Creo God Simulator News

Hey there Creostriders! It's so exciting to finally be able to reach out to all of you and let you know about our exciting new version of Creo - V.0.5.2! I've been hard at work for the last several months developing a myriad of improvements and changes to our beloved game, and with all the hard work being done, the time has come to release the update.

[h2]That's all great news, but where have you been for the last few months?[/h2]

That's an excellent question, random stranger! If you all haven't noticed, I've been somewhat quiet about Creo's development for the last few months - this hasn't been out of laziness or me not caring about the game, I've actually been fortunate enough to co-found a tech startup in my hometown, and with this new startup, a massive new set of responsibilities and work were added to my plate. For the last few months, I was working a full-time development job, afterward, I would do a variety of work for our startup, and then I would make time to work on Creo.

I can't tell y'all just how cathartic it has been to work on Creo. With life being as crazy as it is, making time to work on Creo feels like coming home - it's my warm space where I can let my imagination run wild, and work on making an awesome gaming experience for all of you. So I would set aside time late in the night to work on the game - after my son was put to bed and all was quiet.

I recently left my other full-time job to focus on our startup, which has also opened up quite a bit of time for me to work on Creo! With this increased free time, I was able to wrap up a variety of improvements and updates for the game, in addition to squashing a variety of bugs! I'm excited about what's in the works for Creo, but enough about me, let's talk about this update!

[h2]What the update contains[/h2]



A large part of my time was spent working on two massive undertakings for Creo - adding language localization support, and a huge refactoring of my code architecture. Adding language localization support has been something I've always wanted to add to Creo, but I knew that it would take me a large amount of time to update all of the code to support this (this was due to a terrible game dev decision made when I just started working on Creo - all you beginning game devs out there, make sure to add language support right at the beginning!)

I finally decided to bite the bullet, and after dozens of hours of refactoring, I've got Creo and my workflow updated to allow for various languages! I've currently added Spanish support since that's my native language, but I'm hoping on adding a variety of other languages as time goes on, so let me know which ones you would like to see!

I also drastically improved Creo's core programming structure, which will allow me to add buildings and new game features much more simply and quickly than before. The changelog for this update is very long, so I will post it below, but I will highlight the ones which I think you will be most excited to hear about:

• Updated tree models to match the building's voxel style
  
• Made a variety of UI improvements, including asking if "you're you want to delete your save" - no more accidentally deleted saves!
  
• Improved the water animation quality (intersection foam, waves, transparency
  
• The game now saves your camera's position, rotation, and zoom - no more having to load a game with the camera in a weird position
  
• Dozens of other improvements and bug fixes
  

[h2]The future[/h2]



What does the future hold for Creo God Simulator? Well, in the short term, I'm thinking about adding in a variety of new buildings, such as the trading guild and the tribute altar. I've also built about 75% of the new prophet spawn event - beware, though they might increase your believer's faith in you, they might also overzealously trigger disasters! I'm also going to be adding in a reward/loot drop system where when you successfully defeat/survive certain events, resources are dropped. This is being done to help prevent you from running out of wood/stone/etc. I've also got several new events in the work (we're needing many more positive events, to help balance out disasters).

I'm wanting to keep things a bit wacky at times, so please make sure to join our Discord server and let me know what randomized events you would like to see!

As a final word, I just want to thank you all for being so patient with my little game - I'm trying my best to make time to grow this game, and I know that we'll keep adding improvements and making it better as time goes on, just as we have been up to now! Hope you all continue to have an awesome summer - stay safe out there, and don't go casting lightning bolts too often!

- Esteban




Big Changes:

Added language localization support (Spanish)
Game now saves/loads camera position, rotation, and zoom on save/load
Drastically improved code structure of all buildings, improving performance and making it easier to add/modify buildings

Small Changes:

Made small temple generate a passive amount of willpower based on priests working at the location
Improved smite animation, added small crater when smiting area
Upon language change, a notification box will clear itself
Added confirmation box appearing when clicking on the "delete save" button to prevent accidental deletion
Updated load buttons UI to be more easily readable (moved save date)
Updated farm vertical position so that farmers don't sink too deeply into farm
Updated trees to match other game art (Breaks previous saves)
Added caret to trade menu inputs
Added language support to trade system
Added Spanish version of the tutorial
Improved selected building info UI (hp, text positioning)
Improved water quality (intersection foam, waves, transparency)

Bug Fixes:

Fixed loading menu's save slots not showing correct incompatible version warning message on hover
Fixed main quest not successfully rewarding player upon completion
Fixed main quest icon triggering issues in different situations
Fixed meteor having choppy movement during fall due to not interpolating the position of rigid body
Fixed placeholder text appearing in inspiration menu when first opened
Fixed "Advanced training" technology appearing at the end of the inspiration menu
Fixed quality level not being rendered correctly in the options menu
Fixed camera pan not applying bounding limits - the camera will now limit pan distance
Fixed bug where roads could be built regardless if there are insufficient resources
Fixed roadbuilding exploit where short roads would cost no wood/metal. Resolved this by making any road cost at least 2 wood, 1 stone, 1 metal
Fixed bug where when workers died, they did not remove their filled role at their workplace
Fixed villagers death sound effects not outputting to correct audio output channel
Fixed typos in tutorial
Removed Creobrine
Fixed logic error where basic Market logic was being applied incorrectly due to a typo
Fixed birthrate error where more villagers would be born than population capacity
Fixed villager animation bug where working animations would be triggered on villagers that do not have working animations
Fixed camera issue not showing water transparency
Fixed building rotation being fps-locked
Fixed zoom speed being fps-locked
Fixed building menu not closing on right click for high fps machines

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