As the New Year approaches we often take time to reflect on the year that has passed, and set goals for the year to come. Setting and refining goals for Solace Crafting however is something I do every week. Instead I am preparing to enter a new phase of development for 2020. I want to share what I mean by that, and make clear the roadmap I'm following towards version 1.0.

Sales
Financially I had some pretty hard times this year. In March it was looking like I would have to take on a part time job to help cover bills. In May it was made clear to me, thanks to a fellow developer, that I wasn't using one of the more obscure features of Steam that plays heavily into recommending similar games to subscribers. After improving that, and coupled with a short sale, I was able to get back to making enough per month to stay full-time. November then saw the best sales in a month since the initial release in January 2018, and that record has since been entirely demolished by the ongoing Steam Winter Sale.

The influx of sales these past two weeks has seen a large enough number of new players, to the point that I have fallen behind on answering questions directly and I can't stress enough how thankful I am for everyone in our community that takes time to help out beginners with questions and concerns. It's a weird mix of stress, with so many things I want to do and that need my attention, but also joy, that I can not only keep working on my passion full-time, but take development into the long anticipated next phase.

Outsourcing
In September I made a post on our Patreon about setting up goals to start outsourcing contracts for original content. I contacted a freelance 3D artist for new building pieces, and an audio team that had been following us since early access release. Pixel Noise, the audio team, has been great to work with. They are very active, kind, and understanding. The 3D artist I contacted unfortunately went months over our original contracted timeframe, and once again has not contacted me in over a month. I gave up on him and contacted a second artist, who was likewise very eager to work with me, and now likewise has not contacted me in over a month. I think though, those experiences are to be taken as lessons.

I am now in the process of contacting outsourcing companies, not freelancers, whose profession as a corporate entity is to do just that, create original content for paying game developers. Outsourcing is intended to help get the ball rolling even faster, as we are in sore need of more building pieces, better facility models, animations, and code. The next goal beyond outsourcing is of course the acquisition of actual full-time staff, though a term-based paid "partnership" with an experienced studio is not out of the question either. The more common alternative is to seek a publisher, who you then pay a percentage of earnings, and generally have to do as you're told to some degree. I set out to create and operate Big Kitty Games as an independent entity from day one, to ensure that Solace Crafting and any other titles I may be fortunate enough to work on in the future remain 100% under my guidance, and are never pushed into marketing scams, or quite frankly poor design.

Optimization
Mentioning "poor design" might seem in "poor taste" to some, as Solace Crafting is not a highly optimized AAA game, with a fine-tuned interface and wonderful user experience. When I speak about design, I mean more to mention "game design," as opposed to layout or graphics. Not everyone knows that I started out with no formal training, no funding, no experience. I've always only wanted to make a better model for a crafting RPG, and with the distance based leveling and variable based crafting I believe I have opened up new avenues in our genre that will hopefully flower into even greater things from here on. I have grown tremendously as a programmer over these past two years, but that doesn't mean all of the code that I wrote in 2017 or 2018 has magically leveled up along with me. There is still a lot that can be done both to speed up world generation and frame rate, as well as increase the quality of visuals, animation, audio, and more. This too plays heavily into the subject of outsourcing, as developing a game of this scale is simply not something anyone should be doing on their own.

I am looking to set aside a week or two in January or February to work on speeding world generation up, as the current system is getting slower with each new monster, animal, and resource I add.

Things not on the roadmap
With the recent upgrades to support multiplayer, there have been a number of small, mostly cosmetic bugs that have crept in. I always have a feverish urge to move on to the next step on the roadmap, and have already started working on fishing, but it is important that I polish up what's already in-game, and to some degree I've neglected that truth a bit too much recently. Currently we have buildings that don't actually do anything, menus that don't actually offer anything, and resources that can't yet be used. I'd like to push fishing and cooking back a bit further and ensure I get more crafting recipes, building pieces, enchants, and some other things in first. The roadmap below outlines the greater "features" that things like recipes and quests are built on top of, but without an abundance of items, recipe, and places to find them, the drives to travel and explore are lost.

Some more general things that I want to get in:
- Many more building pieces
- Colorable buildings
- Customizable lights (color/distance/brightness)
- Steam Workshop support
- Mod support (recipes, items, textures, 3D models, pre-made buildings, etc.)
- Emotes
- Partying
- Custom map labels
- World map (large scale map)
- Resource "sensing" skills
- More everything: enchants, resources, biomes, monsters, animals, equipment, potions, etc.
- Multi-lingual support (wip)

Roadmap
This is the current roadmap to version 1.0, but do understand that 1.0 is not "the end". The real goal of releasing a bug-free, polished, and content-rich 1.0 is to hopefully make enough money to have a small team of full-time staff continue to create content, as the procedural nature of the game was designed to support, for years to come.

Version 0.6
- Crafting material system (iron -> steel) (90% working)
- Temperature zones & underwear (90% working)
- Fishing
- Cooking & nutrition
- Farming improvements & breeding

Version 0.7
- NPC villages & trading
- Villagers (recruitable NPCs with skills)
- Quests
- Solace upgrades & research
- Solace defense improvements
- Obelisks

Version 0.8
- Combat rework
- Monster skills
- Skill system rework
- Job and class skill trees

Version 0.9
- Optimizations

All in all we've got a great start to the "tools" required to let players enjoy an endless and limitless game. I really believe the greatest power in modern gaming is the players. Supporting the creativity of gamers around the world, and giving them the ability to add custom content, whether it's an epic quest chain or an interdimensional dungeon, is what really makes a community grow and last. That's why the biome system, that's why everything procedural, that's why unlimited levels. When all of our systems are in and working, we can work as a community to create quests, rewards, and encounters across countless locations and levels, be they difficult, easy, relaxed, or intense.

I hope the New Year finds you and your loved ones in good health and good spirits!
I'm very much looking forward to 2020 and can't thank everyone enough for joining me in early access!

Kyle Postlewait
aka Malkere
Big Kitty Games

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays!

Today we had a new problem crop up on the multiplayer server as the total solace count reached over 130! This was too much data for the server to send all at once to newly connected players and subsequently solace interactions were throwing errors for the past 12 hours or so. I hope that didn't leave a sour first impression for anyone trying multiplayer out for the first time.

I have fixed the bug by splitting the package into parts and sending them in a queue. I'm also working on respawning resources right now as the starting area has been picked clean! I hope to have that up in a few hours, but wanted to fix solaces as soon as possible.

v 0.6.1.24 2019.12.26
- Fixed the possibility of multiplayer world solace data exceeding the network limits

v 0.6.1.23 2019.12.24
- Changed exp rewards to range from a base reward of 0.01 to 3 across -9 to +8 levels when compared to the player
- Fixed several exp bugs introduced in 0.6.1.22
- Fixed a number of enchants not showing up on the skill tree properly

Several fixes for bugs reported over the weekend are addressed in this small Monday patch. Wishing every one happy holidays if that's a thing wherever you may be!

v 0.6.1.22 2019.12.23
- Fixed schematics always checking for base materials instead of for example steel
- Fixed schematic icons showing the missing ? in the crafting interface
- Fixed upgraded materials such as steel not awarding exp
- Fixed harvesting silk, wax, and resin not "assigning" properly
- Fixed town buildings not snapping properly to the "world grid" after switching snap off then back on
- Fixed town building signposts remaining during repositioning
- Fixed a town building snapping problem specific to multiplayer

v 0.6.1.21 2019.12.21
- Fixed a bug making newly placed doors and shutters uninteractable

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

The past two weeks have been almost entirely dedicated to upgrading what started out as a single player game to work also as a multiplayer game. There are still a couple of features not yet upgraded, solace storage and caves being the biggest. The process of "upgrading" is pretty draining, so I'm going to get back to other things, and everything added to the game from here on is being built to work with/in multiplayer from the beginning. It's just that originally I was not consciously programming the game to be multiplayer.

There is also one multiplayer "defect" that I was unable to remedy with the current software I'm using which is a couple years old, so I will be looking to upgrade it probably first thing after the new year starts. Introducing new or upgrading old software can sometimes lead to serious headaches and I didn't want to risk falling behind schedule right before the Steam Winter Sale. The "defect" is that you can't start a dedicated server without being connected to Steam. If you then have your server set to "require steam authentication" it means that you will need 1 account to host, and 1 account to connect with. For now private servers can disable Steam authentication checks and should be able to run fine. And in the near future I will upgrade the software which will hopefully remedy the problem.

As this patch is largely an "upgrade" patch it mostly only fixes things that weren't working in multiplayer. I usually don't post "fixed" type patch notes with live patches, but there were some notable bugs fixed with this patch:

- Removed Limestone Quarry, Coal Mine, and Magical Siphon as separate town buildings
- Fixed fire fonts making meat become inedible
- Fixed resource scanners not accepting the proper resources for range upgrades
- Fixed not being able to reselect buildings placed on floating islands
- Fixed schematics not letting you adjust their level, tier, rarity, and material
- Fixed schematic made items not displaying materials

edit: added v 0.6.1.20

The latest patch notes are as follows:

v 0.6.1.20 2019.12.20
- Fixed solace upgrades going to the wrong solace

v 0.6.1.19 2019.12.20
- Fixed multiplayer clients becoming unable to use skills after certain actions
- Fixed the town building interface closing then reopening when interacting while open

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

The past couple weeks have seen a lot of fixes for multiplayer with a number of small fixes for single player as well. This patch has been prepared for a push to the live branch which I hope to do in a couple hours after some quick testing. I will go deeper into what's up and coming with that post.

v 0.6.1.18 2019.12.20
- Removed Limestone Quarry, Coal Mine, and Magical Siphon as separate town buildings
- Removed Step 4 (Auras) from the solaces tutorial
- Temporarily disabled solace storage in multiplayer
- Fixed some instances of client-side NPCs not updating their appearance properly
- Fixed fire fonts making meat become inedible
- Fixed instances of procedural towers not lining up properly in multiplayer

v 0.6.1.17 2019.12.17
- Fixed assigning harvesters to town encounters
- Fixed Enchanted Stones not spawning in multiplayer
- Fixed servers not kicking clients when connecting with a different version
- Fixed clients throwing an error while trying to illegally randomize a town NPC
- Fixed obelisk firing for multiplayer
- Fixed solace defense on multiplayer
- Fixed a variety of network objects spawning universally instead of based on client location

v 0.6.1.16 2019.12.14
- Added deconstruction capabilities to town buildings
- Fixed newly placed town buildings locking up client input upon interaction on multiplayer
- Fixed fully clearing a procedural tower causing problems on multiplayer
- Fixed harvesting problems introduced with 0.6.1.15

v 0.6.1.15 2019.12.14
- Fixed a variety of problems with multiplayer towns (still a wip/mostly working)

v 0.6.1.14 2019.12.12
- Turned on the first wave of multiplayer town capabilities (still a wip/mostly broken)
- Fixed arrow skills throwing errors
- Fixed harvesting skill points not updating immediately
- Fixed crafting skills not syncing properly

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

The largest change in this patch is the way that special effects like fireballs and explosion are handled over the network in the case of multiplayer. I still need to make some small adjustments, but it's much more performant than what it was previously. I've also added custom output logging that will start a new log file every 3 hours for dedicated hosts, and turned auto-reboot (6 hours) on for the official BKG beta server.

Because of the change to special effects, I'm delaying the live patch for another day to make sure this doesn't impact anything unexpected as it's very late and I couldn't test everything I wanted to today.

v 0.6.1.13 2019.12.11
- Updated language files
- Added custom log file outputs to dedicated servers
- Added the option to specify a query port for Steam to query dedicated servers with
- Improved spell effect handling over networks
- Fixed the close button on the player list not working
- Fixed some sounds playing universally
- Fixed a bug with server port settings being ignored
- Fixed health pools not updating when leveling up in multiplayer
- Fixed skill points spent not updating immediately in multiplayer

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

A player recently voiced their concern of how I haven't been working on single player recently, I wanted to address that openly a bit. I am planning to continue working on multiplayer for the next two weeks, to try and get it as stable as possible for Christmas. If things go well I will add the multiplayer tags and information to the Steam store page. Single player development, which will from then on include multiplayer development as one, will continue as normal after that.

The first pass that I made at multiplayer last year around this time was like learning a new language and caused a lot of head scratching and headaches. It took several months just to get things connecting and then I burnt out. I made a second pass at multiplayer earlier this year and was able to get things "working", but again, I got swamped with upgrading so many different things using skills I was still not very familiar with and burned out pretty hard.
This time around I'm finding that things make a lot more sense to me. I've made small improvements to a lot of the basic back and forths between the client and server with this patch, and honestly most of the "manual labor" type of work is out of the way.
There is still a fair amount of tiny things like, skills upgrade not showing that they've upgraded immediately, and interface "callbacks" like that that I need to improve/get working this week, but the game is starting to run pretty normal in multiplayer mode. The public server I'm renting has been up for over 24 hours without a hitch, though there are certainly still some known bugs to tackle.

Having said that, what I'm doing now with multiplayer is really just catching up to where single player is. Once multiplayer is in a better position I will not necessarily return to single player, but continue developing the game to work in either mode. Single player is really just a "host" that doesn't allow anyone to connect to it anyway.
Wrapping your head around the idea of a single object being on 3-12 different computers, each with different levels of authority, and what they should be doing with the data provided to them starts out very daunting and confusing, but I've a much better handle on it now, and can code things from here on to work both in and out of multiplayer, rather than upgrading things from single player in clumps.

I wasn't feeling well the later half of last week and didn't post, though I did silent patch beta a few times, whose patch notes are included below. As there are some live bugs fixed with these patches I will be looking to patch live shortly, regardless of multiplayer progress.

v 0.6.1.12 2019.12.09
- Added an "autoRestart" field to the server configuration file, defining minutes to auto-restart, the default of 0 meaning disabled
- Fixed resource scanners not accepting the proper resources for range upgrades
- Fixed right-clicking on items in multiplayer
- Fixed splitting stack in multiplayer
- Fixed bow/equipment change errors in multiplayer
- Fixed non-procedural towers in multiplayer
- Fixed hunger in multiplayer

v 0.6.1.11 2019.12.07
- Added notifications for players joining and leaving multiplayer server
- Disabled Unity Anonymous Error reporting for multiplayer hosts
- Improved detection of reboot worthy errors for multiplayer hosts
- Fixed not being able to reselect buildings placed on floating islands
- Fixed returning to the main menu disconnecting Solace Crafting and Steam

v 0.6.1.10 2019.12.03
- Map data for multiplayer clients is now stored locally
- Fixed schematics not letting you adjust their level, tier, rarity, and material
- Fixed schematic made items not displaying materials
- Fixed doors, hatches, and shutters throwing harmless errors on multiplayer
- Fixed spider's nests, hornet's nests, and scale bug nests not spawning properly on multiplayer

v 0.6.1.9 2019.12.02
- Fixed tear/monoliths not showing up on the map
- Fixed multiplayer map data requisiton
- Fixed phantom resources on multiplayer

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

It's been less than two weeks since our last live patch, so there's not a ton of new "content" in this patch, but there is a whole ton of fixes, mostly multiplayer, which is still very much a work in progress, and actually afflicted with two pretty serious bugs right now. I will be setting out to fix those right after this!

There were a couple minor issues with the prior live patch that warranted pushing this patch live, namely town building repositioning throwing errors and the possibility to pull T-1 resources from a storehouse. This patch addresses those, an inability to make rare upgraded resources (steel, etc), and also moves the language files to a visible folder for quick replacement and testing for community members that are kind enough to help improve the translation files in languages they speak. The multi-lingual system is still a work in progress in that not everything is yet "plugged" into it.

Happy crafting!

Edit: Added v 0.6.1.9

v 0.6.1.9 2019.12.02
- Fixed tear/monoliths not showing up on the map
- Fixed multiplayer map data requisiton
- Fixed phantom resources on multiplayer

The condensed patch notes are as follows:

v 0.6.1.8 2019.12.02
- Added background music that will start playing randomly when above ground during the day
- Added cave ambiance
- Upgraded resources can now be upgraded using rare base resources
- Language files moved to "Solace Crafting_data" in the application folder
- Fixed repositioning buildings throwing errors
- Fixed a bug with town resources coming out as T-1

The most recent beta patch notes are as follows:

v 0.6.1.8 2019.12.02
- Upgraded resources can now be upgraded using rare base resources
- Language files moved to "Solace Crafting_data" in the application folder
- Fixed "withdraw tier" not updating the first tutorial
- FIxed the main menu settings interface not turning off the mode select
- Fixed a number of item display problems including not being able to change the rarity of advanced materials

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

This patch is still largely focused on multiplayer though I didn't quite get to finish two major things that I'm working on, mostly the way that map and resource data are transferred to clients.

There are however quite a few bug fixes that have been added into beta since the last live patch. Despite the remaining problems with multi-player, I'm hoping to push this build live pending some more testing to be sure that there's nothing in particularly game breaking, such as the tailor's cap bug that came in with the last beta patch.

The repositioning of town buildings was not saving villager data properly, causing errors to be thrown in some cases. This also caused villagers to be re-rolled with each placement. This patch should fix that so the same villager returns in the case of repositioning and without any errors.

Farming was doubling vegetables in the case of sleeping in a bed while they grow, and they were returning T0 regardless of where/what was planted. The current system, though we will be going through some changes in the near future with farming as a whole, will reduce a seeds tier to match the tier of where it's being planted if the tier of the soil/planter is lower.

v 0.6.1.7 2019.11.30
- Fixed a multiplayer tower bug
- Fixed planted vegetables and herbs multiplying while you sleep
- Fixed planted vegetable harvests not award the proper tier
- Fixed repositioning buildings throwing errors
- Fixed players that had learned the "Tailor's cap" recipe being unable to craft since (temporary) removal of the recipe

You may need to restart Steam for the update to begin.

To opt into Beta you only need to go to your Steam Library, right-click on Solace Crafting, select Properties, click on the Beta tab, and opt-in to the beta. The beta is not available to 32-bit users.

Interested in supporting development of Solace Crafting?
Please consider becoming a patron via Patreon!

Recently I patched into the beta our first original piece of music, made by the duo known as Pixel Noise. You can take a listen to it and read a bit about what they had to say about the track and their vision for future works in regards to Solace Crafting on our Patreon page:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/31916443

There are also a variety of new buildings pieces in the works and hopefully much more to come!