Crest
New Update Coming Soon - Improving End Game
We've gotten a lot of feedback as of late that the game lacks goals or enough meaningful end game content. This is always a conflict when making sandbox games, if you narrow the goals too much it's not much of a sandbox anymore, but if you make it too loose then some people feel they lack motivation.
We're going to find a better balance. So in the end of the summer we will release a new update that builds upon what we already have. The gist of it is that you will be able to shape the religion in more direct ways, for example eliminating some doctrines and having permanent effects on the religion you're building. The underworld and ancestors will provide an important role here.
We still believe Crest can reach more people and have not lost hope in making it the best it can be with the resources we have. The team is really excited about these new features and think it will solve a lot of the problems people have given us feedback about.
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Before the new update goes live you can help us in some simple but important ways:
* Leave a positive review if you like the game
* Share the game to your friends
* Ask your favourite streamers to play the game (Twitch support)
Thank you for your continued support!
// Martin & The Eat Create Sleep Team
Inheritors Update Now Live! Baby Animals - Custom Games - Twitch Integration
We've secretly been working on a major update and are very happy to now finally be able to present it to you: the Inheritors Update, a free, automatic update for all players on all platforms, available RIGHT NOW!
New features
- Baby animals – Animals now have babies!
- Custom Games – You can now customize your games with increased or decreased amounts of resources, animals, islands and overall island quality.
- Twitch integration – Built in twitch support now allows streamers to engage their viewers in the actual game! Join cities and vote on commandments to help or disrupt the streamer's plans.
- Increased selection – Resources and animals are now selectable and include detailed descriptions.
Updates
- Associations logic - Only one word will now be changed when a new association is made with heavier focus on similar words.
- War implications – Cities who win a conflict will now pillage and kill followers of the losing city
- Feedback icons – Traders, diplomats, priests and warriors going to war now have icons above their heads to make them easier to discover.
- City and follower scrolling – You can now easily scroll between your cities by selecting one and clicking the arrows in the city popup. This also applies to all of your followers within the same city.
- Last follower death – If a follower is the last remaining follower in the world, a meter will start counting down until its death unless you actively attempt to rebuild society via commandments.
- Tutorial skip – A prompt will ask if you wish to play the tutorial in the beginning of a new game if you had the option activated, declining will turn off the tutorial setting.
- Improved death symbols – Death symbols will now be easier to spot and give a summary of what killed the followers
- Migration – All followers no longer immediately leave the city for the new, leaving the old city with just one follower.
- General feedback updates – We have added more tooltips and visual updates to minor things that happen in the game.
- Profanity filter – Has been removed completely.
- Biomes – Ground blending between biomes has been smoothed out
- Other minor updates
Bug fixes
- Boats no longer move slowly in higher game speeds
- Mountains no longer spawn on lower areas, cutting off rivers from flowing to the ocean and turning entire islands into desert
- Trees should no longer occasionally turn blue
- Other minor bug fixes
Should you encounter any bugs, please continue submitting them via in-game function. For feedback or general questions, you're always welcome to hit us up on Discord:
http://discord.gg/ecs
Thank you all for your support & have fun playing!
Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep
Crest OST - Now THRICE As Long With 14 New Songs!
We've updated our OST with 14 new songs, bringing it to a total playtime of 49:08! This is more than triple the playtime it had before and beside the new songs composed by Tuomas Nikkinen, the OST now includes all the beloved trailer songs as well.
If you already own the OST, the update is completely free of charge and Steam should automatically download the new songs.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/386570/Crest__Original_Soundtrack
Patch Roundup v1.1 & v1.2
Here are the patch notes of the two recent patches we pushed since launch last Thursday:
Patch Notes v1.2
- Balance changes
- Influence gain rebalanced: faithful cities now reward 3 influence points instead of 2.
- Follower food and hunger rebalanced.
- Animal fertility rebalanced.
- Influence gain rebalanced: faithful cities now reward 3 influence points instead of 2.
- Hippos are now less aggressive. They build up anger over time instead of attacking habitat intruders immediately.
- Follower hut positions slightly adjusted.
- Tooltips should no longer display a follower death message regardless of what is hovered over.
- Fixed an issue with followers resting outside of their huts after running away from animals.
- Fixed an issue with the tutorial not being possible to complete.
- Fixed minor GUI navigation issues.
- Fixed an issue where followers could get stuck in their huts forever after the Farm word had been unlocked.
Patch Notes v1.1
- Huts and ores now always touch the ground when spawned on slopes.
- Words no longer gets stuck if you alt-tab the game while dragging a word.
- Fixed issue with herbivores migrating after loading a saved game.
- Fixed problem with some followers spawning at the wrong position after loading.
- Trade cows now work correctly after a load.
- Burning mines are now destroyed properly and can be rebuilt by miners later.
- Miners no longer build on ores without enough chunks.
- 64-bit version for Windows is now available.
- City association bubbles are now above the city name plate to stop them from being obscured by tall cities.
Crest Release Notes
The day has come. After four years in development, Version 1.0 of Crest is here!
A huge thank you to everyone who supported Crest during this long road and improved the game with their feedback and suggestions.
Crest has changed so much over the years and we're really proud of where it is now. But, Crest is also a game where new features can always be added, with endless possibilities, and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible.
In order to do so, Crest has to do well during the next few weeks, otherwise we just can't afford to continue working on it. We've put together a list on how you could help us during this important time:
http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest
We'll talk soon about our post-launch plans, until then, thank you again to every single god of you for supporting us. <3
Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep
https://youtu.be/R5WiMM2gYa8
v1.0 Patch Notes
Nature
- Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
- Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
- Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
- Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
- Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.
Cities
- Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
- Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
- City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
- Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
- Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
- Needs renamed - Some of the city are renamed for convenience.
- Fellowship = Social
- Sustenance = Food
- Abundance = Surplus
- Wealth = Money
- Fellowship = Social
Followers
- Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
- More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is now more detailed.
- Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.
General
- World Overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
- Word Discovery - A new system for discovering words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
- Faith - No longer counts followers but cities instead.
- Mini-Map - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
- Updated Tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
- Achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
- Polished visuals - New shaders to make it look extra shiny.
Commandment and Word Tablet
- Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
- City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
- Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
- Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.
Dev Blog #168 - One Week Left!
Community
Crest got featured on IndieDB this week, which made it one of the Top 10 most popular games out of 46'026 titles total :O
I'd like to remind you how crucial reviews are for us - especially now, being less than a week away from launch. They're immensely helping small indie titles like Crest to gain greater visibility on Steam. I really appreciate everyone of you taking the time to do so. <3
Please remember, all the new stuff we talk about below is not yet live on Steam but will be in the release version on 8th March. This goes for the achievements as well, which can currently only be unlocked with our inner circle build.
Art
Martin
The trailer is finished from my end, after several weeks of work. When we release it next week, I hope you will enjoy all of our hard work! Below you can see a sneak peek from it.
Emma
I spent half of the week sick again (yes, I seem to get colds way too often this winter), and then the rest of the week was all about UI. I did some final touches to the Steam achievements, then proceeded to do the last couple of layouts for the information panel added to all the pages of the city pop-up; and then just some general nitpicks in the world overview and other UI windows.
Code
Johannes W
This week I worked on the Graveyard menu. Until now we only had some placeholder pictures for each Graveyard save. A screenshot of the game world is now added when the game over screen appears for the player. The screenshot is shown in the Graveyard to make each save unique and memorable. The task required for me understand possible ways to take screenshots through code in Unity engine which feels good to have learned.
Last week I implemented Steam Achievements to the game. There where some small things this week that I had to tweak a bit. The icons that Emma did are now uploaded to Steam which look great. You will have to wait until the launch before you can unlock them though.
Additionally to the things above, I've been focusing on bugs, fixes and improvements this week. The code for when animals migrate is optimized and improved on how new habitats are found.
Johannes
I've been on the hunt for an elusive bug with the shadows. When I made the new shader a while back, the shadows started behaving really weirdly:
It took me three days, but I did manage to fix it. Embarrassingly enough, I still don't know why it happened, I just fixed it by trial and error and some educated guessing. I do believe however that it's a Unity bug, regarding the way we're drawing the trees and stuff.
Normally I would not let a bug go until I understood exactly why it happens, but since we're a week away from launch I don't have the time to do that, so bug fixed, moving on.
Currently I'm fixing a remaining bug with the new water system, and fixing up some minor things here and there.
Jens
This week has been much of the same as last week. A lot of playtesting, balancing, and bugfixing. It's coming along well and it feels good to focus on polishing so close to launch, as opposed to putting out fires from major game breaking stuff.
Tomas
Emelie and I have polished the tutorial most of the week and we now call it finished! It has been thoroughly playtested and many smaller last-minute tweaks have been made. I'm pleased with our work and hope that you will like it and find it helpful.
Design
Emelie
Tutorial, tutorial and more tutorial. I have been working hard together with Tomas this entire week to fix all the issues that has come up with it. And now it's finished (unless nothing else crops up) and I couldn't be happier. I even had time to start some other tasks which need to be done and looked at before release and there's a lot of small fixes needed everywhere.
Production
Marcus
This week has been testing, testing, fixing and then testing some more. We're one week out from release and all of our resources are dedicated to making sure that game will be as polished as possible, and it's looking pretty good if you ask me.
_____________________________________________________________
If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.
Have a nice weekend!
Dev Blog #167 - Two Weeks Left!
Community
Two weeks left until the launch of Crest and it's looking pretty good!
Here's is some encouraging feedback we recently got for our secretive inner circle build:
"I looked at the regular build [again] and was really surprised with the changes in the inner circle build! You guys did amazing!"
If you'd like to help us playtesting the new features, you can still become a part of the inner circle yourself. More info can be here: Join The Inner Circle
Art
Martin
I had to take a short break from the trailer to incorporate our new shader, it's always a bad idea to implement new things just days before release, so a few weeks earlier is better! You can here see me playing around with the new shader. It's usually hard to control specular (or the shininess) with uniform low poly artstyles without textures (like most games). But with Johannes' new magical shader I can control that for separate objects, for instance make the gems more shiny than the rock it's attached to!
Emma
This week, I've been helping out with the lighting of the scenes in the trailer. It was a real challenge, especially for someone still not completely comfortable with Blender yet. Turns out that it's pretty difficult to get some decent lighting in space! After that, I've been doing some UI work, like updating graphics for the information panels.
Code
Johannes
I've had full focus on the save system.
I've worked on a tool to verify that saves are working properly. The tool works by saving all states in the game to a text file, then it saves the game, loads that save, and then saves all states again to a second text file. Then I load both text files into a diff tool and see if something is different. That tool has allowed me to find a few subtle save errors that I've now fixed.
Jens
This week has been all about polishing and fixing the features we have. Just to give you a taste of what I've done, I have added sfx to a lot of the interface buttons. The voice in the intro is now updated with a remastered version of the audio, and some background ambience has been added. The Word Tree is now more consistent, with words having designated spots in the UI window.
I have continued to fine tune the stamina for the different follower tasks.
Influence is now gained in a slow trickle with a bonus amount added every half cycle for faithful cities, instead of faithful followers as it previously was. This change hopefully reduces some of the frustration that could occur when you were missing just a one or two points to make a commandment.
Johannes W
I have fixed bugs and made some improvements and optimization with how followers find new locations when building new cities. It was an issue before with how it worked and how the performance was. Often when a world had a lot of cities it became noticeable how the game became slow because many followers tried to find new locations and not always finding anything.
The old implementation was done through randomly checking tiles all over the island until a valid place was found. This was very unpredictable and a better solution had to be made. The way it is implemented now is to search outwards from the home city in circles until a good location is found. This felt like an obvious way to do it and it improved the performance a lot. The algorithm checks not every single tile outward but checks them with a bit of spacing just to lower the performance cost a bit. This fix will be available on the Crest release.
Tomas
I have tweaked the last things with the tutorial together with Emelie. We have playtested it internally and there are only some minor finishing touches left, then it will be all complete.
The tutorial is also incorporated into the save system now, so loading a game will no longer reset it to the beginning.
Design
Emelie
The update to the tutorial has taken the entire week for me, and will probably take a few more days as well. It's coming along nicely, but I wonder if I have in my haste forgotten about something important, the pacing and the time it takes to finish it. We had a playtest this week as we do every week now and we focused on the tutorial so I got valuable feedback and will do my best to make it better. Other than the tutorial, I have been dabbling wherever I have been needed and I am guessing that's what I'll be doing everyday until release.
Production
Marcus
Our release is slowly creeping upon us, so this week has seen a lot of playtesting in order to fix final balancing issues and bugs. Beyond that I am also continually busy with getting stuff ready for GDC amongst other company related stuff. So there is never a dull moment.
_____________________________________________________________
If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.
Have a nice weekend!
Dev Blog #166 - On the Horizon
Community
Well, we got a launch date! 8th March 2018! Check out what's all going to be in the full version:
Launch - New Features
Please help us to reach as many people as possible in this critical time until launch! We put together a list of helpful things <3
http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest
We will have an Official Launch Trailer as well soon, for now here's a little tease:
https://youtu.be/E8G5AlZTEpo
Art
Martin
Yes, the secret is out, I've been working on the launch trailer for a few weeks now. It's almost done and I look forward to see your reactions to it!
Emma
This week, I've done a little bit of everything. I've been sick, I've been doing some playtesting, fiddling around with UI stuff and helping out with the trailer. The main thing I've been doing is Steam Achievements! Gonna be a lot of fun to unlock them all when they're added. Below is a sneak peek!
Code
Jens
I have mostly been balancing, polishing, and fixing minor bugs. It is kind of like playing whac-a-mole. Usually when I go to fix something, I discover something else that I need to do. The biggest balancing task was the new stamina rework that Johannes W made.
Previously, followers were allowed to overperform and do actions even though their stamina was depleted. The stamina system is now consistent and much better at predicting how much work the follower can do. I have gone through all the follower actions and given them reasonable stamina costs.
Johannes W
For me, this week has mostly been about hunting bugs. I fixed so followers can mine right after they have built a Mine and I fixed some camera movement glitches. I also finished up the code for how we track Steam achievements. We have a bunch of achievements now that are ready to be published but have some graphics and design left to do for that. I look forward for when the Steam achievements are fully done!
Tomas
I have been working with the tutorial together with our resident designer Emelie. It is getting an update to accommodate all the changes that are in the game since the last release.
The core tutorial system has been tweaked a bit and I have constructed brand new debug tools for it to ease testing it out. It is all shaping up really well and it will probably be complete some time next week.
Design
Emelie
I have been working on updating the tutorial, making sure that all the new features are explained and that the flow is improved upon. I have also been working on balancing and a little bit of whatever comes up since we are doing our best to make everything work as intended. Tweaks here and there on pretty much everything is the best way to explain it all really.
Production
Marcus
This week has seen a lot of game balancing and bugfixing. I have been actively helping out with playtesting to focus our efforts on the most important parts these coming weeks since, Holy crap, we're actually releasing the game soon! Beyond that I've also kept up the preparational work for GDC, and some other stuff concerning the company, so I've been kinda split between all sorts of things.
_____________________________________________________________
If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.
Have a nice weekend!
Launch Date Announcement!
What a rollercoaster the past few years have been! We're super excited though to finally announce the launch date for Crest, which will be on March 8th 2018!
We've been very busy the past months and below you can see all the updates, which are going to be in the release build. Right now we're polishing & balancing everything to get it as smooth as possible until launch.
Crest is a game that is never truly finished and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible after launch. In order to do so we need a little bit of help from you. We've put together a list on how you could support Crest:
Support Crest
Now for the waaay too long list of the coming gameplay updates. Bear in mind that the list does not include any technical updates or fixes and focuses on the new gameplay changes only. Enjoy the read & thanks for being a part of our Community. <3
Nature
- Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
- Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
- Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
- Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
- Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.
Cities
- Needs renamed - Some of the cities are renamed for convenience.
- Fellowship = Social
- Sustenance = Food
- Abundance = Surplus
- Wealth = Money
- Fellowship = Social
- Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
- Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
- City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
- Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
- Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
Followers
- Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
- More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is more detailed.
- Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.
General
- World overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
- Word discovery tree - A completely new system for discovering the words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
- Mini-Map update - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
- Updated tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
- Steam achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
Commandment and Word Tablet
- Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
- City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
- Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
- Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.
Patch v0.52 Online!
We've also re-enabled saves for now. They are not 100% stable but if you do not do anything after clicking Save & Quite, it should return to the menu. If Windows should show that the program is not responding, ignore the message and wait a bit longer. As long as there is no popup that saving failed, the games is working in the background
Here's the full list of all the changes:
- Downgraded Unity to fix the crash that always happened after a couple of minutes.
- Fixed memory leak in our memory pooling system. There should no longer be any problems starting another game without first exiting the game.
- Migrate commandments should now be able to properly target animals.
- Re-enabled saves.
- Audio volume options should now load correctly.
- Farm remnants are now properly removed.
- Lots of minor bug fixes.
Please let us know if the game is still crashing for you (outside of saving).