Creo God Simulator News

Hey there everyone! I hope your holidays were spent wonderfully in whichever way you could manage - we all know that this year's been a doozy. I just wanted to make a small update to Creo which fixed a small number of bugs and issues with the previous version.

Nothing too fancy with this update, though I'm working on a new building and some new events for the next update. I've been thinking about adding in the Trader's Guild building again, which allows you to generate additional gold and a random resource item as long as it's staffed with totally non-greedy tradespeople. I've also been working on the Prophet character event, who will go about doing miracles and convincing more villagers to believe in you.

There are several more buildings and events I've got in mind, but one step at a time, right? Work continues on Creo - we've even got some new soundtracks pieces in the works as well! Please make sure to let me know, either on Steam or in our Discord, what additional features or improvements you would like to see! I love getting feedback from our community.

Have a Happy New Year's everyone! Here's to seeing a whole new year of updates and improvements to the Creoverse!

- Esteban


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

[h3]Minor Changes[/h3]

• Increase population trigger value for homelessness to 10 minimum
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed build menu sometimes not allowing building placement due to logic error
  
• Fixed Kitchen's info on select lacking spaces in certain areas
  
• Fixed town name being same as God name in new game map generator on randomize
  
• Fixed build area clipping on y-axis with map
  

Ladies and gents, after so many long months of development, testing, and iterating, the newest version (V.0.5) of Creo God Simulator is now live for every owner to play! I made sure to take advantage of the US Thanksgiving break and focus almost all my days on getting this new version up and running. Most nights have involved me staying up nice and late in order to get bug fixes and improvements put in the game.

I'm extremely grateful for all the testers who have been involved so far in getting this new version ready, and for my family who's be extremely understanding of my long coding/development binges. I know that now begins the slow and steady process of bug fixing, adding community-suggested improvements, and adding more razzle-dazzle to the main build of Creo on Steam, and I'm extremely excited that Creo is finally at this stage.



[h2]Summary of Improvements/Changes[/h2]

Over the course of the last few months, Creo God Simulator has received an extremely large number of changes and improvements to its game engine, graphics, and gameplay. I'll briefly cover the main changes that have taken place over the course of the last few months, but if you want a more detailed look at what's been added, please feel free to check out Creo's long list of updates in the 'Recent Events and Announcements' section of the store page.

Some of the changes and improvements that Creo's received over the last few months:

• Complete graphical overhaul, changing from low-poly to a unique blend of voxel, pixel-art, and low-poly graphics
  
• Much-improved camera system (smoother movement and more intuitive controls) and made the game isometric, rather than having it perspective based, as it used to be
  
• Narrowed down the scope of the villager simulation, switching focus from the individual villagers to the city as a whole. This was done to help keep Creo's gameplay goals achievable and focused
  
• Added a dynamic villager/sprite creation system. This new system allows me to add unique villager and animal animation sprites to each building - this helps give Creo's towns a much more lively and busy atmosphere and opens the door for future improvements to Creo's ambiance as well
  
• Updated event engine to be much easier to work with as a developer - this means that I'll be able to add new and unique events/quests to Creo much more quickly and efficiently than before. I'm excited to see what unique events the community can come up with, much like the Cat Swarm event that occurs occasionally in Creo
  
• Large redo of Creo's old UI system. The new UI system has been designed to be much more intuitive and appealing, to be honest, my old UI sucked. I've definitely put much more work into Creo's current UI/UX
  
• Many, many, many more changes and improvements...
  

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

Now that the new version of Creo is finally out to the public, I can continue my work of adding new features, buildings, gameplay systems, and events to the game. Additionally, I hope that I can now leverage the player's feedback on the live version in order to make relevant improvements and bug fixes.

Some of the things I'm eyeing for the next update are:

• Giving the road laying tool the ability to build new sections of road without closing the tool
  
• Showing all areas of effect of raw material/city services buildings when selected (think when you click on a well, it will show you ALL well's AoE, not just the one you've selected)
  
• Adding new 'Prophet' event - an outcast arrives in your town and begins converting non-believers to your religion while working miracles as well
  
• Showing a building's total health when selected (654 HP / 1000 HP) - we currently only show current health
  

I'm extremely excited for Creo's future. I'd like to thank everyone who's patiently waited these last few months for this update - Creo would not exist without all of your support. Looking forward to hearing back from all of you, and I hope to catch you all on our Discord server!

- Esteban



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

[h3]Major Changes[/h3]

• Added starvation that slowly kills your villagers if player has no food
  
• Added in-game help dialog (you can reopen the tutorial at any time)
  
• Drastically improved quality and length of initial tutorial, now covers more game topics
  
• Added possibility for a 'Crisis of Faith' to occur in random villagers, randomly increasing or decreasing their faith.
  

[h3]Minor Changes[/h3]

• Improved UI of notification icons
  
• Increased villager birth rate to be more reasonable
  
• Added production rate indicator in certain selected building's UI
  
• Added age indicator UI in top UI bar
  
• Removed Creobrine
  
• In market flux equations, increased the quantity of wood purchased by shops/markets by 30%
  
• Raised WP cost of each godpower to improve WP balance
  
• Made quest info UI screen larger
  
• Updated build menu icon images
  
• Added earthquake sound when earthquake occurs
  
• Removed gold income hover in UI
  
• Doubled duration of of Meteor Crater
  
• Added game speed control using hotkeys (1,2,3 numeric keys)
  
• Finally got a haircut
  
• Game now will also save and load the RNG time remaining for events and future quests
  
• Removed tree wind sways - found that this was causing large performance issues
  
• Increase faith/fear effects of Rain, Meteor, and Lightning god powers
  
• Changed faith/conversion values to favor player more
  
• Increased lumberyard work rate by around 30%
  
• Made rain remove cats
  
• Doubled strength of rain power
  
• Updated name-randomization values
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed game not returning 1/3 resource cost when a building is demolished
  
• Fixed a demolision bug where buildings would run removal code twice when demolished
  
• Fixed build area rendering causing large performance issues when several altars exist
  
• Fixed world-generation showing behind loading screen on a resolution of 3072 x 1920 or larger
  
• Fixed bug where game speed was set to 1 everytime inspiration menu was closed
  
• Prevented random events from occurring during tutorial
  
• Fixed cat swarm cat's colliding with rain collider
  
• Fixed dust puff's orientation when placing starting plaza
  
• Fixed villager's audio spatial 3D blend issues
  
• Fixed save/load issue with RNG event times
  
• Fixed UI road cost being incorrect in build menu
  
• Fixed meteor not applying blast damage to roads properly
  

Hey there everyone! I've got some exciting news - Creo God Simulators' largest update ever is beginning its testing phase! After months of work and changes, I've managed to get Creo to a point where it's ready to begin playtesting and finding balance improvements. This testing will be done internally and outside of the Steam network, and we're very excited to start getting feedback on how we can help Creo have a better gaming experience.

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

Briefly put, the next few weeks will involve various personally-selected playtesters playing and helping iterate improvements to the in-development version of Creo. I hope that our testers will be able to help me tweak Creo's resource-management system to be more challenging yet fair. Additionally, we'll be testing game difficulty and possible quality-of-life improvements.

Once we wrap up this initial testing phase, I will be finally uploading the new version of Creo to Steam, which will anyone who owns Creo God Simulator to update their local version, and try it out! As we did before with Creo, I hope that all of you play the game please head over to our Discord server and make any suggestions you may have or report any bugs you may find. Here's a link to Creo's server:
Creo God Simulator's Discord Link

[h2]What's New in This Update?[/h2]

This progress report includes various improvements and game additions that I've added over the last few weeks. One I'm excited to announce is the new main menu screen which will have user-generated game art as a background! I'm hoping that our players will be able to take some beautiful screenshots - or for those artistically-minded folks, create some beautiful art - that will then be displayed for everyone to see in-game.



Obviously, these images will be hand-picked by myself, and submissions will follow guidelines which can be found on the main-menu-artwork channel in our discord server.

Additionally, I added in two new events: a Crop Boon, which randomly increases the crop growth rates of your farms, and a CAT SWARM.

The Cat Swarm event spawns a hungry, angry, and terribly adorable herd of cats on the map, which will then proceed to visit your town and cause trouble! These cats will eat your food, and will also drain your gold amounts, seeing as how your villagers will want to care for and feed these lovable felines. You'll have to get creative on how you remove this swarm!



I've added various other improvements and changes to Creo, which will be listed below. I'm very excited for the next few weeks - I look forward to getting feedback from our testers, and I can't wait until I can get this new version of Creo out to all of you! Thank you all so much for your support and patience during this large update, I truly appreciate it.

- Esteban
Developer of Creo


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

[h3]Major Changes[/h3]

• Finally added CAT SWARM event (they eat food and age your villagers)
  
• Added ability for main menu to show user-created images/screenshots
  
• Added Crop Boon Positive Event (Increases Crop Growth)
  
• Now preventing saving during disasters or other certain events
  
• Made main plaza selectable and destroyable, causing a gameover
  

[h3]Minor Changes[/h3]

• Added ability to toggle ingame information icons
  
• Increased conversion probability for all god powers
  
• Updated main quest to 10x its rewards, while also requiring 300 target population to complete
  
• Updated Main Menu to use user-created screenshots as background images
  
• Improved building placement and destruction animation
  
• Added villager ghosts upon death
  
• Added villager screams upon death
  
• Made roads destroyable by god powers
  
• Made villagers destroyable by god powers
  

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed central Plaza spawning villagers if the population is zero
  
• Removed certain techs that were not ready gamelogic-wise
  
• Fixed lightning explosion not dissapearing after animation finishes
  
• Fixed fire not being extinguished by rain
  
• Fixed Build Fullscreen and Vsync not triggering
  
• Fixed edge panning on windowed mode
  

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
  

Hello there everyone! Here we have another extremely-overdue Creo God Simulator progress update! In this progress update, we will be discussing gameplay feature additions, UI changes, and a large rebranding.

To begin, I'll admit that the current pandemic situation really did a number on my ability to get work done. Here at Homebase, I was surprised by how difficult it was to balance my fulltime job, attend to my family, and work on Creo in the little free time I had. Over the last few months, my frustration with how slowly Creo was progressing was getting to me, and though I was making progress on new game systems and UI, I really let my communication with Creo's community slip.

However, in recent weeks, I've found significantly more time to work on Creo, and a good friend of mine has agreed to hop on the Creo team as a community/growth development manager (more on that in coming updates). With my additional time and my friend's help, I'm excited to say that Creo is entering a much more efficient period for its development and growth. So without further adieu, let's get to what I've been up to.



[h2]New and Improved Gameplay Features[/h2]

So over the course of the last few months, I've made numerous improvements to various gameplay systems in Creo. Villager birth rates, for one, have gotten a major overhaul, and now scale based on how large your town is becoming. I've also been gradually balancing the gameplay out resource-wise: making sure wood gathering and food production rates are fair yet challenging.

Oh yeah, I also added a point-click road laying system.



Yes, you heard that right. For all you old-school Creo fans who remember the admittedly awful road laying system of yonder, you'll be pleasantly surprised with the intuitiveness of simply clicking where you want your road point to be, and a road magically connecting your points! (This system took weeks...)

[h2]Updated God Powers[/h2]

In addition to updating lots of the current gameplay mechanics, I've also updated the god powers to work with the new map, and also made them look at a bit nicer, as is evidenced below:



With the changes to the game engine completed, I overhauled the god power system, which should make it much easier to add new god powers in the future. As it currently stands, we have the Meteor, Rain, and Lightning god powers.

[h2]Rebranding and UI Updated[/h2]

And last but certainly not least, is our large UI/Rebranding project. This was the thing that actually took up most of my time over the last few months. I've been taking some time to learn a thing or two about better UI/UX design, so this lead to me remaking ALL of the UI in Creo. Here's an image of the main game screen with its new UI layout:



I wanted to go for a little bit more polished/modern look to Creo. In addition, I also added a new notifications/events textbox in the top left of the screen. This scrollable and expandable box will hold a log of all the important notifications that occur in your town and Creo at large.



I believe that these UI changes, though small, will add up to make a much more enjoyable gaming experience. In addition to these UI changes, I also had the game logo redone for something more minimal which really caught my eye.



[h2]In Conclusion[/h2]

Yes, I know this progress update had a lot to process - holy gifs am I right? - but I found it necessary to catch you up to where Creo currently sits. Right now, I am balancing the resources management side of the game, but am getting VERY close to having a playable update ready for all of you. The next few weeks will see more regular posting and progress. I'm excited to share with you all the new features I'll be adding to the game in the coming months.

Thank you Creostriders!

- Esteban (Guy who made Creo)