HCG Fix Fixed an issue where character costume parts were displayed abnormally in certain animations. Resource Optimization Resolved an issue where performance significantly slowed down when entering the extra room. Thank you.
Redid item distribution on Estoria The Personal Shield can now be recovered earlier on Lil Green Patched up some holes in Big Purp Lil Green shield cone no longer visible in space while shield is off
The Frontier Paladin demo was available for the first time during the Tower Defense Fest. While we've done a bunch of internal and external testing in the past, nothing beats getting it in the hands of the public.
As we had hoped, we learned a lot and took the demo down to work on the feedback we received. In no particular order, here are some of the biggest changes we made:
Optimization - The first level specifically was not well optimized. We're now getting almost double the frame rates from before!
Tutorials - There's a lot of depth and nuance to Frontier Paladin's mechanics. While you don't need to know it all right away, the feedback we got was we were giving too much information at once and simultaneously not enough. We've now spread out the tutorials, as well as made them more seamless in how they're presented to the player.
Settings - Much requested, this allows the player to do a myriad of things like changing graphical options, audio, etc. Rebinding keys will have to wait however, we'll need some more time for that.
Entirely New Quest - We've changed the quest flow, hopefully making it more interesting while also making it less likely the player gets lost along the way.
Journal - We've added in the Journal component to the pause menu, allowing the player to get a better sense of what they need to do, as well as what Titus thinks about what's happening to him, as well as the rewards on offer for the current quest.
Cutscenes - Added in several new cutscenes to immerse the player in the game.
Music - Added in two tracks, one for the main menu / castle, and the other for the boss fight. Audio in general has been worked on relentlessly and improved.
Character Illustrations - All new illustrations for each character you'll interact with. All the named NPCs have their own unique illustration while some generic characters share one.
Enemy Brawls - In the swamp level, the two enemy factions at war with each other will now engage in skirmishes and fight against each other more effectively and often.
Tower Defense - Improvements in tutorialization and controls of these segments. We've also added in a TD segment in the Swamp map to further show the potential of this mechanic.
Better Notifications - The player now gets better, more easier to notice notifications when completing objectives and quests, as well as SFX.
Warhammer - Rebalanced the Warhammer to place it close to the effectiveness of the sword weaponsets.
Main Menu - There's a whole new main menu! We think it looks cool.
XP Bar - A small bar under the mana bar that lets you know how far along you are to levelling up.
Much Better Dialogue UI - Significantly better looking and thematically appropriate Dialogue UI!
These are just some of the additions and improvements. There's a bunch of bug fixes as well which we won't mention here. Suffice to say we think the game has never been better and we're excited for new and old players alike to check it out and give us their feedback!
The demo will be available by the 18th of September.
I'm happy to bring you some exciting, albeit long overdue news! I now have a partner in crime. We're going to call him the Project Director for now, who I have been working together with day in and day out for the past couple of months. We have big plans for Solace Crafting I'd like to go into just a bit for now, but I will leave the majority of it up to him, scheduled for a post in the next week or two. Needless to say we are hard at work on creating a much richer, more engaging experience, in order to bring Solace Crafting to the many many players that have yet to hear its name.
Most of you know that I have always worked on this labor of love by myself, and no doubt the majority of you are aware of at least some of the many shortcoming of the game as it is right now. There really is no one to blame for these shortcomings other than myself, and yet that has never really bothered me because I am only one man. The job of "indie game developer" nowadays can mean many different things, from multi-million dollar teams of nearly a dozen people, all the way down to zero funding, solo entrepreneurs like myself. On top of that, there are many different levels of difficulty when it comes to creating a video game, and Solace Crafting has pretty much all of the challenges that a game can. It's 3D, it's physics based, it's multiplayer, it's procedural, it uses a semi-realistic style, etc.. Were this being handled by a triple A company there would be teams of programmers, animation specialists, visual effects artists, character designers, level designers, writers, shader technicians, network developers, audio engineers, 3D artists, UI artists, managers, directors, marketers, you get the point. There are many many different professions that a strong game needs filled in order to thrive. Long story short, the majority of these professions, I'm just straight up not that good at. Our new Project Director is a great counterpart to me in that sense because his talents are very different than my own. I have my talents, but they do not stretch far and deep enough to cover even 25% of what a game like Solace Crafting really needs and deserves. Having said all that, I don't have a million dollars to round up a team and get all of those problems solved. That's why over the past couple of months we've been putting together design documentation to redesign Solace Crafting from the ground up, keeping all of its core strengths, while filling in its many gaps with a much more player friendly, rewarding, and engaging experience. The first wave of major changes are things that we can handle with just the two of us, primarily a complete redesign of the art style, world generation, and player controls. We hope to then leverage this improved experience, along with our extensive design documentation detailing the further stages of improvement, in order to attract funding to help make those later stages possible. We hope to have ready the first look at a re-imagined Solace Crafting around two weeks from now. Some of our plans further down the road very much include our community, some of you in Discord have been around from day 1, as well as some interesting ideas for our Patreon.
I'm sorry that during all of this the endless content and feature patches that I've been continuing for years now have pretty much grinded to a halt. So much time and stress had passed as a solo developer that I had really lost my direction, and was just doing what felt necessary to keep me and my wife warm and fed. It's was very hard to take this leap given I have my firstborn due in just two months! But there's so much more to Solace Crafting that I was never able to achieve on my own, and now that we've got a solid plan on how to get there, I'm more excited than ever!
I hope you'll all hang in there with us as we work through this transition from solo to staffed, and I wish you all the best!
