and spell cast times.
4.
There were somewhere around 350 response to public survey, with a fair amount of text based comments and remarks, but here are the number based responses:
This graph shows that for the most part everyone voted towards "this does not bother me". The higher the number the more "bothered" people were, with combat AI, animations, and the UI being the least liked.
I was a little surprised that audio was voted as not bothering people, and that achievements weren't better received. There are some bugs with the current achievements systems, one big one showing a ton of achievements as just all giving "wisdom 0.2" when they actually give a wide variety of stat bonuses, that I have fixed, though not patched in yet. But all in all I personally agree with the bulk of the answers.
5.
In the video I go into some depth as to how I want the game to evolve to better support some of the survey results, and how some of the systems already in-game have been designed from day one specifically to support exploration, area based quests, NPC villages, and to add more practical uses to the long range viewing distance we have rather than just looking neat. Tough to summarize twenty minutes of me talking into a few paragraphs, but I'll try.
Currently the world of Solace Crafting generates in 8km squared "chunks," which are divided into 64 "sections" or terrains, each 1km squared themselves. Each chunk, for example, can contain only 1 floating island, then each remaining 63 sections that do not have a floating island then roll to determine what type of a "large encounter" they have. So there is only ever one cave or dungeons per square kilometer. This is a flow of logic that the generation engine goes through to make sure that encounters are properly placed throughout the world.
In the future I would like to further expand on those systems to generate an NPC town per chunk, and to have that town aware of the other encounters within the same chunk, and build stories and offer quests and rewards for engaging in those encounters.
One of The main thing I am interested in exploring further is a quest system that in large does away with the:
- get a quest from a quest hub (city)
- walk to some distant location to kill 8 monsters
- walk back to the quest hub
- rinse repeat
This is still a widely used system, especially in RPGs and MMORPGs, and is in my opinion just terrible, and really ends up making otherwise great games a chore to play. I think for example, NPC villages that offer quests should have a public solace within them that players can teleport back to, maybe even with a spell specifically for NPC villages only.
The quest hub, story building system has a lot of good that can come out of it as long as it doesn't turn into a walkathon, but a superior and generally more fun system of questing that I want to implement is an area based quest generation system. In the video I use the example of walking into a swamp and having a quest notification popup that "you hear a scream to the northwest." You don't need to "pickup" the quest, and you don't need to engage in it if you don't want to, it just exists in that area, and can be engaged with if you choose to. Maybe killing a skeleton in a graveyard drops a ring that starts a quest, or you come across a broken shrine that starts a quest, etc. Things that don't ask you to walk somewhere else to engage with them, but start and finish relatively where you are.
I think it will be entirely possible to support these types of area based quests with an area specific section of the journal, and by allowing players to interact with map "sections" by clicking on them to show if there are quests that they encountered and either finished or are maybe still available to them.
I think there are a lot of unexplored possibilities for making "questing" more fluid and exploration based than the plain old "go get this for me" stuff, and I think can open up a lot of opportunities for modders to get involved in designing more fun content in the future.
I also think having crafting and harvesting quests, class specific quests, and a lot of other "unlock" content can really add to giving players more options of what to do with some minimum level of guidance, without railroading players down a main story quest or predetermined path.
Anyway, check out the video if you'd like to hear more about me rambling about that kind of stuff. I'm sorry I haven't actually been engaging a ton in "game development" these past two weeks. I'm trying to dedicate the majority of this week to bug fixes, and probably half and half next week between bug fixes and again getting ready for onboarding more help.
It still feels like mid-summer over here, but the nights are starting to cool down, hopefully I can get out and repair my once accessible yard from it's current jungle status.
Happy gaming!