A couple of smaller bug fixes including two major ones:
Bug that caused children to never grow up
Bug that caused remnants for buildings to not work properly
As you can see, we started checking off the list mentioned in The Future of Crest hence this patch contains besides bug fixes also a major improvement. Let us know below what you think of the new animal behavior. It's not completely finished yet but for now they will migrate more across the island and therefore bring a new dynamic into Crest.
Dev Blog #160 - Uphill Battle
Many battles have been won this week and an immense progress was made in tackling some of the very difficult to solve issues.
Community
A new patch will be released today. Johannes is still working on it with full force together with Jens but it'll come out very soon.
We'll keep it short in the Community section this week but don't worry, there will be a special blog post on Tuesday, keep a lookout for that! Also beware of our Discord channel, holiday season seems to make everyone a bit...silly.
Art
Martin Until all of the new exciting features and revamped systems are done by code, I'm in a bit of a slump when it comes to content. Bottlenecks sometimes happen, usually for us non-programmers and especially in a procedural game.
So what we do is trying to do meaningful work that doesn't increase the workload for the programmers. I'm designing hats! Each doctrine's city leader will have their animal symbol as a hat to make it easier to know at a glance which doctrine a certain city follows.
Code
Johannes I've been making good progress on the new water system. It's very satisfying to see it come together. I can't wait for it to be finished and working together with the rest of the game systems.
I've also done some work on today's patch release, mostly merging fixes back from the dev branch.
Jens Most of this week I've felt like I'm making a nature documentary film. I have tweaked, continued to improved, and tested the migration behaviours of all animals. Made sure that they all migrate at appropriate times. This involves a lot of observations and documentation of data related to migration and feeding of the animals. Herbivores moves when they are out of food or if they are being hunted heavily by predators. And when they move, the predators soon migrate after.
The balancing of values will be further worked on but we can already see huge improvements in how impactful the followers are on the eco system. If followers decimate a predators food source, the predators will move to another food source that maybe already sustains another group of predators. Now two groups are hunting from the same herbivore habitat, resulting in a slow and steady collaps if one is not careful.
I also made a change to pathing to ensure that followers will now avoid walking through a hippo habitat if they can find a better way. Hopefully this will prevent the massacres we've had previously...
Johannes W You sure have noticed in the game that followers and animals are glitching/snapping to positions when they are walking. Until now, the walking animation was dependent on a variable we call "time units". Time units are a sort of currency for how many actions a follower or an animal can do before they need to rest.
Time units are updated on a constant time interval. Walking from A to B costs the amount of time units relative to the total distance to walk. The speed in which the characters moved was determined by the animation, which made it difficult to sync the updated time units and the animations. Now, the walking animations control when time units are spent.
Tomas I have been working with Follower & City Needs this week. The system has not been working as intended and was finally rectified.
It is a complex system of cravings and basic needs that determines followers' happiness and what they do with their free will actions. I added a bunch of debug tools so that the system is easier to balance, which should make Emelie's work easier.
Production
Marcus This week I have been doing some playtesting and helping out with game design stuff, in addition to my ordinary work of keeping track of the project and making sure that everyone knows what they're doing. I have also started planning work for beginning of next year.
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Have a nice weekend!
Dev Blog #159 - Let it Snow
Wait, what? Snow? In Crest?! Yes! This week has been all about water, in its liquid as well as in its solid form.
Community
You will read a lot about Crest's water system in this blog. What that means in short: We redirected almost all resources to improve the performance issues Crest has to make it run much smoother.
What does the water have to do with the performance issues? Although invisible to you at the moment, water is the main resource in Crest. Every island consists of thousands of tiles and each tile has it's own water-level, which gets constantly updated by the system. This worked fine in the beginning, when there was only one island and not so much stuff happening in the world, but it didn't scale well over time and needs to be reworked now.
Art
Martin I've been spending this week with working on the new feedback for the water system. It's always been hard to see how the water works in Crest, and since it's such a critical resource we want it to be more clear.
In real life clouds dump their water on the mountains as snow, which later melts and become rivers. There's not as much snow on the African continent as on others and this is where a bit of abstraction comes in. We'd rather have an easy to understand game than 100% realism. The mountain works like a batter, the more snow there is the more water can be "taken" to the rivers by nature. Below you can see a mockup of this new system.
Emma This week has been all about doing mockups for UI in the game. We're doing some small changes to make it easier to navigate and understand it, making it more convenient for the players to use it. For example, below, you can see the new mockup to the left which will be replacing the current spider chart to the right. The new system with bars will make it easier for players to just throw a glance at the City Needs, to immediately know which need is in danger.
Code
Johannes This week the other programmers and I sat down to figure out how we should fix the water system. The water system has always been kind of broken, and we've tried to fix it several times to no avail. So this time we decided to rethink it from the ground up.
The solution we came up with should allow for more dynamic changes of the environment, and should be a lot less demanding on performance. So I'm very happy about that. We'll see how well it works once it's actually implemented :)
Johannes W I participated on the discussion for the new water system during the beginning of the week and I think the new changes will make a big difference to the game, which I'm personally excited about.
The programming stuff for me this week included updating migration for both followers and animals in Crest. The followers now migrate only from commandments by the player and not by their free will. The animals now migrate to new habitats based on a grid layout on the islands. The reason for this is to have more control over where animals migrate compared to before, where a lot of randomization was used.
Another reason is for optimization. For example, when a herd of antelopes wants to migrate, we can search through each center tile in the grid and make basic assumptions where they don't want to move, for example the jungle or how far they can migrate. Then we can search the area around the center tile and make other more specific assumptions.
These updates on the migration system are just on a early stage and may be updated later. However, the new water system will have a big impact on migration for followers and animals and therefore we want to have a lot of control when we later have to create a good balance.
Jens This week I have been cooperating with Johannes W to fix the migration of animals. At first I started to increase the affect herbivores have on their environment. If the number of animals in a habitat gets too big, they will drain the soil for resources. When they can no longer find food, they will try to find a new area for their habitat.
The result is that we will see animals moving more across the island. And where the herbivores move, the carnivores will follow. The aim is to get islands that feel more dynamic and ever-changing. I still need to wait for the reworked watersystem before I can finish, since it is so closely tied to how animals eat and find suitable habitat areas.
Tomas At the start of this week I was mostly involved in design discussions. One major discussion was regarding the water system in Crest and how to improve it to affect gameplay and performance in positive ways. We found a solution that should do both.
At the end of the week I have been reworking the season system to allow for harsh and mild conditions. This required a rework of how seasons are queued and changed. It can now be balanced more easily and dynamically.
Design
Emelie This week have been busy for me, I don't think that I have been involved in so many different things in one week before. It all started with the redesign of the water system because it has never really worked properly, this will make the nature part of Crest have more consequences.
We also discussed the new look of the city needs since the spider chart could be a bit difficult to read at times, hopefully the changes will make it more clear to the player what is going on.
After we had finished those discussions, I moved on to make the design for the berry bushes. We want to pace the game in the beginning a bit better because farms are too powerful. It feels more natural to have a hunter/gatherer society at first and then evolving into farming when they got enough knowledge. I hope this will make it more interesting, as with all the things that we have planned to fix.
Production
Marcus This week I have been busy with introducing a new planning platform and making sure that everything is up to date and that everyone understands how to use it. It will be an iterative process in how we will be handling everything going forward but the team seems to like it so far.
We got a small patch for you fixing some of the bugs we encountered:
• War bug fixed.
• "Toggle all" button in Chronicler screen now works properly
• Updated Diplomacy window
• Skeletons now actually disappear eventually
• Minor UX and gameplay bugs fixed
More infos about the specific bugs can be found in our latest Dev Blog. The next patch will bring a few more changes but since it's only been three days since we launched the community module, we decided to rather release this smaller fix instead of holding it back for no reason.
Dev Blog #158 - Back to bug squashing
Before the Community Module is after the Community Module - after some stressful days of panicking, we return to squashing bugs in a more relaxed manner. This week we go a bit more into the specific problems we encountered while doing so.
Community
The Community Module finally arrived! How do you like all the new features and changes we implemented so far? Today we'll release the first patch fixing some of the bugs and afterwards we'll continue releasing patches every 2-3 weeks, while also working on the improvements we talked about in The Future of Crest.
Also, our new trailer could definitely need some more love, check it out if you haven't yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w
Art
Martin What a week! It jumpstarted with finishing the trailer. Even if you plan carefully sometimes not everything fits, and some things don't turn out as you expected. Then you have to improvise, like I had to do this time, and usually it can lead to a better result. Careful planning and spur of the moment inspiration works best for me. Hope you like the new trailer!
Emma This week has been all about finishing trailer, this time animating the rest of the scenes. I've been struggling with a running cycle, as the NLA editor doesn't wanna cooperate when I'm locking the hands to a tablet they're holding. So, I had a small mental break-down and started working on the slightly easier scenes, with mostly poses with slow movement (and no evil tablets!).
Code
Johannes This week I've been completely focused on making saves work. The build on Steam that we released this Tuesday is fairly stable with regards to saves, but there's still a few issues that I've been ironing out.
Jens After the release of the community module I have been working on fixing the bugs we found while testing. The two main concerns for me were terraforming and war.
Terraforming stopped working due to a problem with how spaces were delegated around the city. Monuments and expertise buildings claimed a lot of room causing terraform projects to fail. While working on getting it to behave nicely I also made some other improvements, for example terraformers now gather water from sources closer to the terraform project.
We saw that war had problems with cities constantly attacking each back and forth. Now they have a longer "cooling off period", and are not as eager to start a war if they have just been in one. There was also an issue with the commandment "... produce war" causing cities to start wars back to back that is fixed in today's update.
Johannes W My week has been about fixing bugs. It included updating filter toggles in the Underworld, updating GUI for different screen resolutions, limiting the amount of messages from the Bulletin Board (the thing that shows the player events that happen in the game), and more.
I did also make remnants from dead animals and followers disappear after a time. We realized that the islands turned into graveyards of dead bodies if remnants weren't removed. We want traces to be left in the world, but for right now, removing remnants after a while appeared to be the best solution.
Tomas This week I began with fixing general bugs in the game. Then I was play testing and quality assuring, trying to find more bugs and issues. After the release of the community module I have once again been fixing bugs.
One bug, that I just now squished, had to do with building placement. Several buildings had a tendency to clip into each other, mostly expertise buildings and monuments. This should now be resolved and will be included in an upcoming patch.
Design
Emelie Playtesting, playtesting and more playtesting is what I have been doing this week. The days have flown by and it takes a lot of time and effort to try and reproduce certain bugs that are annoying to have.
It's also an illuminating experience as I can see, as a game designer, how my systems work or not work as intended which will be really useful to know for when we finish Crest. It's also really clear after all these days of playtesting that balancing has been neglected for way to long, this will be next on my list of things to do.
Production
Marcus This week was a major update week, so I've been busy with making sure that the community update was as smooth as possible, and I've also been organizing a follow-up patch that we will roll out today. Apart from the update my time has been spent with setting up our new planning tools and what priorities we have in production going forward towards the next milestone for Crest.
Here it is, the final module for Crest! Monuments, tons of skeletons & many more features, besides an overall improved experience, await you in the Community Module. The very long list of all changes, which are based on your countless feedback, can be found below.
To start off the celebrations, we got a new cinematic trailer in store for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egP9grBQr3w
Here's a list of all the new features & updates:
New Features
Remnants of the world
Animals & followers now leave behind skeletons when they die
Cities leave behind slowly degrading ruins after its last follower has died
Graveyard
Upon death the Chronicler will tell you about the world's history
New end screen that lets you explore the world after your legacy ended
Revisit past playthrough's world spirals & stories
Monuments
A new type of building that followers will build over time to commemorate you, if they have enough materials & faith in you, which will provide an additional boost to the city's faith.
Renaming
It's now possible to rename your cities & followers!
Event Notifications
A notification bar on top of the screen informs you when something has happened in the world & let's you navigate to the location it happened by clicking on it.
Updates
Faith
Faith interface completely overhauled with new visuals
Faith system reworked for more insight
Influence
Influence max cap now at 100
Influence gain now dependent on number of faithful followers
Tutorial
Tutorial updated with new visuals & improved flow
Now explains all mechanics properly without being (too) overwhelming
Chronicler
More events added to the spiral
Filter added to the spiral
Advisors
More tips added to advisors
Expertise
Gaining an expertise now make followers create a specific expertise building in that city
Expertise buildings are upgraded over time and give their city a boost to said expertise
Words
Removed: Food
Added: Middle aged
Updated Verbs:
Destroy: now primarily uses warriors to destroy their targets
Consume: has been tweaked to not as easily lead to cannibalism
Don't: verbs have been tweaked to have a stronger impact on your followers
Explore: has been tweaked to affect to word discovery rate
Visuals
Each season now has a unique look
Animals <*>Hippos have been nerfed and shouldn't win fights with followers as easily anymore
Commandment Tablet
Sorting & filtering of commandments now possible
Diplomacy
Updated UI to better display city relationships
Balances made to city trading
Balances made to city warfare
Updates made to city relationships
Loading Screen
Loading screen now has an animated progress bar
Displays helpful tips while generating the world
Camera
The camera has been updated and is now a lot smoother to control
Audio
Many new sound effects
New background songs
Added ambience sounds to each biome
That should cover most of it, left aside the countless performance improvements & bug fixes. We hope you'll enjoy the update and are happy with the choices we made. Let us know if you encounter any bugs or have feedback via the Steam forums or write us on discord.
Thank you all for your support & have fun playing!
Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep
Dev Blog #157 - The Final Module
Today it's just you and me. In order to not distract people from their work I decided to do this week's Dev Blog alone, but I can sum up the week in a nutshell for you:
Emma & Martin: working on the trailer
Emelie & Marcus: playtesting
Johannes, Tomas, Jens & Johannes W: bug fixing
We're all giving our best to deliver a polished build until next Tuesday, which will be our final module launch before we transition into the pre-release phase and we'll start releasing updates/patches every 2-3 weeks. The perfect time to look back again how far we've come in the last 4 (!) years.
It's no secret, if you've read the Development History of Crest, you know about all the hardships we've been through - from the initial hype to bankruptcy and now; our Indian summer - we always pushed through.
It's incredible to see how much Crest has changed since the beginning. You can still check out our initial prototype over at Gamejolt to see for yourself. Here's a small montage how Crest evolved over the years up until the Exploration Module:
Like many of you, when I first played Crest I saw the potential it had and was very fond of the philosophical approach to the classic god game genre but everything had still been very raw. Now, with the release of the Community Module, we're getting one step closer again to fulfill that potential.
I'm pretty sure you'll will be impressed by how much the game has evolved in the last four months but also bare in mind: it's still early access, we're not finished. There will be performance issues, bugs and unbalanced features that will get smoothed out over time.
But we've only come so far thanks to the support and feedback of all of you, hence the name of the module; to commemorate you. Most of the new features and improvements in the module are based on suggestions from you. So please keep that feedback coming to make Crest even greater in the coming months.
Next Tuesday a new era will start. Until then, thank you for taking this journey with us & I wish you all a splendid weekend!
Dev Blog #156 - Let's hear it!
We continue teasing you about the forthcoming update, but for a change we also present a little treat for your ears. Find out what it is and what everyone's been working on this week:
Community
We found a lot of bugs at last weeks QA session at the university and more importantly, what causes them. A lot of them already got smashed but we're going to dedicate the entire week before the launch of the Community Module to fix as many as possible.
By the way we're now less than two weeks away from the release of the Community Module! Here's the song that will accompany the new trailer, made by Tuomas Nikkinen:
https://youtu.be/_4srlXAeXmA
Art
Martin The trailer is nearing completion, or at least the setting up part, I've created a lot of scenes, which I will now start animating. I usually split my time between all of the work I have to do. If there's several deliverables for the same project (in this case a trailer) I divide my time.
So for example, if there's five scenes I've got to do, I split a day for 1-2 hours per scene. This keeps me focused on the big picture and I don't get lost in the details. What happens otherwise is that I might spend a day on one scene and the other ones are completely underdeveloped. Below you can see another work in progress render!
Emma This week has been about 2-3 days of UI work and the rest on the trailer again! It's closing in on the animation phase, with some last touches to the setup of each scene. While I've been working on the trailer, the programmers have made some changes to how some of the UI works; which means that some of the original layouts didn't work anymore. So, small fixes to layouts and new graphics for the tutorial was on the agenda for this week.
Code
Johannes After spending several days debugging a big freeze bug, I finally ended up fixing it by adding a single character in the right spot.
That's programming for you.
For the rest of the week I started working on making saves work again, as they always break during the development of a module.
Jens This week my focus has been on getting alliances and war to work properly. Alliances are now working fine, rewarding the cities with a sense of fellowship, better trade agreements, and free movement within each others borders. The war has been a harder nut to crack but it is getting there.
Some unexpected bugs were also found and fixed which will result in reliable looting and raiding if the attacking nation wins the war. We have also made sure that the player commandments now have a lot more impact on how cities treat each other. Even though a lot has been improved, there is still a lot of balancing and tweaking left to be done before the module release.
Johannes W This week I fixed the code for the new UI window that shows which cities are faithful, faithless, or undecided towards the player. The design for the faith and influence system was slightly changed, which I made sure was implemented in the code.
Influence is now based on the total amount of followers in faithful cities and faithless cities, where every follower in a faithful city adds 1 influence point as reward and every follower in a faithless city subtracts 1 point. Undecided followers add zero influence. A base influence value is added to make sure the player always receives influence points no matter what.
Tomas I have worked closely with Emelie this week on continuing the development of the new tutorial. It is coming along nicely. The new tutorial should have a much better flow than the previous one and it is in the world, pointing to UI elements and in-world objects that are being described. It should be easier to learn the game with this iteration of the tutorial. Hopefully it's the last major rework of it! Most of the tutorial is actually completed, only minor tweaks remain for next week.
Design
Emelie This week I have been working on the tutorial, working closely with Tomas. The text and the position of the bubbles have been iterated quite a bit and there are still things to be done, the structure is there and the focus now is to make the flow better and more guiding for the player. Other than the tutorial I've been playtesting in order to find bugs.
Production
Marcus This week I have been going through the results from the playtesting we did last friday and documenting any found bugs to be exterminated. I have also done some additional playtesting on my own to make sure the new stuff we've been working on isn't broken. Together with this I have been setting up the planning for our final push to the Community Module, while also doing some company stuff.
Lots of sneak peeks in this week's Dev Blog, let's cut straight to it!
Community
The Community Module will launch on 28th November! But hopefully you've already seen that by now. Once again, here what's going to be in there: Community Module - All the Infos
Today we're having a QA day at the local university, where we're trying to find as many bugs as possible together with the help of the students. Since this is still going, I can only show you a picture from the final preparations in the morning:
Art
Martin Another week with the trailer and now I'm starting to see some real progress! It's pretty hard to make a trailer for Crest since the gameplay is not something you can understand at a glance like say a platformer or fps game. But our solution is to make cinematic trailers with some gameplay bits.
Creating a cinematic for a game where most of the story is procedural and made by the player requires some finesse, you can't really tell a story of the characters in the game, because they're not important to the story, so what I can do is use symbolism, to try and tell an allegorical story that fits what you can experience inside of the game. Below you can see a test render of one of these symbolic scenes.
Emma This week has been all about the trailer again, I am still new to Blender so a LOT of time this week has been about trying to figure out different systems and handling weird bugs(?). It's been a tiring week, but I learned a lot!
Below is a funny setup in one of the scenes, inspired by the world in Animal Crossing. The mines are supposed to appear after the second character joins the first character, so this was a try to see how it would look if it rotated into view!
Code
Johannes This week I've finished implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This allows us to see what commandments are being used, how long people survive and so on. It also allows us to capture crashes and errors. It will be a great help to make sure that the game is balanced and bug free in the final release.
Johannes W This week I've completed the new story builder, graveyard, and end-screen feature. As this is the first complete version, it may need a revisit later for additional tweaks and added functionality. I think it works great at the moment and I look forward to see what stories our players will create when it's released!
The next thing I'm working on is for a new UI window that will show information about the players Faith from cities and followers.
Tomas I have implemented an entirely new tutorial system from scratch. It will be a more fluid approach, that wont interrupt gameplay as much as the old one did.
I am especially pleased with how the tutorial window behaves when it is attached to objects in the game world, it follows them around.
The basic functionality of the system is done but more is needed to finalize it and I will continue with it next week.
Jens I have continued working on the disposition system, and now have finished the foundation. This means that I can move on to the branching subsystems which are trade, forming of alliances and waging war.
The trade is almost finished, but some testing and balancing remains. Trading is now less convoluted and will emerge later during the gameplay to not overwhelm the player as soon as new cities start to form. We want the player to have more control of how and when trading occurs and it is now better tied into the disposition system.
Design
Emelie I have been working on some design tasks from our big meeting a few weeks back, specifically on some special cases with hunger, looking a bit more into associations and the pacing of the game.
It's essentially for the full release of the game and not for the community module, so it's not really our biggest priority now, which was why I went back to my other duties as QA for the last half of the week.
Production
Marcus This week I have been busy with making sure that we are on track with the development of the game and preparing for our open QA session. Lots of playtesting on the schedule!
Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached with confidence.
I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:
Community
The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm; where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board.
In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.
Art
Martin I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!
Emma After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.
Code
Johannes This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values.
I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing.
Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us.
Johannes W This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs.
We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week!
Tomas I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments.
I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it.
With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week.
Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder.
Jens A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it.
It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.
Design
Emelie This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance.
I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well.
Production
Marcus This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken.
