We are very busy with working through your submitted bug reports and just pushed another patch. Thanks for being so active in reporting the bugs and please keep them coming!

Here are the patch notes of the two recent patches we pushed since launch last Thursday:

• Balance changes
  
  • Influence gain rebalanced: faithful cities now reward 3 influence points instead of 2.
    
  • Follower food and hunger rebalanced.
    
  • Animal fertility rebalanced.
• Hippos are now less aggressive. They build up anger over time instead of attacking habitat intruders immediately.
  
• Follower hut positions slightly adjusted.
  
• Tooltips should no longer display a follower death message regardless of what is hovered over.
  
• Fixed an issue with followers resting outside of their huts after running away from animals.
  
• Fixed an issue with the tutorial not being possible to complete.
  
• Fixed minor GUI navigation issues.
  
• Fixed an issue where followers could get stuck in their huts forever after the Farm word had been unlocked.

• Huts and ores now always touch the ground when spawned on slopes.
  
• Words no longer gets stuck if you alt-tab the game while dragging a word.
  
• Fixed issue with herbivores migrating after loading a saved game.
  
• Fixed problem with some followers spawning at the wrong position after loading.
  
• Trade cows now work correctly after a load.
  
• Burning mines are now destroyed properly and can be rebuilt by miners later.
  
• Miners no longer build on ores without enough chunks.
  
• 64-bit version for Windows is now available.
  
• City association bubbles are now above the city name plate to stop them from being obscured by tall cities.

We are very busy with working through your submitted bug reports and just pushed another patch. Thanks for being so active in reporting the bugs and please keep them coming!

Here are the patch notes of the two recent patches we pushed since launch last Thursday:

• Balance changes
  
  • Influence gain rebalanced: faithful cities now reward 3 influence points instead of 2.
    
  • Follower food and hunger rebalanced.
    
  • Animal fertility rebalanced.
• Hippos are now less aggressive. They build up anger over time instead of attacking habitat intruders immediately.
  
• Follower hut positions slightly adjusted.
  
• Tooltips should no longer display a follower death message regardless of what is hovered over.
  
• Fixed an issue with followers resting outside of their huts after running away from animals.
  
• Fixed an issue with the tutorial not being possible to complete.
  
• Fixed minor GUI navigation issues.
  
• Fixed an issue where followers could get stuck in their huts forever after the Farm word had been unlocked.

• Huts and ores now always touch the ground when spawned on slopes.
  
• Words no longer gets stuck if you alt-tab the game while dragging a word.
  
• Fixed issue with herbivores migrating after loading a saved game.
  
• Fixed problem with some followers spawning at the wrong position after loading.
  
• Trade cows now work correctly after a load.
  
• Burning mines are now destroyed properly and can be rebuilt by miners later.
  
• Miners no longer build on ores without enough chunks.
  
• 64-bit version for Windows is now available.
  
• City association bubbles are now above the city name plate to stop them from being obscured by tall cities.

The day has come. After four years in development, Version 1.0 of Crest is here!

A huge thank you to everyone who supported Crest during this long road and improved the game with their feedback and suggestions.

Crest has changed so much over the years and we're really proud of where it is now. But, Crest is also a game where new features can always be added, with endless possibilities, and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible.

In order to do so, Crest has to do well during the next few weeks, otherwise we just can't afford to continue working on it. We've put together a list on how you could help us during this important time:

http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest

We'll talk soon about our post-launch plans, until then, thank you again to every single god of you for supporting us. <3

Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep

https://youtu.be/R5WiMM2gYa8

• Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
  
• Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
  
• Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
  
• Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
  
• Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.

• Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
  
• Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
  
• City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
  
• Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
  
• Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
  
• Needs renamed - Some of the city are renamed for convenience.
  
  • Fellowship = Social
    
  • Sustenance = Food
    
  • Abundance = Surplus
    
  • Wealth = Money

• Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
  
• More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is now more detailed.
  
• Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.

• World Overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
  
• Word Discovery - A new system for discovering words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
  
• Faith - No longer counts followers but cities instead.
  
• Mini-Map - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
  
• Updated Tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
  
• Achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
  
• Polished visuals - New shaders to make it look extra shiny.

• Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
  
  
• City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
  
• Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
  
  
• Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.

The day has come. After four years in development, Version 1.0 of Crest is here!

A huge thank you to everyone who supported Crest during this long road and improved the game with their feedback and suggestions.

Crest has changed so much over the years and we're really proud of where it is now. But, Crest is also a game where new features can always be added, with endless possibilities, and we want to keep expanding the game with your ideas for as long as possible.

In order to do so, Crest has to do well during the next few weeks, otherwise we just can't afford to continue working on it. We've put together a list on how you could help us during this important time:

http://eatcreatesleep.net/supportcrest

We'll talk soon about our post-launch plans, until then, thank you again to every single god of you for supporting us. <3

Cheers,
Eat Create Sleep

https://youtu.be/R5WiMM2gYa8

• Mountains - Rain clouds gather at the mountains and snow, the snow indicates the possibility for the mountains to create rivers, as long as enough water has gathered.
  
• Ecology - A new water system making nature more alive. It is a delicate balance that can be affected by animals, followers, cities, farms and berry bushes.
  
• Berry bushes - An early game food source making surviving in the beginning easier.
  
• Season changes - Once per cycle there’s a dry season or a rain season.
  
• Start island does not have a volcanic biome - To promote moving to another island, the start island does not contain any volcanic biome or obsidian anymore. In order to complete monuments cities need to trade with each other.

• Doctrine updated - The doctrines are updated to be more different from each other. How each doctrine reacts to commandments is updated as well.
  
• Overpopulation more severe - Overpopulation can cause potentially disastrous outcomes if left alone. It costs more food and it drains more water from the surrounding area.
  
• City needs - City needs are visually updated, displaying the needs in another way.
  
• Doctrine/Faith mashup - Doctrine and local faith in the city popup are combined to one tab to provide a quicker & easier overview.
  
• Expertise buildings - Diplomacy, War and Trading have now their own expertise buildings.
  
• Needs renamed - Some of the city are renamed for convenience.
  
  • Fellowship = Social
    
  • Sustenance = Food
    
  • Abundance = Surplus
    
  • Wealth = Money

• Self preservation - Followers now try to avoid dangerous areas (animal habitats) and attempt to run away when attacked.
  
• More own will feedback - The feedback given when followers act on their own will is now more detailed.
  
• Stamina fixes - Followers are now getting properly tired when doing any work so that they can’t keep going forever.

• World Overview - A new UI window details all cities and their overall needs, number of inhabitants, doctrine, faith and strength in war.
  
• Word Discovery - A new system for discovering words in the game, now in the shape of a tech tree that gives you an overview of all of the words and how to unlock them.
  
• Faith - No longer counts followers but cities instead.
  
• Mini-Map - A small update to the mini-map marker so that it’s easier to tell where you are.
  
• Updated Tutorial - The tutorial is updated to account for all new features that have been added to the game.
  
• Achievements - A whole bunch of Steam achievements are added.
  
• Polished visuals - New shaders to make it look extra shiny.

• Commandments - Many of the commandment combinations are iterated and changed, adding some completely new ones such as “scare away animals” and we also make the consume verb have less “cannibalistic” outcomes.
  
  
• City Creation - Followers no longer create cities on their own, and must be ordered to do so via migration commandments.
  
• Word tablet - The word tablet gets an UI overhaul to match the new word discovery system.
  
  
• Commandment tablet - In addition to the bless/condemn of the associations, the original commandment can now be blessed and condemned as well. Blessing the original commandment will increase the lifespan of that commandment for a period of time, it can be done a couple of times. Condemning an original commandment makes an association do more “damage” than it usually would to the lifebar and it also decreases the faith of your followers. These actions cost two influence.

Crest got featured on IndieDB this week, which made it one of the Top 10 most popular games out of 46'026 titles total :O

I'd like to remind you how crucial reviews are for us - especially now, being less than a week away from launch. They're immensely helping small indie titles like Crest to gain greater visibility on Steam. I really appreciate everyone of you taking the time to do so. <3

Please remember, all the new stuff we talk about below is not yet live on Steam but will be in the release version on 8th March. This goes for the achievements as well, which can currently only be unlocked with our inner circle build.




Martin
The trailer is finished from my end, after several weeks of work. When we release it next week, I hope you will enjoy all of our hard work! Below you can see a sneak peek from it.



Emma
I spent half of the week sick again (yes, I seem to get colds way too often this winter), and then the rest of the week was all about UI. I did some final touches to the Steam achievements, then proceeded to do the last couple of layouts for the information panel added to all the pages of the city pop-up; and then just some general nitpicks in the world overview and other UI windows.




Johannes W
This week I worked on the Graveyard menu. Until now we only had some placeholder pictures for each Graveyard save. A screenshot of the game world is now added when the game over screen appears for the player. The screenshot is shown in the Graveyard to make each save unique and memorable. The task required for me understand possible ways to take screenshots through code in Unity engine which feels good to have learned.

Last week I implemented Steam Achievements to the game. There where some small things this week that I had to tweak a bit. The icons that Emma did are now uploaded to Steam which look great. You will have to wait until the launch before you can unlock them though.

Additionally to the things above, I've been focusing on bugs, fixes and improvements this week. The code for when animals migrate is optimized and improved on how new habitats are found.


Johannes
I've been on the hunt for an elusive bug with the shadows. When I made the new shader a while back, the shadows started behaving really weirdly:



It took me three days, but I did manage to fix it. Embarrassingly enough, I still don't know why it happened, I just fixed it by trial and error and some educated guessing. I do believe however that it's a Unity bug, regarding the way we're drawing the trees and stuff.

Normally I would not let a bug go until I understood exactly why it happens, but since we're a week away from launch I don't have the time to do that, so bug fixed, moving on.

Currently I'm fixing a remaining bug with the new water system, and fixing up some minor things here and there.


Jens
This week has been much of the same as last week. A lot of playtesting, balancing, and bugfixing. It's coming along well and it feels good to focus on polishing so close to launch, as opposed to putting out fires from major game breaking stuff.


Tomas
Emelie and I have polished the tutorial most of the week and we now call it finished! It has been thoroughly playtested and many smaller last-minute tweaks have been made. I'm pleased with our work and hope that you will like it and find it helpful.




Emelie
Tutorial, tutorial and more tutorial. I have been working hard together with Tomas this entire week to fix all the issues that has come up with it. And now it's finished (unless nothing else crops up) and I couldn't be happier. I even had time to start some other tasks which need to be done and looked at before release and there's a lot of small fixes needed everywhere.


Marcus
This week has been testing, testing, fixing and then testing some more. We're one week out from release and all of our resources are dedicated to making sure that game will be as polished as possible, and it's looking pretty good if you ask me.

_____________________________________________________________

If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.

Have a nice weekend!

Crest got featured on IndieDB this week, which made it one of the Top 10 most popular games out of 46'026 titles total :O

I'd like to remind you how crucial reviews are for us - especially now, being less than a week away from launch. They're immensely helping small indie titles like Crest to gain greater visibility on Steam. I really appreciate everyone of you taking the time to do so. <3

Please remember, all the new stuff we talk about below is not yet live on Steam but will be in the release version on 8th March. This goes for the achievements as well, which can currently only be unlocked with our inner circle build.




Martin
The trailer is finished from my end, after several weeks of work. When we release it next week, I hope you will enjoy all of our hard work! Below you can see a sneak peek from it.



Emma
I spent half of the week sick again (yes, I seem to get colds way too often this winter), and then the rest of the week was all about UI. I did some final touches to the Steam achievements, then proceeded to do the last couple of layouts for the information panel added to all the pages of the city pop-up; and then just some general nitpicks in the world overview and other UI windows.




Johannes W
This week I worked on the Graveyard menu. Until now we only had some placeholder pictures for each Graveyard save. A screenshot of the game world is now added when the game over screen appears for the player. The screenshot is shown in the Graveyard to make each save unique and memorable. The task required for me understand possible ways to take screenshots through code in Unity engine which feels good to have learned.

Last week I implemented Steam Achievements to the game. There where some small things this week that I had to tweak a bit. The icons that Emma did are now uploaded to Steam which look great. You will have to wait until the launch before you can unlock them though.

Additionally to the things above, I've been focusing on bugs, fixes and improvements this week. The code for when animals migrate is optimized and improved on how new habitats are found.


Johannes
I've been on the hunt for an elusive bug with the shadows. When I made the new shader a while back, the shadows started behaving really weirdly:



It took me three days, but I did manage to fix it. Embarrassingly enough, I still don't know why it happened, I just fixed it by trial and error and some educated guessing. I do believe however that it's a Unity bug, regarding the way we're drawing the trees and stuff.

Normally I would not let a bug go until I understood exactly why it happens, but since we're a week away from launch I don't have the time to do that, so bug fixed, moving on.

Currently I'm fixing a remaining bug with the new water system, and fixing up some minor things here and there.


Jens
This week has been much of the same as last week. A lot of playtesting, balancing, and bugfixing. It's coming along well and it feels good to focus on polishing so close to launch, as opposed to putting out fires from major game breaking stuff.


Tomas
Emelie and I have polished the tutorial most of the week and we now call it finished! It has been thoroughly playtested and many smaller last-minute tweaks have been made. I'm pleased with our work and hope that you will like it and find it helpful.




Emelie
Tutorial, tutorial and more tutorial. I have been working hard together with Tomas this entire week to fix all the issues that has come up with it. And now it's finished (unless nothing else crops up) and I couldn't be happier. I even had time to start some other tasks which need to be done and looked at before release and there's a lot of small fixes needed everywhere.


Marcus
This week has been testing, testing, fixing and then testing some more. We're one week out from release and all of our resources are dedicated to making sure that game will be as polished as possible, and it's looking pretty good if you ask me.

_____________________________________________________________

If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.

Have a nice weekend!

Two weeks left until the launch of Crest and it's looking pretty good!
Here's is some encouraging feedback we recently got for our secretive inner circle build:

"I looked at the regular build [again] and was really surprised with the changes in the inner circle build! You guys did amazing!"

If you'd like to help us playtesting the new features, you can still become a part of the inner circle yourself. More info can be here: Join The Inner Circle



Martin
I had to take a short break from the trailer to incorporate our new shader, it's always a bad idea to implement new things just days before release, so a few weeks earlier is better! You can here see me playing around with the new shader. It's usually hard to control specular (or the shininess) with uniform low poly artstyles without textures (like most games). But with Johannes' new magical shader I can control that for separate objects, for instance make the gems more shiny than the rock it's attached to!



Emma
This week, I've been helping out with the lighting of the scenes in the trailer. It was a real challenge, especially for someone still not completely comfortable with Blender yet. Turns out that it's pretty difficult to get some decent lighting in space! After that, I've been doing some UI work, like updating graphics for the information panels.




Johannes
I've had full focus on the save system.
I've worked on a tool to verify that saves are working properly. The tool works by saving all states in the game to a text file, then it saves the game, loads that save, and then saves all states again to a second text file. Then I load both text files into a diff tool and see if something is different. That tool has allowed me to find a few subtle save errors that I've now fixed.

Jens
This week has been all about polishing and fixing the features we have. Just to give you a taste of what I've done, I have added sfx to a lot of the interface buttons. The voice in the intro is now updated with a remastered version of the audio, and some background ambience has been added. The Word Tree is now more consistent, with words having designated spots in the UI window.

I have continued to fine tune the stamina for the different follower tasks.
Influence is now gained in a slow trickle with a bonus amount added every half cycle for faithful cities, instead of faithful followers as it previously was. This change hopefully reduces some of the frustration that could occur when you were missing just a one or two points to make a commandment.

Johannes W
I have fixed bugs and made some improvements and optimization with how followers find new locations when building new cities. It was an issue before with how it worked and how the performance was. Often when a world had a lot of cities it became noticeable how the game became slow because many followers tried to find new locations and not always finding anything.

The old implementation was done through randomly checking tiles all over the island until a valid place was found. This was very unpredictable and a better solution had to be made. The way it is implemented now is to search outwards from the home city in circles until a good location is found. This felt like an obvious way to do it and it improved the performance a lot. The algorithm checks not every single tile outward but checks them with a bit of spacing just to lower the performance cost a bit. This fix will be available on the Crest release.

Tomas
I have tweaked the last things with the tutorial together with Emelie. We have playtested it internally and there are only some minor finishing touches left, then it will be all complete.

The tutorial is also incorporated into the save system now, so loading a game will no longer reset it to the beginning.


Emelie
The update to the tutorial has taken the entire week for me, and will probably take a few more days as well. It's coming along nicely, but I wonder if I have in my haste forgotten about something important, the pacing and the time it takes to finish it. We had a playtest this week as we do every week now and we focused on the tutorial so I got valuable feedback and will do my best to make it better. Other than the tutorial, I have been dabbling wherever I have been needed and I am guessing that's what I'll be doing everyday until release.


Marcus
Our release is slowly creeping upon us, so this week has seen a lot of playtesting in order to fix final balancing issues and bugs. Beyond that I am also continually busy with getting stuff ready for GDC amongst other company related stuff. So there is never a dull moment.

_____________________________________________________________

If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.

Have a nice weekend!

Two weeks left until the launch of Crest and it's looking pretty good!
Here's is some encouraging feedback we recently got for our secretive inner circle build:

"I looked at the regular build [again] and was really surprised with the changes in the inner circle build! You guys did amazing!"

If you'd like to help us playtesting the new features, you can still become a part of the inner circle yourself. More info can be here: Join The Inner Circle



Martin
I had to take a short break from the trailer to incorporate our new shader, it's always a bad idea to implement new things just days before release, so a few weeks earlier is better! You can here see me playing around with the new shader. It's usually hard to control specular (or the shininess) with uniform low poly artstyles without textures (like most games). But with Johannes' new magical shader I can control that for separate objects, for instance make the gems more shiny than the rock it's attached to!



Emma
This week, I've been helping out with the lighting of the scenes in the trailer. It was a real challenge, especially for someone still not completely comfortable with Blender yet. Turns out that it's pretty difficult to get some decent lighting in space! After that, I've been doing some UI work, like updating graphics for the information panels.




Johannes
I've had full focus on the save system.
I've worked on a tool to verify that saves are working properly. The tool works by saving all states in the game to a text file, then it saves the game, loads that save, and then saves all states again to a second text file. Then I load both text files into a diff tool and see if something is different. That tool has allowed me to find a few subtle save errors that I've now fixed.

Jens
This week has been all about polishing and fixing the features we have. Just to give you a taste of what I've done, I have added sfx to a lot of the interface buttons. The voice in the intro is now updated with a remastered version of the audio, and some background ambience has been added. The Word Tree is now more consistent, with words having designated spots in the UI window.

I have continued to fine tune the stamina for the different follower tasks.
Influence is now gained in a slow trickle with a bonus amount added every half cycle for faithful cities, instead of faithful followers as it previously was. This change hopefully reduces some of the frustration that could occur when you were missing just a one or two points to make a commandment.

Johannes W
I have fixed bugs and made some improvements and optimization with how followers find new locations when building new cities. It was an issue before with how it worked and how the performance was. Often when a world had a lot of cities it became noticeable how the game became slow because many followers tried to find new locations and not always finding anything.

The old implementation was done through randomly checking tiles all over the island until a valid place was found. This was very unpredictable and a better solution had to be made. The way it is implemented now is to search outwards from the home city in circles until a good location is found. This felt like an obvious way to do it and it improved the performance a lot. The algorithm checks not every single tile outward but checks them with a bit of spacing just to lower the performance cost a bit. This fix will be available on the Crest release.

Tomas
I have tweaked the last things with the tutorial together with Emelie. We have playtested it internally and there are only some minor finishing touches left, then it will be all complete.

The tutorial is also incorporated into the save system now, so loading a game will no longer reset it to the beginning.


Emelie
The update to the tutorial has taken the entire week for me, and will probably take a few more days as well. It's coming along nicely, but I wonder if I have in my haste forgotten about something important, the pacing and the time it takes to finish it. We had a playtest this week as we do every week now and we focused on the tutorial so I got valuable feedback and will do my best to make it better. Other than the tutorial, I have been dabbling wherever I have been needed and I am guessing that's what I'll be doing everyday until release.


Marcus
Our release is slowly creeping upon us, so this week has seen a lot of playtesting in order to fix final balancing issues and bugs. Beyond that I am also continually busy with getting stuff ready for GDC amongst other company related stuff. So there is never a dull moment.

_____________________________________________________________

If you want to follow the development of our game and get the latest news, you can find us on Facebook & Twitter or sign up for our Newsletter.

Have a nice weekend!