Introducing beards. Not a huge selection yet, but a few is better than none. There are also new hair styles for both sexes.
I pushed the majority of the new character models to beta a couple night ago, but wanted to clean up some remaining bugs before posting about it. These patches now also allow for character appearances to be edited even after creation from the character select screen. Each character selection slot now has an edit button "looks like a pencil" that will open the character inside of the character creator for editing.
Note: Old characters cannot transfer their "look" to new character. When opening up an old character for editing, they will be converted to the new base model. You can still cancel out of that, or just keep your old look if you prefer. I haven't been able to test every piece of clothing individually, but they should work with either base model.
I've also transferred town NPCs to this model, so you may find that your townfolk have been "rerolled" and now have different appearances.
I've also updated Unity, the terrain shaders, and a few things under the hood, some of which I'm still tweaking a bit.
v 0.8.1.2 2022.06.16 - Added beard options and beard coloring to male characters - Fixed the Head section in the character creator not sizing properly - Fixed female bra and/or panties sticking through armor - Fixed a red subsurface scattering artifact/fog over some of the characters faces - Fixed backing out of editting a character without saving potentially returning to that character if creating anew afterwards - Fixed boats not moving after mounting
v 0.8.1.3 2022.06.17 - Fixed male characters going naked
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
I've been hard at work updating the old player models to a better looking base, as well as adjusting the minimum and maximum values of the body morph sliders to make the end results quite a bit less silly.
Here you can see the old faces versus the new faces:
While in these systems I've cleaned up some of the code and also been able to add in different base face selections that aren't actually morph presets, but different base meshes for the face and head, including an Orc and an Elf face:
I have some new hairs in as well, and should be able to get some facial hairs in as well, though I wasn't able to get to that today.
I ran into some Unity related problems last week that really set me back a couple days. At one point I had to wait six minutes every time I changed anything before Unity would become responsive again! It was very frustrating, but I was able to track down and get rid of the problem eventually, with minimal loss.
I hope to finish testing a few of these new options tomorrow not just in the character creator but in-game before pushing the changes to beta. I think it will also be a very good thing if I can add the option to edit a characters appearance even after the initial creation process.
I've also finished some work on weather and things like fog color and cloud types that had been left kind of hanging.
Not all quite ready yet, but I wanted to check in and give a bit of an update.
Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting? Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!
Looking forward & Beta v 0.8.1.0
Hey all, hope everyone is well. It's been a rough few months, I'm barely making enough money to get by, and well, that's pretty demoralizing. I started playing with other projects and thinking I needed to try and get something new and decent out, and quick, with all the skills I've gained over the past 4-5 years. That's of course kind of silly, and after spending some time working on some different projects I realized more clearly that that's just not who I am nor what I want to do. I may have to take up some supplementary work to keep all of this going, but the third option of just releasing as 1.0 early and seeing how it does would honestly be a disservice to the game and everything I've worked on these past years.
So I'm back, working to polish up and integrate on the road to 1.0. For starters this patch introduces a few small performance improvements, as well as one pretty large one that was running very redundant checks, especially when hungry or thirsty. There's still room for improvement, but this patch is already much better with handling passive stats and quickly repeating buffs.
I've also done a fair amount of what is called profiling, where you put an application under the microscope and really watch each piece to see who's slowing things down. While doing this I have identified shadows, grass, and sky rendering to be the three main culprits damaging performance. With this knowledge via actual hard numbers I've implemented Low, Medium, and High video quality preset buttons to the in-game video settings. Each button has a tooltip as well, but will in short primarily tone down grass, shadows, and cloud rendering in those orders. I don't have a super fast machine (hence the poor frame rate of the trailer =o=) but can range from 45-130 fps depending on the settings. There's still very much a number of things to be done for improving performance, and I consider that entire profession a constant work in progress.
I would like to focus on a few different things these next couple weeks, one of which I brought up in Discord and would appreciate more input on.
Character customization
The current system is "neat" in that it allows you to stretch your arms and tummy and things like that, but mostly just ends up with silly characters rather than being some sort of high level customization engine. In short it's really kind of a gimmick, though I've been proud of it's presence as it is something that's not all that easy to do. My main question being, how would you feel about a less robust, but more performant, likely prettier, character customization system? This would likely be reduced to things like height, skin color, hair, hair color, some different faces and easily enough things like fangs, horns, etc., though probably nothing fine tune-able like arm size, foot size, etc. Facial features could be a thing without interfering with what would likely be entirely new weapons and armor, but probably not something included in the initial system. I would also likely be able to add a much greater variety of weapons and armor as the current system requires things rigged specifically for it.
Character controller
The current character controller uses a mix on non-root based animations and physics, to the effect of very smooth movement that doesn't necessarily reflect what is actually going on in the animations. I get a lot of reviews that people feel it's "clanky" for example. Personally it's not something that bothers me, but it's clearly something quite a few people notice much more than I do. I am looking into replacing the current controller with a root-based system which means that the animations would actually be driving the movement of the character.
Standing out
A lot of Unity games have kind of a Unity look to them. I've, partially subconsciously, tried to make the game look a bit like reality, likely because that's what I'm used to looking at. I'd like to play around with altering the colors more extremely to create a stronger fantasy feel and to help screenshots stand out further from other games.
So, there's a bit of uncertainty in the near future, with a number of possibilities still up in the air. It's a big project and there's still some things left to do to tie it all together. Hopefully a 1.0 release is received well enough to merit continued work on the game post-1.0. Thank you as always to everyone that has supported the game thus far, and my apologies development has been slowing down as the months add up.
v 0.8.1.0 2022.06.06 - Fixed some performance issues, several primarily related hunger and thirst - Added Low, Medium, and High video quality presets to the in-game video settings
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
The last few patches have gone onto beta for testing, so I've kept their posts to Discord. Discord has been very busy of late with lots of extremely helpful bug reports and QoL suggestions. With my hands full I have not gone through the Steam discussion boards for a few days, sorry if I've left anyone hanging on there. I will try and go through those tomorrow.
One of the biggest changes is the complete restriction of anything hostile spawning within the first 250m, generally the grassy circle on the map that players start out in. The aim being to give players enough room to find the basic resources (passive animals are still available for skinning for example) they need to gear up and get ready to move out.
I'm well aware that I can just outrun anything that attacks me at the start, and I know what everything looks like, and exactly what I need to get a new character on their feet, so it's often difficult for me to know how to properly give enough information to new players without pulling their hand too hard. I've also changed the wording on a few of the tutorials as some players have expressed difficulty in understanding some of the initial steps.
It still looks like there will be another beta patch or two before I move onto looking into some performance improvements, but this patch should be a good candidate for pushing to the live branch.
The current changes on beta are:
v 0.8.0.32 2022.05.03 - Added Main hand melee speed reduction, Off hand melee speed reduction, ranged speed reduction, and magic speed reduction stats. Each point provides a 1% speed reduction to appropriate weapons, up to a maximum of 50% - Updated weapon speed upgrading passive skills to use the new stats - Added skill tree specific cooldown reduction stats, currently only used by the archetype specific enchants - Increased jewelry recipe ingot use by 1 - Fixed Obsidian Golems not showing up properly in multi-player - Fixed Siphoners gathering regardless of Enchanted Stone presence - Fixed containers (bags and watering cans) not properly storing their material - Fixed Tabula Rasa potion not resetting job skill points - Fixed empty hand damage scaling upward with level
v 0.8.0.31 2022.05.02 - Reverted to the previous stalk model - Added resources and facilities to navmesh generation calculations - Restricted monster and aggressive animals from spawning within the "starter area" 250m radius - Stopped the "Strong Hit" skills from triggering on vegetables and herbs - Enabled the game instance to be visible in the background if you alt-tab away from windowed or windowed full-screen mode - Tweaked the storage chest size to not slightly overlap when placed next to each other using snap - Fixed the Hallowed Ground skill - Fixed a rare multi-player structure update bug - Fixed a number of skill spelling and description errors - Temporarily fixed ranged speed skill, pending a better solution
v 0.8.0.30 2022.04.29 - Increased the collider size on most herbs and vegetables - Increased stalk size - Moved stalk closer to ground to prevent the appearance of floating - Increased stalk spawn rate in grasslands - Added material names to bag, backpack, and storage chest titles - Added slot count to bag descriptions - Fixed familiars throwing an error if their target dies while casting - Fixed a number of skills not properly using damage levels
v 0.8.0.29 2022.04.28 - Enabled keyboard turning while in aim view - Enabled view cam (unlocked) while in aim view - Disabled towns that were spawning unintentionally - Fixed a harmless archer run animation event error - Fixed a burn/targeted aoe error - Fixed players appearing naked in multi-player sometimes - Fixed an error when remove death markers from the map - Fixed a chain lightning MP error - Fixed a rare AqauticAI error - Fixed a rare MonsterAI error - Fixed a rare projectile error
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.
Had a couple of really annoying bugs patched in last night that this patch fixes with some other quality of life things. Due to the start of the Steam sale, it's very likely that some first-time players immediately ran into this bug. Normally changes are pushed to the beta branch prior to being pushed straight onto what I call the live branch, but being in the middle of some changes, and hoping to get stuff out in time for the sale, I rushed last nights patch a bit and apologize for the problems that caused people.
Earlier today I found a new "let's play" sort of YouTube two-part series of a player playing Solace Crafting for the first time, which is always super informative watching someone play without knowing where everything is and what everything does. I took some notes and have tweaked a few descriptions and tutorial steps to try and improve the user experience with some of the things he got caught up on.
v 0.8.0.28 2022.04.26 - Improved several tutorial descriptions - Fixed a couple spelling and grammar errors - Removed the majority of the taller plant like grasses to alleviate confusion for new players looking for stalks - Replaced stalk with a non-SpeedTree model - Increased stalk size - Fixed another bug brought on by the recipe bonuses
v 0.8.0.27 2022.04.26 - Fixed a bug brought on by the recipe bonuses
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
Over the past few days I've been working on a new trailer, that is up now on Steam and YouTube! Sadly I don't have a very good graphics card, so I can't record full HD at 60 FPS, but it's still a lot better than the old trailer. I'll have to make a new "let's play" sort of intro video for the store as well I think at some point as I deleted the old one from version 0.2.
To celebrate, I'm running a weeklong sale. Sales always bring in a lot of new players, as over 99% of Steam users still have never even heard of Solace Crafting. So I'll probably be on overtime responding to new questions and concerns =]
I've also upped a new patch that fixes, one pretty major bug in particular that was improperly scaling damage based on level difference between players and mobs. I've also reinstated weapon and armor bonuses from learned recipes, so some equipment recipes now have innate attribute bonuses, etc., prior to any enchanting. There are also still some shortcoming with some of the new magician spells it seems and I'll be looking into those today. I've also had 1-2 players say their skills keep resetting. I've been unable to reproduce this though, and if anyone is encountering this and can give me more details or send me a save file to look at that would be much appreciated.
Happy gaming!
v 0.8.1.0 2022.04.25 - Added/reenabled learned recipes bonus stats - Added instructions in key bindings that you can hold to set modifier keys - Fixed Fire Pillar spell - Fixed some spelling errors - Fixed a problem with the level difference damage scaling math
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
I pushed a silent patch at the end of last week and just now pushed another. Last weeks patch introduced a variety of new special effects and animations for skills and spells.
Beyond that both patches bring a number of smaller quality of life improvements and bug fixes as I'm primarily trying to focus on polishing what we've already got in the game rather than adding new features from here on towards 1.0. Please read the patch notes below for more information.
Last week I also updated the Steam store page with new graphics, text, and tags. I hate to say it, because I'm terrible at video editing, but more than anything the store page needs a new trailer. So, I thought I'd try and say that out loud and see if maybe anyone is interested in helping out with that. I'll be trying to gather pertinent video clips while working over the next few days, working on a script for overlay text, etc. If anyone's passionate about putting video together for fun, I'd very much appreciate the help!
v 0.8.0.25 2022.04.18 - Added the player level weighed enchant amounts to the enchanting UI - Added a larger collider for swamp trees - Put a cap on enchants higher level than the player so they retain their normal value - Tweaked the scale of wood roof pieces to fit better - Tweaked the colors of a lot of wood pieces to fit better - Fixed the Lightning Wave skill - Fixed X to rotate while snapping facility placement not working - Fixed ocean rocks not registering as ground / harvestable - Fixed familiars firing at dead things - Fixed a math error scaling damage and enchants upward when out leveled
v 0.8.0.24 2022.04.15 - Added new animations for Strike, Thrust, Stomp, Zealous Strike, Sweeping Strike, Flurry, Sunder, and Calculated Strike - Added new effects for Heal, Expulse, Cure, Chromatic Blast, Fire Pillar, Lightning Wave, Flame Shield, Inferno, Blizzard, Storm, Arcane Explosion, Bind, Swarm, Rejuvenate, and Seance - Adjusted Damage Levels to use percentages instead of a solid number when adjusting damage against target level - Increased maximum hit points from 2500 to 5000 - Fixed a bug with Quick Shot triggering Rapid Fire repeatedly - Fixed a walking while equipped animation event error
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
Fixed another wave of bugs thanks to reports from Discord, console bug reports, and anonymous reporting. I added 6-7 new animations for skills too, but they're acting funny so I've turned them off for this patch to work on them more tomorrow.
v 0.8.0.23 2022.04.05 - Added a new Flame Pillar particle effect - Fixed a line of stats when crafting metal armor not getting updated properly, instead reading "16 wood" - Fixed the teleport distance description showing up in a bunch of unrelated skill descriptions - Fixed the bow shot animation playing with staves and wands - Fixed a bug with obelisks attacking - Fixed a variety of incorrect attribute descriptions in the Skills -> Attributes descriptions - Fixed an error with Wood Triangle 3 - Fixed imp firebolts not showing up in multiplayer - Fixed two rare projectile bugs
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
I've got a number of bug reports to look into, mostly regarding the new skills, but here is a first wave of bugs fixes to get started.
v 0.8.0.22 2022.04.01 - Upgraded the vegetation engine - Changed facility placement to ignore the player layer - Tweaked the large spiral staircase collider to improve movement between other building pieces - Fixed Ice Spikes attempting to align to the ground from too far up, causing them to place on the roof of goblin dungeons - Fixed teleporting to a solace positioning further away than when recalling - Fixed a number of new animation not producing foot step audio - Fixed a bug letting storehouses fill up with NPC gathered resources beyond their capacity
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
This patch has been a long time in the works, and in truth is not yet 100% complete. In this post I'll go into What's new, why this patch is being pushed live incomplete, and what's been going on here at Big Kitty Games.
- What this patch brings to the live branch
At the bottom of this post there is a condensed list of patch notes that lists the changes between the current live version and the new live version, and I've covered these topics in greater detail in previous posts, but there are a couple of big changes that I'll go over.
The math behind all systems in-game has been updated to a shifting scale of values that adjusts itself based on the level of the player. This means that at level 0 having 1 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty, and likewise at level 50 having 51 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty. If however you have 75 strength at level 50, you will be receiving a variety of bonuses including increased health, increased melee and ranged damage, etc. The reason for this is two fold. For one, the old system was a form of linear progression where an attribute bonus difference between levels 0 and 1 would be something like 100%, but over time, the difference between two levels would drop down to numbers like 0.1%. Secondly, because levels are infinite, health and damage numbers were capable of going beyond the capabilities of 32-bit numbers. This new system solves these and other problems by having a base set of values that any "balanced" character will have, and a scale of possible bonuses and penalties that keep the math under the hood at manageable and balanced numbers regardless of your level. It is however fun to see your damage and health numbers go up, so these numbers are scaled, though only visually, when presented to the player.
The 4 Archetype skill trees have been redesigned and 8 Job skill trees have been added now as well. This amounts to around 240 skill nodes now available, and all characters upgrading from the live version will have their adventuring skills reset so they can reassign their points as desired.
Monster classes and abilities have also been added to the game, though there are still only a handful of monsters that have been equipped with varying classes and abilities.
Almost all of the old animations have been entirely replaced with new animations. Animation has always been a weak point of mine, and in studying up a bit I came to understand that a lot of the animation I was using were built for more "toon" shaped characters and so don't properly translate when fit onto standard human shaped models. The new animations that have now replaced most of those old animations are built specifically for human models. I also completely did away with the old animator, which is a compilation of state machines that blend what animations should be playing on the player at any given moment, for a fully scripted animator. Manually creating an animator can involve hundreds if not 1,000+ mouse clicks, and locating a problem can be just as difficult. To avoid that, as I do want to add more animations and more "categories" like 1-handed melee, 2-handed melee, etc., I wrote a machine that can construct an animator purely from code. As such there may be an animation state or two that I have overlooked, but can address easily if enough once brought to my attention.
- Why this patch is being pushed live now
Being honest here, this is not everything I wanted to get into 0.8.0 before pushing it to the live branch. There is a lot still under construction, including unfinished skills, a lack of skill animations, audio, and visual effects, as well as some lesser features that have been temporarily disabled. This patch has been in the works for months and with every week that passes the differences between the live branch and the beta branch grow farther apart. This has led to an increased difficulty in managing bug reports among other things, and I really need to push these changes live to get a better grip on the current state of the game before moving forward.
Because of this there may some small problems that were fixed on the live branch that get reintroduced with the
- Regarding the current state of development
I've also spoken a few times over the past 12 months about a growing heaviness in regards to development of Solace Crafting. The project has over 180,000 lines of code, and I've spent something like 10,000 hours on it, in this chair, at home, alone. It's been a very difficult journey thus far, and I have no intention of ending it. Having said that, over the past couple months I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am extremely burnt out on working on a single solo title for a straight four and a half years now. When I put together the game's core design back in 2017 it was full of a lot of great ideas that I was never able to realize on my own and over time had to repeatedly shorten the roadmap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a learning process that I had to go through. Despite repeatedly redesigning the roadmap, my optimism of being able to put together all things that I wanted to in maybe a couple years max, we're still here and SC still needs quite a few more hours even after 50 months of dedicated development.
In truth, the first month of early access back in January of 2018, was one of the best selling months I've ever had, and it fueled my optimism that I would very much be able to afford more paid freelance work than I ever actually was able to. In reality, one month not long after that I made less than 500$, and overall it's been an ongoing struggle, not necessarily to pay my bills, but to refrain from doing more of the things that we all want to do. This over time is a weird form stress that I never really had experienced prior to starting my own business.
I have been aware of these different angles of stress slowly building up on me and pledged at the start of 2021, that 2021 would be the year that we would leave early access, for better or for worse. Then later in the year, after wrestling with whether to go through with it or not for several months, I decided to start the 0.8 branch by revamping the game math and adding more skills to the game. This was a massive undertaking, and I should have been more aware of that truth by then. The skill trees are something I designed back in 2017, and have always been something I've really wanted to implement, but in hindsight, they may have been better left for a post-1.0 release patch.
Sure enough, after several months working on 0.8, I was completely exhausted. I tried for months to take breaks during the week, but no one is more aware of the bugs and shortcomings of the game than I am, and the desire to create better is a constant thorn in my head when I'm only "stepping away" for a bit. A few weeks ago I was generously gifted a VR kit and finally decided to put Solace Crafting down for real, albeit of course temporarily. I "officially" have started working on a new title and did nothing but that for two weeks straight, and have already made a lot of progress in the game itself. That four and a half years of experience has made a very big difference, not only with the speed at which I can develop things, but my ability to judge what's important, what's not, how long something is going to take, and so on. I'm still only a little over two weeks into development of the game, and not ready to start blabbering about it, but I need, not want, need to be open my actively working on something else, as that has become a necessity for my own well-being.
Having taken a few solid weeks to do something else, my burnt motivation for SC has had some time to heal and I've been gathering bug reports and reassessing the current situation and how to best approaching going forward from here. I do believe that just slapping the "good enough" sticker on it and seeing what happens if I release out of early access is not something I can morally get behind, but I do also think that for my own well-being, both mentally and hopefully financially, that focusing intently on adding nothing else to game, but rather polishing and improving what is so that I can release a version 1.0 and temporarily switch into "maintenance mode" where I only address problems and bugs, while I work on something else for a while. If the game generates enough interest (sales), then I can continue to put my resources (money & time) back into the game in the hopes of turning it into all of the things I want it to be.
What I've come to realize recently though is that Big Kitty Games is more important than Solace Crafting. If Big Kitty Games can thrive, then I can always come back to Solace Crafting regardless of what happens over these next few months. But there seems to be a very real chance that I will dry up and run out of money if I stubbornly keep trying to "muscle" my way through development of my first love.
I've spent the past couple days working again on SC, and am planning to work on SC for the next few days, but it's likely I'll be working on my second title on and off from now on. I hope I'm able to get SC to a solid 1.0 release in working condition over the next few months, and hope it is able to make enough money for me to keep working on it well beyond 1.0!
Best wishes as always, Kyle Postlewait AKA Malkere
v 0.7.8.10 -> v 0.8.0.21 condensed patch notes - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Added poison to several animals - Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person - Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried - Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20 - Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS - Added a monster/animal ability system - Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps - Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log - Improved block and parry logic - Changed fonts to the alchemy profession - Removed Recall mana usage - Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress - Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI - Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets - Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI - Added ascend and descend specific key bindings - Changed attribute and statistic math to new system - Increased flattening around procedural towers - Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro - Added a /checkheightmaps console command - Fixed paper being unstackable - Improved the strong harvesting skills descrpitions to explain that they share a single hotkey - Improved terraforming performance - Enabled terraforming in multi-player - Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings - Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor
Latest changes to beta: v 0.8.0.21 2022.03.31 - Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct - Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar - Repositioned tool/weapon holding position/rotation
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
