This patch has been a long time in the works, and in truth is not yet 100% complete. In this post I'll go into What's new, why this patch is being pushed live incomplete, and what's been going on here at Big Kitty Games.
[h2] - What this patch brings to the live branch[/h2]
At the bottom of this post there is a condensed list of patch notes that lists the changes between the current live version and the new live version, and I've covered these topics in greater detail in previous posts, but there are a couple of big changes that I'll go over.
The math behind all systems in-game has been updated to a shifting scale of values that adjusts itself based on the level of the player. This means that at level 0 having 1 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty, and likewise at level 50 having 51 strength grants you no bonus and no penalty. If however you have 75 strength at level 50, you will be receiving a variety of bonuses including increased health, increased melee and ranged damage, etc. The reason for this is two fold. For one, the old system was a form of linear progression where an attribute bonus difference between levels 0 and 1 would be something like 100%, but over time, the difference between two levels would drop down to numbers like 0.1%. Secondly, because levels are infinite, health and damage numbers were capable of going beyond the capabilities of 32-bit numbers. This new system solves these and other problems by having a base set of values that any "balanced" character will have, and a scale of possible bonuses and penalties that keep the math under the hood at manageable and balanced numbers regardless of your level. It is however fun to see your damage and health numbers go up, so these numbers are scaled, though only visually, when presented to the player.
The 4 Archetype skill trees have been redesigned and 8 Job skill trees have been added now as well. This amounts to around 240 skill nodes now available, and all characters upgrading from the live version will have their adventuring skills reset so they can reassign their points as desired.
Monster classes and abilities have also been added to the game, though there are still only a handful of monsters that have been equipped with varying classes and abilities.
Almost all of the old animations have been entirely replaced with new animations. Animation has always been a weak point of mine, and in studying up a bit I came to understand that a lot of the animation I was using were built for more "toon" shaped characters and so don't properly translate when fit onto standard human shaped models. The new animations that have now replaced most of those old animations are built specifically for human models. I also completely did away with the old animator, which is a compilation of state machines that blend what animations should be playing on the player at any given moment, for a fully scripted animator. Manually creating an animator can involve hundreds if not 1,000+ mouse clicks, and locating a problem can be just as difficult. To avoid that, as I do want to add more animations and more "categories" like 1-handed melee, 2-handed melee, etc., I wrote a machine that can construct an animator purely from code. As such there may be an animation state or two that I have overlooked, but can address easily if enough once brought to my attention.
[h2] - Why this patch is being pushed live now[/h2]
Being honest here, this is not everything I wanted to get into 0.8.0 before pushing it to the live branch. There is a lot still under construction, including unfinished skills, a lack of skill animations, audio, and visual effects, as well as some lesser features that have been temporarily disabled. This patch has been in the works for months and with every week that passes the differences between the live branch and the beta branch grow farther apart. This has led to an increased difficulty in managing bug reports among other things, and I really need to push these changes live to get a better grip on the current state of the game before moving forward.
Because of this there may some small problems that were fixed on the live branch that get reintroduced with the
[h2] - Regarding the current state of development[/h2]
I've also spoken a few times over the past 12 months about a growing heaviness in regards to development of Solace Crafting. The project has over 180,000 lines of code, and I've spent something like 10,000 hours on it, in this chair, at home, alone. It's been a very difficult journey thus far, and I have no intention of ending it. Having said that, over the past couple months I've had to come to terms with the fact that I am extremely burnt out on working on a single solo title for a straight four and a half years now. When I put together the game's core design back in 2017 it was full of a lot of great ideas that I was never able to realize on my own and over time had to repeatedly shorten the roadmap. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a learning process that I had to go through. Despite repeatedly redesigning the roadmap, my optimism of being able to put together all things that I wanted to in maybe a couple years max, we're still here and SC still needs quite a few more hours even after 50 months of dedicated development.
In truth, the first month of early access back in January of 2018, was one of the best selling months I've ever had, and it fueled my optimism that I would very much be able to afford more paid freelance work than I ever actually was able to. In reality, one month not long after that I made less than 500$, and overall it's been an ongoing struggle, not necessarily to pay my bills, but to refrain from doing more of the things that we all want to do. This over time is a weird form stress that I never really had experienced prior to starting my own business.
I have been aware of these different angles of stress slowly building up on me and pledged at the start of 2021, that 2021 would be the year that we would leave early access, for better or for worse. Then later in the year, after wrestling with whether to go through with it or not for several months, I decided to start the 0.8 branch by revamping the game math and adding more skills to the game. This was a massive undertaking, and I should have been more aware of that truth by then. The skill trees are something I designed back in 2017, and have always been something I've really wanted to implement, but in hindsight, they may have been better left for a post-1.0 release patch.
Sure enough, after several months working on 0.8, I was completely exhausted. I tried for months to take breaks during the week, but no one is more aware of the bugs and shortcomings of the game than I am, and the desire to create better is a constant thorn in my head when I'm only "stepping away" for a bit. A few weeks ago I was generously gifted a VR kit and finally decided to put Solace Crafting down for real, albeit of course temporarily. I "officially" have started working on a new title and did nothing but that for two weeks straight, and have already made a lot of progress in the game itself. That four and a half years of experience has made a very big difference, not only with the speed at which I can develop things, but my ability to judge what's important, what's not, how long something is going to take, and so on. I'm still only a little over two weeks into development of the game, and not ready to start blabbering about it, but I need, not want, need to be open my actively working on something else, as that has become a necessity for my own well-being.
Having taken a few solid weeks to do something else, my burnt motivation for SC has had some time to heal and I've been gathering bug reports and reassessing the current situation and how to best approaching going forward from here. I do believe that just slapping the "good enough" sticker on it and seeing what happens if I release out of early access is not something I can morally get behind, but I do also think that for my own well-being, both mentally and hopefully financially, that focusing intently on adding nothing else to game, but rather polishing and improving what is so that I can release a version 1.0 and temporarily switch into "maintenance mode" where I only address problems and bugs, while I work on something else for a while. If the game generates enough interest (sales), then I can continue to put my resources (money & time) back into the game in the hopes of turning it into all of the things I want it to be.
What I've come to realize recently though is that Big Kitty Games is more important than Solace Crafting. If Big Kitty Games can thrive, then I can always come back to Solace Crafting regardless of what happens over these next few months. But there seems to be a very real chance that I will dry up and run out of money if I stubbornly keep trying to "muscle" my way through development of my first love.
I've spent the past couple days working again on SC, and am planning to work on SC for the next few days, but it's likely I'll be working on my second title on and off from now on. I hope I'm able to get SC to a solid 1.0 release in working condition over the next few months, and hope it is able to make enough money for me to keep working on it well beyond 1.0!
Best wishes as always,
Kyle Postlewait
AKA Malkere
v 0.7.8.10 -> v 0.8.0.21 condensed patch notes
- Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct
- Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar
- Added poison to several animals
- Disabled equipped weapon/tool models when in first person
- Reactives like force field can no longer be resisted/dodged/blocked/parried
- Changed enchants to scale statically providing 75% when > 5 levels above, 50% > 10, 25% > 15, and 0% > 20
- Added monster/animal "archetypes," ex: Tank/RangedDPS/MeleeDPS
- Added a monster/animal ability system
- Added abilities to rock elementals, wolves, and imps
- Added skill names to the majority of skill based attacks printed to the combat chat log
- Improved block and parry logic
- Changed fonts to the alchemy profession
- Removed Recall mana usage
- Added 192 new Job skills, some of which are still works in progress
- Improved the font clarity in a lot of UI
- Improved enchant details explanation on enchants/sockets
- Added some basic instructions to the solace storage UI
- Added ascend and descend specific key bindings
- Changed attribute and statistic math to new system
- Increased flattening around procedural towers
- Monsters more than 15 levels under you will no longer agro
- Added a /checkheightmaps console command
- Fixed paper being unstackable
- Improved the strong harvesting skills descrpitions to explain that they share a single hotkey
- Improved terraforming performance
- Enabled terraforming in multi-player
- Added /dayspeed and /nightspeed multiplier commands as well as world creation settings
- Altered the ghost death animation so they don't "fall" through the floor
Latest changes to beta:
v 0.8.0.21 2022.03.31
- Upgraded animator to a fully scripted construct
- Replaced all players animations not specifically built for a semi-realistic humanoid avatar
- Repositioned tool/weapon holding position/rotation
You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.
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