After several years of development I'm excited to finally be announcing my new game project, AutoForge. Much like Crea, AutoForge is a 2D sandbox game. However, it has a pretty big twist - it is a factory building game too!
Visit the official website for more information: http://playautoforge.com/
I'm happy to answer any questions you may have. You can ask away here or over on the Discord server. Thank you everyone for your continued support. I'm excited to share a bit of what I've been working on for so long.
Celebrating Ten Years
Ten years ago the seed of Crea was planted into my head. I immediately began work not knowing that it'd lead me on such an exciting and long journey. While there were many struggles along the way, as explained in my last update, there were far more wonderful moments. I would have never made it as far as I did without your support. Thank you for all of the kind words and encouragement throughout the years.
As a thank you and way to celebrate all of this time, Crea will be 75% off for the next week! Be sure to share this great deal with your friends, family, enemies, and any other dressed mannequins you know.
Crea's True Future
Greetings everyone!
It has been over two years since my last official post, so first off I want to thank everyone for being patient with me and apologize that it has taken this long. This post is a mixture of both great news and not so great news.
TL;DR: Crea will not be receiving any substantial updates in the future; however, I'm not done with either the world of Crea nor the game concept.
This is undoubtedly upsetting to many of you as many people have told me that “the game has so much potential.” I too share that feeling, but it gives me hope for the future! Before looking forward to the future let's take a look at the past - storytime!
The world of Crea was born nearly 20 years ago as an RPG Maker 2k game that I was working on in High School. In true indie gamedev style, the scope of the game I designed was way beyond my abilities at the time. Years later I revisited the Crea mythos in the form of a card game inspired by Final Fantasy 8/9. Once again years later in February 2012 I was inspired to take the world I had been working on for so long and began shaping it into Crea, the sandbox RPG game you know today.
I worked on it during nights and weekends while holding a fulltime job. The successful Crea Kickstarter gave me the confidence to quit my job and work on Crea full time. In my youthful naivete, I sincerely believed the game would be released in just a few months. Instead, it took another 4 years to a 1.0 release and several years of post 1.0 updates.
During Crea's development I was continually revising the vision for the game while constantly behind the unrealistic schedule I had set for myself. This led to making many poor decisions and a relentless pressure, primarily from myself, to get Crea released. Unsurprisingly, years of this pressure resulted in burnout and depression. It has taken me the majority of the last 3 years to recover to the point that I could even resume game development.
During that time I did somehow manage to release the latest Crea update in August 2019. With a new update out and an acquaintance offering to dedicate some development time, things were looking up for Crea. I was excited and shared that excitement in my last post, “Crea’s Future”. Unfortunately not everything turned out the way I had hoped.
My wife and I had a newborn, and things got very challenging with the newborn and toddler. We enrolled the toddler into preschool so that I could have more time to work. That backfired as the toddler was sick just as often as she wasn’t, and the rest of the family would become ill too. Things were finally starting to look up again in the second half of February 2020...when it all fell apart again. As we all know the pandemic affected everyone and in different ways. For my family it meant going back into survival mode with two little kids stuck at home. Struggling with exhaustion and burnout again, I barely touched game development until the beginning of December 2020. At that point I felt it was best to start something new that I would be truly excited about.
My new project, AutoForge, is a 2D sandbox base building automation game (Terraria meets Factorio) being developed in a new engine I plan to use for future projects. Autoforge will take some time to develop and afterwards, then I would love to work on a Crea followup. I've already designed out a large chunk of what a new Crea game would look like. It would be a great undertaking which is why I'm trying to build up to it - both engine and development team. The best way I believe I can achieve that is making a smaller game such as AutoForge.
I apologize to fans who were looking forward to the updates that I promised in the last “Crea’s future” post. As I hope you can see from this post, Crea has been a part of my life in some form for the last 20 years. It’s truly a part of me and not something I've chosen to carelessly abandon.
I’m moving forward with a new project because I believe that’s what’s best for my career and mental health. I don’t know exactly what my future holds, but I do know that I'm going to keep working hard on making even better games. If you have any questions you are welcome to ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer. Thank you for all of the support and I hope I will continue to have it moving forward.
The Future Of Crea
As some of you may had noticed Crea's updates have gotten less and less frequent leading up to the release of "Chaos Awakening". This is about to change!
I'm excited to announce that Crea has a new developer helping out part-time. Andrew (Wacko) is a talented developer with over a decade of experience working on games such as Starcraft 2. All of the work Andrew is doing is completely volunteer - that's just how awesome he is. If you see Wacko around be sure to give him some love.
With Chaos Awakening released we are planning out and starting development on the next major update, v1.8. Our focus will be setting the stage for bigger and better future updates. One of the major changes we are making is modernizing the custom engine that Crea runs on. With these changes Crea will run smoother on more machines including proper 4k and Mac OSX support. We are also listening closely to feedback and you can expect to see some of that addressed as soon as v1.8.
Before completely moving onto the next update, I am planning to put out at least one more patch addressing issues recently reported. Thank you everyone for reporting issues so diligently and for your patience while I fix them.
Welcome New Players
Hello to all of you new players that have joined Crea's community recently! I hope you are all enjoying Crea's latest update, Chaos Awakening. I wanted to give you a bit of useful information.
Developer Livestreams
I do daily development livestreams where you are welcome to join to follow development, ask questions, request support, or tell me how much you love me.
https://www.twitch.tv/siegegames
Official Discord Server
Great place to find other players to play with, provide feedback, report issues, or just chat away.
https://discord.gg/crea
Supporting Crea
Thank you for all of the support thus far! The best way to continue supporting Crea is to share it with your friends, friends, and favorite influencers. Leaving a review is also a great way to show your support and provide feedback - be sure to give details!
Patch v1.7.3
Speaking of support, I have just released a new patch v1.7.3 that has resolved several issues. You can check out the details here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/280520/discussions/0/1640918469750611138/?ctp=2#c1640919103674778989
Crea Extravaganza Livestream
Join in on the Chaos and celebrate the release of the "Chaos Awakening" update along with the best discount yet! Here are a few things we will be doing:
Playing Crea
AMA (Ask Me Anything)
Crea history lesson
Sneak peak at Crea's future
Giveaways
Celebrating Jasson's Birthday
Official start is today 10AM PST (1 hour from this post)
https://www.twitch.tv/siegegames
Chaos Awakening Update Released!
Something deep in Crea seems to have been disturbed some time ago. It has been growing unnoticed and today it has broken free!
A brand new update for Crea, Chaos Awakened, is now available to play! This update focuses on adding new content, bolstering bosses, balancing, incorporating player feedback and resolving many outstanding issues. This update has something for everyone.
Rumors are that a new inhabitant of Crea, the Chaotician, reveals himself to those that have truly engaged Chaos.
Oh good, you are here. I needed a bit more Chaos in my life.
Chaos has further corrupted the creatures of Crea and many new monsters can now be found roaming the world.
The corrupted Aer (Bosses) have been rejuvenated with this surge of Chaos and will undoubtedly provide a worthy challenge. Unlocking bosses is now much clearer. Their attacks and mechanics have been greatly refined. The Chaos has culminated into a new high difficultly boss only the strongest can face.
Chaos has weakened the natural healing abilities of Crea and adventurers now much look to other means to survive. Healing tonics are great for recovering health and can easily be refilled with alchemy; however, acquiring new and stronger containers prove to be costly.
The Chaos Effect is wide reaching and more can be learned from here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/280520/discussions/0/1640918469750611138/
Regarding Mac OS Support
Over the years Mac OS has continued to evolved and Crea has unfortunately not kept up with these changes. Consequently I have decided to remove the Mac OS support tag on the store page for the time being as its quality is not high enough.
This update has been released for those who already own Crea on Mac OS. The goal is to rework Crea's game engine and resolve these Mac OS issues and many others. In the meantime I ask for your patience and understanding. Thank you!
Magnificent Mechanisms Update Released!
I am extremely happy to announce that Crea's latest update, Magnificent Mechanisms, is now officially released. It started out as an innocent update but slowly grew into the beast of an update it is today. So what exactly does this Magnificent Mechanisms bring?
Mechanical Wiring System
Thanks to the Syle Manipulator it is now possible to connect items together and create complex automated systems. When a device sends a signal it has a power level which the receiving item can react to in different ways. It can be as simple as a light changing color based on the power level to as complex as a series of logic gates with conditional logic based on the power level. Automatically open doors, easily move water, and even transfer items in treasure chests. The power is now yours.
Completely redesigned dungeons
The original dungeon concept had some great ideas but ultimately had some fatal flaws. I took dungeons back to the drawing board and now they are better than ever. Every sector you advance through includes multiple threats including monsters, traps and environmental hazards. Progress towards the end and you will now be greeted by a boss and a reward if you claim victory.
Multiplayer Enhancements
With the extended development time I took the opportunity to beef up multiplayer. Bandwidth usage has been reduced by roughly 90% meaning less lag for everyone. The HUD has received a facelift and along with it ally vitals will now be displayed below yours. Target yourself or your ally by the portrait or hovering over your ally character - ally targeting has been fixed!
Full Changelog: https://steamcommunity.com/app/280520/discussions/0/3216031607501136699/
Happy holidays everyone!
Crea's v1.6 Update in Beta
It has been a few months of work since my last status update and this one has some amazing news. The upcoming version of Crea, Magnificent Mechanisms, (v1.6) is now in public beta. Much excite!
There are so many amazing changes in Magnificent Mechanisms. It will undoubtedly dazzle new and old players. For now I will withhold divulging details as I want the official launch to be the highlight. At that time I will go over the juicy new features and give an extensive changelog (it is going to be huge).
So far it has been tested by many players for a few months now and is very close to prime time. Now is your chance to get a first look (more like second or third) at this super exclusive (everyone can play) beta. If you do play then please join the discord and let me know how it is going.
You can join by opening up the Crea game properties in Steam, going to the "BETA" tab and then selecting the "beta" branch from the dropdown menu.
Designing Dungeons - A look at update v1.6
Introduction
After Housewarming Update (v1.5) came out last year I decided to turn my attention to the dungeon system. Before taking some time off from development I laid out the dungeon design changes I wanted to make. As usual, I decided on the most ambitious ideas I could imagine which has resulted in the dungeon system being rebuilt from the ground up. In this post I want to share why I think the dungeon system needed to change and what these changes will look like.
Revisiting Dungeons
After turning my attention to dungeons it quickly became obvious that the biggest decision I had to make was if I should attempt to salvage it or completely scrap it. I heavily considered taking the salvaging route but a major factor was that another programmer had implemented it entirely. This meant I had to first learn the existing code before I could make substantial changes. Additionally, dungeons were riddled with both design and mechanical issues that I wanted to overcome.
What are these issues even? Dungeons are currently huge sprawling areas with interweaving hallways and massive rooms. This sounds great but in practice it lead to players running aimlessly hoping to stumble upon the exit. Exploring was uninteresting and monsters could often be entirely ignored - unless the exit objective required you to kill them in which case good luck tracking them all down. Needless to say the progression was empty and culminated into absolutely nothing when the end presented you with no boss or any sort of climax - dungeons fizzled. These are fundamental issues which necessitated fundamental changes. Mechanical issues also plauged dungeons with the most popular being hallways being blocked by rooms preventing progress.
Looking at these issues I worked to shape the dungeon design into something more coherent. First, dungeons should focus on survival and not exploration. The main world is where the exploration should happen. To reinforce this focus on survival it made sense to narrow exploration into something much more linear. Additionally, it is crucial that dungeons build to a climax to make completing dungeons feel both challenging and satisfying. So how does this all translate into a new system?
Dungeon Redesign
Dungeons will continue to be broken up into multiple floors (realms/maps). Each floor is segmented into a "sector" which will have its own objective. Progression through sectors will be linear and completing the sector objective is necessary in order to advance to the next sector. Difficulty will ramp up slowly as you progress through sectors and floors. Upon reaching the last sector of the entire dungeon you will encounter a worthy boss. Upon victory you will be rewarded with a juicy treasure chest.
Sectors have become the pivotal component in dungeons and they are receiving much attention. Sector objectives will range from "kill all monsters" to "flipping a switch in a room guarded by monsters to power a treasure chest in another room that has the sector key in it". Objectives will have lots of variety and there can be a supporting objective to add even more. You will never know what to expect in the next sector.
Focusing on survival, there are many threats within dungeons the player will face. Hazards such as lava pools, poisonous plants and spikes will be despersed throughout. Players will encounter many traps as well such as flamethrowers, dart shooters, bomb launchers and monster alerts. Even monsters are going to prove more challenging as they will patrol their area and will link with other monsters if you're not careful. Don't be a Leeroy Jenkins and rush into rooms!
Conclusion
Now that you know more about the changes to dungeons I hope you're as excited as I am about them. Dungeons wont be the only changes coming to the v1.6 update. You can look forward to new items, bug fixes and even a "secret" new feature. Unfortunately major changes like these take time and I still have much to do. I have made great progress on dungeons and hope to have an early beta version released in the next few weeks. If you would like to follow development more closely then you are more than welcomed to follow the Siege Games Twitch channel with the schedule below. I have also been attempting to revive the Crea Discord Server and you should join! Thank you again for everyone's continued support.
