Happy Robanukah! - Craftomation 101 Dev Diaries, December 2024
Hey, mates!
This edition of our developer diaries is quite deliberately named after the iconic (and totally fake) robot holiday from Futurama. Because it's the holiday season, and robots are playing a growingly important role in our lives, they deserve a holiday of their own, don't you agree?
You can post your ideas for alternative names in the comments, and we'll keep telling the story of Craftomation 101. It was quite an important year for us, as the game was released into Early Access on Steam.
Even more so, it started coming into shape, thanks to your generous feedback and a bit of hard work.
About a month ago we released the coolest update for the game so far. It is so cool that it introduced 2 new types of frozen areas for you to warm out. This system is a result of weeks of experiments and it comes to replace the infamous Thorns (along with a weird thing called Ancient Ice). After many experiments with them we came to the idea that progressively colder areas felt more intuitive.
So now the planet is effectively more icy and even more lifeless. We hope you enjoy it!
That also led to rebalancing existing heating elements, such as Bonfires and Furnaces. We even introduced new visuals for their area of operation - and then changed it again in another update, for your convenience. Now the preview shows the final state of the affected tiles, instead of the heating level change (which makes sense with the new climate zone system):
Heating elements will keep evolving further. We have spent a lot of time drafting a content plan for the game. Although the details may and will change as we go, we now know the general direction in which we will be heading. More on that below.
The biggest mission for the next few months will be to build a more fluent system of objectives. One target effect is to bring together various gameplay mechanics that sometimes feel like they work independently in their present state.
For example, remember the Sulfur Source? Once you unlock it, it's kinda just… sitting there. Which is a behavior expected from a mineral but it is not very fun. So, since managing that zone also implies working with various kind of organics, our idea is to replace the Source with something more alive. A giant tree? A giant forest? A wise giant turtle (not likely)? Ideas are very welcome: let us know in the comments or on our Discord server!
Introducing this… thing will most likely lead to a separate line of objectives which will not be like the ones given out by the Command Center at the moment. One of the concepts we're going to experiment with is to ask for a certain amount of items to be provided per second, in the hope of motivating the players to experiment with balancing harvesting and crafting various objects.
Another idea for new kinds of tasks is procedural goals - when a player will be asked to provide a random-ish number of random-ish items and write a program for CraftoMates, that will allow them to properly detect what needs to be delivered.
Proceeding to the Volcano will also imply a new structure for the objectives though this is still rather early in the works. But what's definitely coming soon is several new types of heating elements, so you could experiment more with the new climate zones and optimize heat levels in different parts of the map.
We do have a long backlog of ideas that we have plans to experiment with next year. Like adding more minor mechanics that will let interact with the environment in different fun ways (one word: dynamite!). The Brewery could use a renovation, both in terms of mechanics and visuals. And we still owe you that bonfire-carrying ability for CargoMates! It's coming, too. Highly likely.
It was a good year for Craftomation, and the year 2025 is promising to be even more interesting. Happy Holidays, mates, especially to those of you celebrating Robanukah!
