Greetings Adventurers!
I'm happy to bring you some exciting, albeit long overdue news! I now have a partner in crime. We're going to call him the Project Director for now, who I have been working together with day in and day out for the past couple of months. We have big plans for Solace Crafting I'd like to go into just a bit for now, but I will leave the majority of it up to him, scheduled for a post in the next week or two. Needless to say we are hard at work on creating a much richer, more engaging experience, in order to bring Solace Crafting to the many many players that have yet to hear its name.
Most of you know that I have always worked on this labor of love by myself, and no doubt the majority of you are aware of at least some of the many shortcoming of the game as it is right now. There really is no one to blame for these shortcomings other than myself, and yet that has never really bothered me because I am only one man.
The job of "indie game developer" nowadays can mean many different things, from multi-million dollar teams of nearly a dozen people, all the way down to zero funding, solo entrepreneurs like myself. On top of that, there are many different levels of difficulty when it comes to creating a video game, and Solace Crafting has pretty much all of the challenges that a game can. It's 3D, it's physics based, it's multiplayer, it's procedural, it uses a semi-realistic style, etc..
Were this being handled by a triple A company there would be teams of programmers, animation specialists, visual effects artists, character designers, level designers, writers, shader technicians, network developers, audio engineers, 3D artists, UI artists, managers, directors, marketers, you get the point. There are many many different professions that a strong game needs filled in order to thrive. Long story short, the majority of these professions, I'm just straight up not that good at. Our new Project Director is a great counterpart to me in that sense because his talents are very different than my own. I have my talents, but they do not stretch far and deep enough to cover even 25% of what a game like Solace Crafting really needs and deserves.
Having said all that, I don't have a million dollars to round up a team and get all of those problems solved. That's why over the past couple of months we've been putting together design documentation to redesign Solace Crafting from the ground up, keeping all of its core strengths, while filling in its many gaps with a much more player friendly, rewarding, and engaging experience. The first wave of major changes are things that we can handle with just the two of us, primarily a complete redesign of the art style, world generation, and player controls. We hope to then leverage this improved experience, along with our extensive design documentation detailing the further stages of improvement, in order to attract funding to help make those later stages possible.
We hope to have ready the first look at a re-imagined Solace Crafting around two weeks from now. Some of our plans further down the road very much include our community, some of you in Discord have been around from day 1, as well as some interesting ideas for our Patreon.
I'm sorry that during all of this the endless content and feature patches that I've been continuing for years now have pretty much grinded to a halt. So much time and stress had passed as a solo developer that I had really lost my direction, and was just doing what felt necessary to keep me and my wife warm and fed. It's was very hard to take this leap given I have my firstborn due in just two months! But there's so much more to Solace Crafting that I was never able to achieve on my own, and now that we've got a solid plan on how to get there, I'm more excited than ever!
I hope you'll all hang in there with us as we work through this transition from solo to staffed, and I wish you all the best!
Kyle Postlewait
Big Kitty Games