Crea's True Future
[h2]Greetings everyone![/h2]
It has been over two years since my last official post, so first off I want to thank everyone for being patient with me and apologize that it has taken this long. This post is a mixture of both great news and not so great news.
TL;DR: Crea will not be receiving any substantial updates in the future; however, I'm not done with either the world of Crea nor the game concept.
This is undoubtedly upsetting to many of you as many people have told me that “the game has so much potential.” I too share that feeling, but it gives me hope for the future! Before looking forward to the future let's take a look at the past - storytime!
The world of Crea was born nearly 20 years ago as an RPG Maker 2k game that I was working on in High School. In true indie gamedev style, the scope of the game I designed was way beyond my abilities at the time. Years later I revisited the Crea mythos in the form of a card game inspired by Final Fantasy 8/9. Once again years later in February 2012 I was inspired to take the world I had been working on for so long and began shaping it into Crea, the sandbox RPG game you know today.
I worked on it during nights and weekends while holding a fulltime job. The successful Crea Kickstarter gave me the confidence to quit my job and work on Crea full time. In my youthful naivete, I sincerely believed the game would be released in just a few months. Instead, it took another 4 years to a 1.0 release and several years of post 1.0 updates.
During Crea's development I was continually revising the vision for the game while constantly behind the unrealistic schedule I had set for myself. This led to making many poor decisions and a relentless pressure, primarily from myself, to get Crea released. Unsurprisingly, years of this pressure resulted in burnout and depression. It has taken me the majority of the last 3 years to recover to the point that I could even resume game development.
During that time I did somehow manage to release the latest Crea update in August 2019. With a new update out and an acquaintance offering to dedicate some development time, things were looking up for Crea. I was excited and shared that excitement in my last post, “Crea’s Future”. Unfortunately not everything turned out the way I had hoped.
My wife and I had a newborn, and things got very challenging with the newborn and toddler. We enrolled the toddler into preschool so that I could have more time to work. That backfired as the toddler was sick just as often as she wasn’t, and the rest of the family would become ill too. Things were finally starting to look up again in the second half of February 2020...when it all fell apart again. As we all know the pandemic affected everyone and in different ways. For my family it meant going back into survival mode with two little kids stuck at home. Struggling with exhaustion and burnout again, I barely touched game development until the beginning of December 2020. At that point I felt it was best to start something new that I would be truly excited about.
My new project, AutoForge, is a 2D sandbox base building automation game (Terraria meets Factorio) being developed in a new engine I plan to use for future projects. Autoforge will take some time to develop and afterwards, then I would love to work on a Crea followup. I've already designed out a large chunk of what a new Crea game would look like. It would be a great undertaking which is why I'm trying to build up to it - both engine and development team. The best way I believe I can achieve that is making a smaller game such as AutoForge.
I apologize to fans who were looking forward to the updates that I promised in the last “Crea’s future” post. As I hope you can see from this post, Crea has been a part of my life in some form for the last 20 years. It’s truly a part of me and not something I've chosen to carelessly abandon.
I’m moving forward with a new project because I believe that’s what’s best for my career and mental health. I don’t know exactly what my future holds, but I do know that I'm going to keep working hard on making even better games. If you have any questions you are welcome to ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer. Thank you for all of the support and I hope I will continue to have it moving forward.
It has been over two years since my last official post, so first off I want to thank everyone for being patient with me and apologize that it has taken this long. This post is a mixture of both great news and not so great news.
TL;DR: Crea will not be receiving any substantial updates in the future; however, I'm not done with either the world of Crea nor the game concept.
This is undoubtedly upsetting to many of you as many people have told me that “the game has so much potential.” I too share that feeling, but it gives me hope for the future! Before looking forward to the future let's take a look at the past - storytime!
The world of Crea was born nearly 20 years ago as an RPG Maker 2k game that I was working on in High School. In true indie gamedev style, the scope of the game I designed was way beyond my abilities at the time. Years later I revisited the Crea mythos in the form of a card game inspired by Final Fantasy 8/9. Once again years later in February 2012 I was inspired to take the world I had been working on for so long and began shaping it into Crea, the sandbox RPG game you know today.
I worked on it during nights and weekends while holding a fulltime job. The successful Crea Kickstarter gave me the confidence to quit my job and work on Crea full time. In my youthful naivete, I sincerely believed the game would be released in just a few months. Instead, it took another 4 years to a 1.0 release and several years of post 1.0 updates.
During Crea's development I was continually revising the vision for the game while constantly behind the unrealistic schedule I had set for myself. This led to making many poor decisions and a relentless pressure, primarily from myself, to get Crea released. Unsurprisingly, years of this pressure resulted in burnout and depression. It has taken me the majority of the last 3 years to recover to the point that I could even resume game development.
During that time I did somehow manage to release the latest Crea update in August 2019. With a new update out and an acquaintance offering to dedicate some development time, things were looking up for Crea. I was excited and shared that excitement in my last post, “Crea’s Future”. Unfortunately not everything turned out the way I had hoped.
My wife and I had a newborn, and things got very challenging with the newborn and toddler. We enrolled the toddler into preschool so that I could have more time to work. That backfired as the toddler was sick just as often as she wasn’t, and the rest of the family would become ill too. Things were finally starting to look up again in the second half of February 2020...when it all fell apart again. As we all know the pandemic affected everyone and in different ways. For my family it meant going back into survival mode with two little kids stuck at home. Struggling with exhaustion and burnout again, I barely touched game development until the beginning of December 2020. At that point I felt it was best to start something new that I would be truly excited about.
My new project, AutoForge, is a 2D sandbox base building automation game (Terraria meets Factorio) being developed in a new engine I plan to use for future projects. Autoforge will take some time to develop and afterwards, then I would love to work on a Crea followup. I've already designed out a large chunk of what a new Crea game would look like. It would be a great undertaking which is why I'm trying to build up to it - both engine and development team. The best way I believe I can achieve that is making a smaller game such as AutoForge.
I apologize to fans who were looking forward to the updates that I promised in the last “Crea’s future” post. As I hope you can see from this post, Crea has been a part of my life in some form for the last 20 years. It’s truly a part of me and not something I've chosen to carelessly abandon.
I’m moving forward with a new project because I believe that’s what’s best for my career and mental health. I don’t know exactly what my future holds, but I do know that I'm going to keep working hard on making even better games. If you have any questions you are welcome to ask them in the comments below and I’ll do my best to answer. Thank you for all of the support and I hope I will continue to have it moving forward.