Games Solace Crafting - Distance Based Fantasy Survival RPG

Now live on Steam!
Now live on Patreon!

Main Objectives:
- An engaging crafting system with maximum human input, and minimum effort.
- A system to allow and promote the playing of all classes and professions on a single character.
- Crafting and harvesting profession levels, abilities, and equipment similar to adventuring classes.
- To create and encourage vertical travel in all worlds.
- A system of extreme viewing distance.
- Procedural content.

Special Features:
(These are features I consider largely unique or uniquely implemented)
Customizable crafting system
- Each recipe contains a number of variables fully controlled by the player. Each recipe can be made in millions of different ways, and there are hundreds of recipes.
- Recipes are organized into categories. Each category can be upgraded in a variety of ways improving all recipes within the same category.
- No mini-games, no loading bars.
Extreme viewing distance
- Terrain, biomes, weather, special encounters and more can be seen over 50km from the player in all six directions.
- All worlds include vertical objects such as infinite towers, or floating isles, also fully visible for 50km or more.
Limitless potential
- Worlds, encounters, monsters, players, recipes, and skills all have unlimited levels.
Distance based difficulty
- As you travel through any world, encounters change and monsters evolve.
- Monsters scale faster than players, creating an increasingly difficult challenge.
Soul and Facet system
- A character's soul is capable of taking on an unlimited number of facets. Each facet has it's own adventure class levels, skills, and equipment, though only one facet can be active at a time.
- Crafting and harvesting profession levels, skills, and equipment are shared across all facets.
- Each new level in a class or profession unlocks a soul point which can be used to purchase special abilities shared across all facets.
Unique skill system
- Six skill points are awarded per level allowing for extreme customization.
- Two of every six skill points are free to be spent on any available skill tree.
- Skill tiers are unlocked by points, not by level.
Building Freedom
- Build almost anywhere.
- Unique adaptive building interface.
- Building is possible on the world grid, a custom grid, or completely free.

Most Recent Video:


Community Request:
Above all I would love input! At the time of this posting I know all of that is still very vague, but I will be releasing more and more specific details/videos when I can

For easy notification of updates, please watch the thread, or find the game on Steam, Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram !
http://store.steampowered.com/app/670260/Solace_Crafting/
http://www.solacecrafting.com/
http://www.facebook.com/solacecrafting/
http://www.twitter.com/solacecrafting/
https://www.instagram.com/solacecrafting/

And thanks for checking in!

Recent Screenshots:

 

https://twitter.com/SolaceCrafting/status/695985281967611904


Here's a rough shot of one of the levels to show the render distance. At 36km out you can still clearly make out a Rock Tower, which is one of the many major landmarks all randomly generated and placed during initial world creation!

The system is built from the ground up to accept new assets at anytime, and a (still in development) function will allow players to switch to new versions of the same world (different seed) for updates without having to start their character over.

In the future I hope to make a second layer of biomes as opposed to the basic grassland->forest->tundra etc setup this world displays. The goal being to have spider filled sections of forest for example, and others. I know how to do I just still have a lot to do that I consider more important.

 

Sounds very interesting. Vids?

 

I hope to get a video up by the end of next week! I have a list of seven videos on the website of the videos I hope to finish before April, starting with the crafting mechanics. I'll post here as they go live.

 

can you do a rough explanation on your approach for the rendering and some stats? framerate/drawcalls/...
looks very promising!

 

My apologies for being secretive about my rendering technique... it's taken me a long time to even make this thread... I'm planning to finally reveal my crafting system this week though so I guess I might as well... I started a thread long ago where everyone say "Keep it secret! Keep it safe!" until you're ready to go... I guess I'm just afraid of judgement?

I'm on a not-so-hot computer,
Quad 3.2Ghz i5
8G RAM
Radeon HD 5700

At 1440x900 (in Unity) the landscape itself runs a full 60+ fps on my box, up high. If I'm down in the thick grass and thick forest it drops to 30. There are actually some scripts slowing things down that I'm aware I just haven't gotten around to fixing, but the distance rendering is really not intensive.

 

https://twitter.com/SolaceCrafting/status/698417606059896832

I ended up spending a lot of time redoing the website this week, so I am just now getting around to starting the crafting video. I like where the website is now a lot better. Still needs a fair amount of graphic work, but it's a good base.

Here's a quick shot of the recipe window (within the recipe book) and a short explanation:

From the top left:
1. Profession. This is where the recipe book first opens to. A bar representing each profession shows its stats like level, categories known, recipes known, highest rarity unlocked, total items crafted, etc. We can see here that our Smithing is level 7, and 1 of 5 (green box) necessary crafts have been made at this level towards level 8. An item from five different categories must be crafted to level up (pretty easy).

2. Category. This list shows all the categories within the chosen profession and their stats. In smithing we have 1HSwords, 2HSwords, Metal Chest Armor, Metal Tools, etc. Our 1HSword category is also Level 7 (it cannot exceed our profession level) and has been crafted for this level already (the green box)

3. Recipe. This list contains the actual items within the category. In 1HSwords case we have sabre, shortsword, longsword, cutlass, etc. We can see 7 ore (unfortunate coincidence on the seven here..) are required to craft this recipe.

4. Resource. This list shows all the resources we have stored universally, both within reach and out of reach. Resources are not carried by the player, instead stored at player built locations(crystals). Crafting facilities must be built within reach of a crystal, and this allows them to access any resources linked to that crystal. We have selected a batch of Minnal Ore which is Tier 1, the batch is 20% quality, and we have 15 pieces.

5. The Recipe windows we see in the picture. This lets us define a level, a rarity, and apply any upgrades we wish. Upgrades can be non-magical like shield spikes and armor patches, but are most commonly sockets from the Enchanting profession. All the items shown here are enchanted sockets which start out as secondary resources from mining, and the feather/fang are from hunting (main profession for gathering leather).

To create a simple item you just click profession -> category -> recipe -> resource, then craft. Very easy. To make a level 35 legendary flaming claymore with a completed five slot legendary gem set in it, you have to do a bit more work.

With all these choices we can already make hundreds of millions of possible items with the current state of the game. And there is quite a bit left on the drawing board. For example when I said "flaming" claymore, that's actually an imbued type of metal, not a socket.

We do not yet have sorting options in. The UI can definitely relay more information in an easy to understand way, I don't at all consider this a "final" version, but a great start. I'm thinking or removing the left side of the socket list and making the selected sockets show their details in full rather than require a mouseover for starters.

What do you think? Anything you would like to see? Anything you don't understand?

 

sound very extensive! although i find the look of it a bit dusty...
btw how big a team is working on this?

 

no team, no funding, just me. I still use the free photoshop cs2 despite its incompatibility with Win10, etc. and I have a full-time job. Still, I hope to get an alpha version out before the end of June, I'm already a year into it and have most of the systems in and working, just a couple more necessities, the rest is content. If my Kickstarter is a success I'll quit my job and go full-time. Trying to build awareness until then, thus the video production.

 

@jister can you explain "dusty" for me? The edges aren't very solid/all around darkened, sort of blurred look?

 

I don't think the sccreenshot really gives the proper sense of scale. I have to say that the 4km marker looks more like it's a small hill about 128 meters away and the mountains at 15km look more like they are about 4km away. I'm not saying you're lying or anything, it just doesn't look the scales you are marking them.

 

Agreed! You bring up a very real and difficult problem for me. The system is very deceptive which is actually the whole reason for the second video in the series I'm working on, the second I hope to have out next week, the first I'm working on now.

We're used to using fog to portray distance over 2-3km in games, but if I do that you can't see anything past the fog! Once you start moving though it quickly becomes clear you are not getting close to that mountain in front of you even though you may have cleared a hill or two.

Some of the videos will help paint the picture a lot better than the image or two so far are.

 

@malkere, I mean there are so many way today to show an inventory.
your looks a bit like:


while nowadays i would expect something like:

 

@jister
good comparison, thank you. I will put thought into that

addition:
The more I think about it, the player really doesn’t need as much inventory space as I’m “assuming” from RPG experience. Resources are not carried around and secondary ingredients are much better organized in separate bags since they’re all tiny like gems and moonstones, etc. I don’t have a system of “vendor trash” because mobs only drop currencies and ingredients, not usable items, so the only things you need to carry are maybe a different weapon or two, some food/drink/potions. I still prefer being able to put things somewhere rather than a changing list like in Skyrim... still thinking...

 

I very much liked the inventory system in Alone in the dark 4 (it's was kind of the only good thing about the game)
and i'm still surprised it didn't cause the revelation that i thought it would in Interfaces/Inventory.

 

That's the inventory? That's great!
hmmm.. You've set a lot of gears turning for my UI in general. I don't think I'll be able to start implementing anything too new until I get more videos out, get things moving more, but I've already got some changes down in writing.
The input is greatly appreciated!
Out with the old! In with the new!

 

This game looks pretty awesome! I love the visuals and the massive crafting system.

I'm looking forward to a gameplay vid, keep it up!

 

I've had a fever off and on =[
More than that I've been working on the game world more than the videos. Working on the videos really makes me notice a lot of little things I'd like to make better, some of those are kind of important for first impressions, so I'm working on them.

Anyway, I bought a bandicam license and found my old crappy version of Premiere is really not cut out for trailer making, but I am used to premiere more than After Effects or anything else, so I might do the 20$/mo subscription deal through Adobe. I made a little title scene to append onto each of the videos

hoping to get the first one out (switched to building a rendering distance/world system explanation video first) by the end of the weekend.

I also wrote this for the Made With Unity stories section:
http://madewith.unity.com/stories/do-what-you-love-love-what-you-do-1

 

I made a video about the distance rendering capabilities. I should be able to get it up tonight. I'm at work right now, but here is a link to a screenshot from it.

https://twitter.com/SolaceCrafting/status/703861623673360384

I think I'm gonna fork out 30$ for a monthly Premiere license... maybe I should go ahead with the annual contract for it... would be nice to have the latest photoshop too =o= ahh if only we were all gloriously funded. The trial Premiere is exporting the five minutes video at 1.5GB, which I doubt youtube will like, and the trial will run out anyway...

Once I get that sorted out, and figure out how link overlays work with youtube for the end of the video it'll be good enough, so I'll probably upload it tonight.... might record the narration once more, lol, my throats doing a lot better than yesterday.

 

here's my first video!
It's got a lot of flaws, but it's a lot better than no videos! =]
Looking forward to making more and better, over the coming weeks.

 

I've started a dev blog for anyone interested in following. I'd be happy to answer questions on coding or anything on there or here as well! So much on my plate it's hard to keep things updated! I'm hoping to use the blog as a sort of central location for updates and then post them around to other important locations, with more serious updates making their way here and to the homepage. I'd like to setup the homepage to show as an rss feed the blog, I might look into that tomorrow, but not right now.

http://solacecrafting.blogspot.com/
or the Japanese version
http://solacecraftingjp.blogspot.com/

Working on facilities and harvesting tool upgrades right now =]

ps: I've started planning an adaptive UI instead of the window based setup I'm using right now.

 

Looks pretty good! but you need some Alpine assets for your mountain areas

 

Yes! There's so much really well spent time I can put into the environment to make it look better and better. But there are so many other things to get going first, it's really hard only being able to put in a few hours a day sometimes.

I've been doing some simplification over the weekend because of this very topic really. I have a long list of awesome features to get in, but realistically many of them are months or more away. I'm re-wiring my priorities to get the real core of the game out and enjoyable asap.

One of my most important resources Terrain Composer, is coming out with 2.0 in a few weeks and will really bring in a lot of great new stuff I've been kind of holding back for lately also.

 

I really like the idea of seeing far, yet the islands in the sky just dont feel right. Maybe making them different shapes/sizes? Or adding some clouds near them?

It looks really cool though, makes me glad we have cars.

 

Thank you for the input RavenOfCode. The islands were kind of thrown together to be honest. They are generating themselves randomly, though the overall size and shape of them is all the same so they look very repetitive at the moment. When I get time to work on them I think I will probably end up mixing procedural and preset as with most things in Solace Crafting. In other words, hand prep three or four general shapes, probably with a rare big one, then generate the layout on top of them random/procedural.

One of the things I want to do is to build a special tower on the floating islands to build my enchanting facilities in. I always enjoyed doing that in minecraft, but was always limited at how far/what I could. I always have a "catch" pad in game that will negate fall damage, and plan to have feather fall spells/potions, so you can jump from them =D

 

I've added some veggies, building capabilities, some crude tools and clothes, all working towards a general introduction video. Here are some recent screenies =]

 

It's been a hard couple weeks! I'm working on a promotional video, and it's coming along, but it's murdering my motivation! I want to work on the game itself, but making this video is very important to the marketing aspect of things, especially if I hope to raise funding. So I'm trying to balance between working on the game and working on the video so I don't too burned out!

 

Still waiting for my beta access to TerrainComposer2! But I've rebuilt the UI, added lot's of monster, and have refining and crafting facilities working well.

starting out you can build a crappy version of anything for the first five levels (tier 0) with just a workbench.


This has even changed a bit since this picture a couple days ago, but it's forever a work in progress!


I colored these guys from a great deal on the asset store. I'm hoping to refrain from "killing" as much as possible in Solace Crafting, so most monster you are actually defeating the evil that has taken over them, so they can revert to normal (non-red eyes/lighter tone/different particles). This leads to currency and resource rewards as opposed to random swords and armor droppings off totally unrelated creatures. Different biomes have different versions of elementals with different abilities. There is a genie-like fire elemental from the same developer I'm going to get tomorrow to make air/water/fire/etc elementals with. I made some of my own, but animating stuff takes way too much time! XD

 

It's been a long time since I posted! Sorry!
I bought a house and I've been testing TerrainComposer2 and lot's more! (TC2 is awesome! XD Very excited to get back into world creation after a few more bugs get sorted out)
With most of my free time over the past few weeks I've developed the building system up a lot! It's very easy to get rolling with and let's you build up and out fast and easy! Here are some earlier shots of the development:




I still have to add upgrades which I'm going to start working on after I post this, which involve things likes adding doors and windows, changing building styles, or increasing the tier of materials of type of materials (wood, stone, metal). And of course many many more building types will be added over time, but already we can make a very cozy home =]

Behind the scenes there remains a lot to do. Grids are partly in and help out a lot by purposefully restricting building direction, and can be switched between, or turned off for total freedom. Proper sphere casting so you don't build on top of a tree, and the "indoor" mechanics which involves testing whether a room is closed or not, are still on their way.

As for TerrainComposer2, I took a really simple shot just to show some basic basic biome generation. This is a chunk of world zoomed way out, but it's not at all textured properly, or populated yet, I'm just working on noise and the tool itself right now as it's only in beta.

 

So I bought an old house with my wife and that ate up a lot of time/money over the past few months. Still have so much to do with it too, like, ten years worth XD

I worked for a while on a side project with a friend, and it really showed me how finicky I'd been with Solace Crafting. Paying attention to things that don't yet matter, working too hard to perfect tiny details etc. The end result being there are things not yet implemented that are core to the game mechanics. In otherwords, it's not yet playable, and that should really be goal one.

I've also ditched some tools that just really weren't updating in the ways/schedule that I was hoping they would, and have picked up a new tool instead:

I just bought this generator a few days ago, and made this scene this morning in about four hours. Most of that time was just trying to get my distance engine, and RTP to work properly with it, but it more or less works now, so on to more important things. The barely visible mountains on the horizon are 60km out in this picture.

I'm going through and simplifying things, for example I've ditched animations/custom armor for right now. Crafting and building and harvesting and what not work fine, but they're all lacking in a layer or two of content. Mobs are in as well, but they are not yet procedurally leveling up like they need to, and their spawning mechaanics are pretty lackluster. Once I get those four systems working at their most basic levels (harvesting, crafting, building, monsters) I will get back to implementing Dimension Crystals (vital for storage and travel), and towers (vital for loot/crafting upgrades).

One those systems are in we'll at least have a fully playable system. Then it's content. And LAST is polish. I've played plenty games with horrible animations/models, because they are FUN. I'd love to have AAA animations and a million custom armor sets, but that's just not realistic at this point and time.

 

Ever since taking on my simplification stance I've been getting much more done, or rather at a much faster past than I ever have in my life. I've given up playing video games, watching TV, and almost everything outside of my wife, my cats, and that damn day job =] Game development has finally become my world, and now all I have left to do is make it my career.

I'm over half way done with my todo list that I restarted from scratch about two month ago:

-basic player/world/distance engine (done)
-basic harvesting/inventory, dragndrop, mainhand recognition (done)
-basic crafting system/ui, (done)
-basic facilities, campfire that can store/change items (done)
-basic building, basic placement, world grid only, local, type selection(done)
-basic spawning, combat, fighting, weapons(done)
-basic crystals, first solace, recall(done)6/1
-basic item generation, levels, ranks(done)
-basic towers, creation (done)
-basic saving/start screen (done)
-basic death (done)

-intermediate world, resource spawning, rare rewards (done)
-intermediate crafting, level ups/requirements, (done)
-intermediate crafting, enchanting (done) 6/8
-intermediate harvesting, tool damage, stat system (done)
-intermediate building, types, content(done)
-intermediate combat, armor, stats(done)
-intermediate crystals, crafting, placement(done)
-intermediate crystals, storage, connecting(done)
-intermediate towers, monsters, loot(done)
-intermediate combat, experience, levels(done) 6/15
-intermediate combat, equipment, stats(done)
-intermediate combat, skills(done)
-intermediate combat, pathfinding, drops
-intermediate save/load, player inv, stats, etc.
-intermediate start screen, character creation
-intermediate crafting, stacking control,

-advanced crafting, sets, tiers
-advanced world, biomes, level scaling, weather
-advanced harvesting, tiered spawns, skills
-advanced building, scripted checks, grids
-advanced combat, biomed enemies, enemy skills, distance based levels
-advanced crystals, summoning
-advanced towers, biomed types
-advanced save, world changes

The list changes a little bit everyday. Thing that aren't yet (done) get moved around and detailed as I draw closer to them. But this method of strict progress control, and constantly judging each items necessity for the most basic of early releases has improved my progress ten fold.

It's been very code heavy, and still will be until I get to biomes, so I haven't had a lot of screenshots to post, people don't usually get excited at UI pictures understandably. I will be on vacation starting this Saturday though for ten days, and hope to get a fair amount of level generation time in... not sure if I have internet where we'll be staying... XD

 

Been busy working on videos and I built a new website:
http://www.solacecrafting.com/

would love any input on the website as well =]

 

Been a busy couple months since my last post!
For one I founded an LLC to start moving forward with crowd funding operations:

http://www.bigkittygames.com/

I've also solved one of my two major technical challenges which felt very good! It was a noise based problem unique to my engine that caused terrain generation errors from a system I thought was necessary, but I was able to work everything differently so that it all falls right into place.


Other than that I've dumped Morph3D for it's very poor support/pliability for UMA. It's working great so far, though parts of it are not compatible with Unity 5.5 which I already updated to, so armor visuals are currently offline.

 

Hang in there. UMA will be ready soon and if you need help, just ask. Sounds like you have it all together though. Great job and I should follow your lead. I tend to get boggled down in the details too.

 

It's not the way my hands want to move, but I get a LOT more done sticking to a strict todo list.

Thanks for the offertoo =] I watched all of SecretAnorak's videos and got things working fine, just the shaders not working with 5.5 I think.

 

Floating point errors fixed!
We're truly infinite now!
I've got zero "big" technical issues left for the near future!

I have this whole next week off my day job I was expecting to get a lot of time to fix this and some of my multiple terrain generation threads, but I already fixed them all yesterday and today! woo hoo!

I've put down Kickstarter, and have my eyes set on IndieGoGo, largely for their investment options. I'd like to get some better towers in for long range viewing, and start work on my campaign video for this week =D

 

I've added in quality weather and water assets, along with some great new rocks and plants. The rocks and plants still need a lot more tweaking, but it's nice to at least have more "stuff" in anyways =]
Here are some new screen shots of the clouds/water


The rain/fog/cloudy stuff doesn't all color together too well yet. The sky is too blue when it's raining, etc. So I'll be working on that tomorrow.

Here and there when I find the time I'm working on the Town/Quest system. Any given world is generated into lots of different LODs. At 4km x 4km we have on designation called a sector that spawns a town somewhere random within itself, then random encounters get randomly placed and the town and encounters link together to generate quests for the player. The towns and encounters can of course be spotted from many kilometers away. It's still young, but it's still fun =]

It's a lot of fun playing with graphics, but stay focused on the meat too! A pretty game might sell on release date, but I'm hoping to build a community to last for years!

I've started talking with some different advertising companies, have studied quite a bit up on business law and taxes, and am looking forward to a Kickstarter campaign in the near future! Best wishes this Spring!

 

Made a little gif of part of the promotional video I'm working on =]

works fine in the post window.. can view it here if it's broken:
http://i.imgur.com/63ce58c.gifv

another new shots:


and some of me testing my new building models:



The buildings are still mostly square, walls, doorways, as well as stairs and stuff, but I want to get some round stuff in over the weekend, maybe tomorrow night! I really want to be able to make castle turrets freely, maybe with a 2x2 placement option in the future, but as a 1/4 piece for now. You can rotate everything freely already, so that will go into the system super easy.

 

I'd really like to hear more about the tech going into this. Mainly how you accomplished large performant terrains, and what you are using for volumetric clouds. Looking good!

 

The clouds are using Enviro's shaders with my own scripts controlling the settings. I haven't messed with the cloud maps yet much, but I want to make some different ones for overcast, cold winter (long thin clouds), etc. Only really the big fluffy guys are in for now. Changing them from a little to a lot over time look really good though!

For the terrains I'm using a second set at 1/16th the size generated using the same math checks at 1/16th the distance rendered on a camera mimicking 1/16th the movement. It's still very obvious when a "near" terrain draws over a "distant" terrain, but there aren't any holes in the system like 7DaysToDie or other games that try to jump from 1024 to 512 to 256 and so on as they go further and further.

Technically I can loop the system to get another 1/256 scale world for rediculously huge objects.... I haven't played with it much yet though.

Everything is created on the smallest scale first and stored. If it exists and the world is being generated in it's area at full res, a full res version is brought in.

 

Here's an update on custome recipes. These are all using the same "Shortsword" recipe, level, tier of resources, rarity, and color are customizable. Before enchants are even applied =D


Set enchants allow you to use the items you like with the sets you want. Here, the "Squire" set requires a one-handed melee weapon to complete, but any weapon will do.


Skills use a main + support + support combination system letting you upgrade active skills with passive buffs. All skills have unlimited levels letting you focus or spread about where you want.


Here is a harvesting spell called "Shatter" That busts open an ore vein in one shot, but it destroys any possible gem drops in the process, so it's fast but dirty.


Here's an example of the character creation flexibility, using UMA. Still a lot of work left to expand this with!

 

posted a new video for an interview I did that goes up next week =D

I said it's March when... it's April... but whatever XD lol, it's been a long week!

 

Here's a new video on the adaptive building interface

 

And some more recent screenshots!

 

Looks really good, I definitely like the fog/sun shafts that have been added, they make the game look so much more realistic.

 

Thank you. I wish I had more time to spend on the graphics. A little bit goes a long way. I recently switched to MegaSplat and am loving the massive texture count/blending, works great for lots of biomes, but I haven't had time to sit down and play with it hardly at all! =o=

 

I feel ya man, time is something that is always in short supply...

 

New video on player crafting =D

 

Game is looking good, don't give up.

 

Thank you for the encouragement!
That is something sir I can promise will never happen! =D I don't post in here at all as much as I do in twitter where I post almost every day =] Beowulf was an awesome piece of work by the way if that's where you name comes from