The Creostrider Awakens - An Exciting Time to Live in Creo!

Hey there everyone! I wanted to take some time today to let you all know about the recent updates being made to Creo God Simulator. This last month has been an excellent month for Creo's development: I've been able to set aside significantly more time to work on the game, and I'm starting to see a nearing actual update day!

It's been a very exciting time working away at Creo's development goals - slowly checking them off, one by one. Most of the larger changes are completed, so now I'm beginning to move onto game balancing, testing, and polishing for the upcoming release.

The Altar Beam - Indicates when a god power has been used

[h2]Heavilly Improved Camera System[/h2]

I've long felt that Creo's orthographic camera system moves in a slightly jarring and awkward manner. Though it's actually bothered me for a bit, I finally set aside time this month to work on it, and the result? A momentum-based camera system with smooth translation and zooming. As you can see, the new system allows for a much richer gaming experience, all without the jarring camera pans and awkward zooming levels.





[h2]Changed Trees, Improved UI, and a New Inspection Mode[/h2]

After playing this new version of Creo for a bit in one of my testing sessions, I felt that something was rather off about the look of the game - I noticed that the lack of shadows within the game world really felt off. In light of this, Creo's shadow engine changed to use hard shadows, as seen below. However, after making the change, I realized that our current billboard trees were not playing nicely with the new hard shadows, and additionally, the game's performance was taking a small hit with all of the trees following the camera. The trees have now been changed to be low-poly trees - with tree sway and everything!



In addition to the tree and shadow changes, I also updated the display UI, and the in-game UI as well. I also made sure to add a new inspection mode which allows you to see how many resources trees, stones, and ore deposits hold. I'm planning on expanding this new feature in the future.



[h2]So What's Next?[/h2]

Even though I've added all these exciting new changes to Creo, I worked on a myriad of various improvements, changes, and bug fixes that I'll list below. I feel that, as a developer, I'm finally beginning to get out of my odd Corona slump - I'm not sure if any of you have been experiencing that lately? With these changes, I'm finally beginning to make the time that Creo deserves, which makes me extremely happy.

So what's next? Well, in the next few weeks, I'm planning on doing a significant amount of playtesting and balancing - in other words, I'm going to be balancing the food consumption rates, birth rates, disaster occurrences, town growth rate, etc. All the subtle things that can make or break a gaming experience. I'll definitely keep you all informed with the tweaks I make, and I can't wait until you all can try the new version of Creo. I hope you all have been having an excellent and safe summer so far, here's to hoping we can get a playable version of Creo out soon.

Cheers,
Esteban
Developer of Creo

[h2]Changes Made for this Update[/h2]

[h3]Major Changes[/h3]

• Added hard shadows
  
• Added new inspection mode, which allows seeing resources remaining in trees, stone, and ore
  
• Improved camera controls - added smooth camera panning and zooming
  

[h3]Minor Changes[/h3]

• Added UI to see villagers by age
  
• Initial balancing of city birth rates
  
• Added altar beam god power indicator
  
• Added improved lightning strike effect
  
• Added new repairing and fire extinguishing icons
  
• Added game art loading screen
  
• Updated locust swarm to use animated locusts
  
• Improved building model change logic when placing buildings
  
• Added new road placement UI
  
• Upgraded Unity engine and game to 2020 version
  
• Improved UI Design
  
• Changed trees to 3D for better performance
  
• Added tree sway
  
• Added improved dynamic mouse cursors
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed buildings not being destroyed in-game build
  
• Fixed loading menu multi-load bug
  
• Added sound pitch variation to certain sound effects to alleviate audio overlap
  
• Fixed main menu video not loading properly
  
• Fixed resource objects (trees/stone/ore) not disappearing once their contained resources are emptied
  
• Fixed audio settings not applying changes