eatcreatesleepstudios

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Crest - an indirect god sim NOW AVAILABLE

Crest - an Indirect God Sim - Now Available

What kind of god are you going to be? Will you create a flourishing civilization or lead your followers into cannibalism?

We are  excited to announce the launch of Crest, an indirect god sim. After almost five years in development, Crest has shaped up to be something we are very proud of. You can find the cinematic launch trailer here as well as a new gameplay trailer here.  

 In Crest, you become a god and try to control your followers using commandments, however free will leaves these open to interpretation. Will you create a flourishing civilization or lead them into cannibalism?

The world of Crest sees players managing a variety of natural and manmade elements, including:

Islands - Your followers are always looking for new adventures. Will they conquer new lands, or simply go fishing and return home?

Ecology - How will the weather affect the development of your society? Be careful--any imbalances could have drastic consequences.

Animals - Humans aren't the only residents of your world. Crest is populated with a wide variety of animal species, including everything from hyenas to hippos.

Terraforming - Literally shape civilization by commanding followers to change their surroundings-but how will your commandments change them? 

The complete release notes can be found here. 

For further infos and news visit the official website (http://eatcreatesleep.net/) and follow us on Facebook & Twitter. 

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #168 - One Week Left!

Community

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.

Art

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.

Code

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.

Design

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.

Production

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.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #167 - Two Weeks Left!

Community

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

Art

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.

Code

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.

Design

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.

Production

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.

Have a nice week!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #166 - On the Horizon

Community

Well, we got a launch date! 8th March 2018! Check out what's all going to be in the full version:

Lauch - New Features

Please help us to reach as many people as possible in this critical time until launch! We put together a list of helpful things:

Support Crest

We will have an Official Launch Trailer as well soon, for now here's a little tease:

Art

Martin Yes, the secret is out, I've been working on the launch trailer for a few weeks now. It's almost done and I look forward to see your reactions to it!

Emma This week, I've done a little bit of everything. I've been sick, I've been doing some playtesting, fiddling around with UI stuff and helping out with the trailer. The main thing I've been doing is Steam Achievements! Gonna be a lot of fun to unlock them all when they're added. Below is a sneak peek!

Code

Jens I have mostly been balancing, polishing, and fixing minor bugs. It is kind of like playing whac-a-mole. Usually when I go to fix something, I discover something else that I need to do. The biggest balancing task was the new stamina rework that Johannes W made.

Previously, followers were allowed to overperform and do actions even though their stamina was depleted. The stamina system is now consistent and much better at predicting how much work the follower can do. I have gone through all the follower actions and given them reasonable stamina costs.

Johannes W For me, this week has mostly been about hunting bugs. I fixed so followers can mine right after they have built a Mine and I fixed some camera movement glitches. I also finished up the code for how we track Steam achievements. We have a bunch of achievements now that are ready to be published but have some graphics and design left to do for that. I look forward for when the Steam achievements are fully done!

Tomas I have been working with the tutorial together with our resident designer Emelie. It is getting an update to accommodate all the changes that are in the game since the last release.

The core tutorial system has been tweaked a bit and I have constructed brand new debug tools for it to ease testing it out. It is all shaping up really well and it will probably be complete some time next week.

Design

Emelie I have been working on updating the tutorial, making sure that all the new features are explained and that the flow is improved upon. I have also been working on balancing and a little bit of whatever comes up since we are doing our best to make everything work as intended. Tweaks here and there on pretty much everything is the best way to explain it all really.

Production

Marcus This week has seen a lot of game balancing and bugfixing. I have been actively helping out with playtesting to focus our efforts on the most important parts these coming weeks since, Holy crap, we're actually releasing the game soon! Beyond that I've also kept up the preparational work for GDC, and some other stuff concerning the company, so I've been kinda split between all sorts of things..

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Launch Date Announcement!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #165 - Debugging, Debugging & Debugging

This week all our programmers gathered together to take apart Crest's code piece by piece to find what's causing the random crashes. We finally did! But the journey there was rather adventurous as you'll find out below.

Community

We dropped the price of Crest to $9.99 this week and started what is definitely not a cult. Find out more about The Inner Circle.

We will have a new patch next week but want to make sure first that everything is running flawlessly before we publish it. A good thing about all the debugging is, that we've been able to polish a lot of the code while hunting for the cause of the crashes.

Art

Martin Look, I'm sorry that my blog posts have been so cryptic for a while but that changes soon. Here's a last tease of what I'm doing.

Code

Johannes This week all programmers including myself have been trying to fix the crash that keeps happening after playing the game for a while.

After working on it for a few days, we managed to fix a few major bugs having to do with object pooling, but the crash was still happening. We finally realized that the crash started happening when we upgraded to Unity 2017.3. We tried going back 5.6 which is the last version we used before upgrading, and the crash was gone. I tried a few versions and figured out that 2017.1 is the last version where the crash isn't happening, so that's what we've downgraded to now.

A very frustrating realization, but this weeks efforts have all been worth it anyway. We've fixed a lot of memory issues, and built some tools to help us catch problems faster in the future.

Jens The name of the game this week has been debugging, debugging, and more debugging, and its been a journey I can tell you. The crashes have been our top priority and I have looked at more crash logs this week than I think I've done in my lifetime.

At first we could only narrow it down to being a memory issue, the crashes would occur at any place in the code where new objects where created. This lead us to believe that somewhere a loop might be creating a lot of objects during the same frame, but after some testing that didn't seem to be an issue. Looking at the memory usage over time showed a slow increase, building over time. This suggests a memory leak was occuring somewhere. So we started to look for references in static instances that was possibly keeping objects from being garbage collected. When we actually found some cases of this in our pooling of objects, we were feeling hopeful that fixing them would solve the crashes. But nope... Still crashes after a few minutes.

In a last effort we went back to the engine version where the game wasn't crashing, and lo and behold, no crashes! Apparently, there is a problem in our current engine version of Unity. In the end, we did fix a lot of issues in our own code so the time spent was definitely worth it, and now I can finally go back to working on completing the features in the game.

Johannes W I completed fixing the bug where followers are overperforming and I made a change in the game mechanics. Each follower's action, like farming, picking berries, or eating their neighbor, will now have a fixed amount of stamina cost. Before, it was more dynamic but more prone to be bugged as well. For example, in some cases, a follower could do more actions than they had stamina for. This new mechanic I added will hopefully make designing and balancing more controllable without any unexpected bugs.

I have started adding Steam achievements to Crest now. We will see how long it will take, but I think the main functionality will be implemented early the next week. The goal is to make it easy for us to add or change achievements without too much effort!

Tomas This week has had it's ups and downs. I have been working closely with Johannes (our lead programmer) with creating tools for monitoring used memory in Crest. We then used the tool to find memory issues that could lead to Crest running out of memory. Thanks to the tool we have made some huge improvements. For example ending a game and returning to the main menu caused some memory to be stuck in limbo forever. This is now fixed.

Even though we made alot of improvements and tried to locate the main cause of the 'out of memory' error it still occured. It was a tough nut to crack but we finally found the problem. We are now working with correcting it and polishing up on some changes we made.

Production

Marcus This week the majority of the team has been focused on finding and fixing the source of the crash bug we have suffered for a few weeks now. I have been keeping track of our progress on that and I have also been preparing for GDC this March.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #164 - Revealing Premonition

More pixelated images, a folder named Company Secrets and running away from dangerous animals. Yes, this is how gamedev life looks like.

Community

You've all been very active in providing feedback the last few weeks, which has been super helpful. As you'll find out below, some of the recent suggestions from you have already been implemented in our internal build. Also please be aware that everything mentioned in the blog is not yet live on Steam.

We're currently lining up a lot of things. Very soon you'll find out what all the secrecy has been about:

Art

Martin I'm a big tease, I know. But this is the last week I'm not allowed to talk about [censored]. I managed to smuggle this secret image out to you, what could it be?

Emma Just as last week, I'm just working on secret stuff again. Hopefully it won't be a secret for much longer.. Here's a beautifully pixelated tease!

Code

Johannes This week has not been as productive as far as the game is concerned as the last few weeks, due to company work taking up much of my time.

I have been doing some more tweaks to the new water system, and doing some research for the save system problems.

Yesterday we had a play test session, where I for the first time in a long time could just sit down and actually enjoy the game. So I feel really good about where the game is right now. Looking forward to letting everyone play it :)

Jens This week I have done a lot of different minor fixes and balancing. I also added one new mechanic. Commandments themselves can now be blessed or condemned with a low cost of influence. Blessing the commandment makes its lifeforce immun to associations draining it. This allows the player to spend less influence to keep a commandment around than proclaiming a new one when the old is removed. Condemning the commandment does the opposite and drains the lifeforce at an increased rate when an association is made. Condemning also comes with a rather large hit to the following cities' local faith.

The word discovery has gotten some updates. Coast is now unlocked after a new city is built instead of requiring a city with a harbour. Hungry, Happy, and Unhappy word requirements have been changed to be accumulative instead of being a number of followers fulfilling the requirement at the same time.

The trading between islands is now enabled and can occur between two harbour cities. The normal prerequisites for trade still applies.

The last three expertise buildings are now added to the game. Diplomacy gives a bonus to successfully create alliances. War increases chance of winning a battle. Trading expertise increases the amount of wealth received when selling resources. These are more late game expertises than Granary, Mining, and Construction as the words needed to be unlocked are Tier 2 and Tier 3 in the new Word Tree.

Johannes W This week I finished changing how food is stored in the game. When This week I've mostly worked with how followers decide on their actions, i.e. their A.I behavior. We've had issues with balancing that and need to adjust some things to give us more control.

One of these issues is how follower actions haven't been available or referenced in the Unity editor and our balancing and tweaking is mostly done through serialized variables in Unity's inspector windows. The goal has been to list all possible follower actions in the editor along with corresponding variables for us to balance and experiment with.

This has been fixed at this time but there's still some work to do with how follower actions are added depending on how expensive they are in terms of follower stamina and time. I believe, when these things are slightly changed for the better, we'll have more control in making the game balanced and a more fun and interesting experience for players!

Tomas I have worked with followers reacting to being attacked by animals. My first iteration had the followers cancel what they where doing, change into warrior clothing and if they survived they would play their defend with shield animation. After this they would walk home. It looked kind of funny, in a bad-funny kind of way, so I made another iteration. My second and final iteration has the followers cancel what they are doing and running away in fear toward their home hut. About half way home they will stop and decide what they should do instead, building new orders.

During this work I re-enabled running animations for followers and animals again. I also smoothed out walking in general a little bit. There were some visual issues when their target was on the move. They re-made their path and walked back about 1-2 tiles each update. Now, that is a thing of the past!

Design

Emelie What have I been doing this week? Time has flown and every day blends into each one another, I have been deep into the water system but I have started to add influences from animals, berry bushes and farms.

We also have an internal playtesting session every week that is super useful for me, it helps me find and identify systems that are not working as intended or if my balancing is unnoticable and needs more tweaks. You can really feel the difference the balancing is doing so hopefully it will come together quite beautifully.

Production

Marcus This week has been very company heavy for my part, so not much news in terms of production from my end. However, we are of course still steadily improving upon game features and balancing the overall experience, as you've been able to read above.)

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #163 - Turbulences

What a week it has been! We’ve put out two patches and one hotfix since the last Dev Blog and now the game should be running smoothly again but we’ve also done lots of other stuff this week!

Community

On Monday we celebrated the third anniversary of our first game Among Ripples and gave away the soundtrack for free. You can check it out here.

As announced last week, the price for Crest will go up today to $14.99 as soon as it has been approved by Steam. This will be Crest’s final price and there will be no more price raises. We had started at $5 and slowly went up over the years as the game progressed. Take a look at how much Crest has changed over the years:

Art

Martin Oh, I wish I could talk about the exciting graphic work I’m doing right now but that would be telling! Patrick tells me it has to be kept a secret for a little longer. I have a gif to show you though (also censored, teehee).

Emma I’ve just been working on secret stuff all week, so sneaky! Hopefully I can share more with you next week.

Code

Johannes I started this week with fixing a bunch of bugs that cropped up in the patch release at the end of last week. Tomas and I fixed some memory leaks that made the game use more and more memory every time you started a new game, unless you quit the game first.

Emelie and I have had some discussions to work out the kinks and tweak the new water system. I’ve made a new shader that’s going to replace our current default shader. The new one looks a bit fancier and has a few more features than our old one.

I’m currently trying to put an end to the ever broken save system. With some effort and luck the “failed to save” message should no longer be a regular occurance when I’m done.

Jens The UI for the new tier based Word Discovery has now been finished. What’s left is balancing requirements for discovering each words as well as some text. The values for the requirements are visible in the text box when hovering over a word. But as seen in the gif below, the descriptions still have to be written.

The rest of the week I’ve been working on balancing the followers’ reproduction and overpopulation. In its current state, too many births occur from their own free will, which creates overpopulated cities at a fast rate. I’m now working on the AI’s decision making in an attempt to curb overpopulation. It is still up to the player to make commandments to override the AI’s decision but then you might end up with a lot bigger food consumption in the city. It’s still going to be a valid strategy to make a lot of babies, if you have enough food and plan on migrating, or if a lot of followers are dying for some reason.

Johannes W This week I finished changing how food is stored in the game. When followers are generating food, it’s added directly to the city storage instead of to the follower. Followers still carry food but it’s filled only when the follower enters their home hut. I’ve also been working with the new water system and fixed some small issues here and there.

Lastly, I helped Emelie with playtesting and game balancing, like balancing the word discovery system. We are not done with that yet and it still needs some tweaking in the upcoming weeks. I’m sure this is not the last time I did some balancing stuff, but it feels nice to take some breaks from programming!

Tomas I have been working with the hotfix patch that was released only a few days ago. We fixed two game breaking bugs, improved memory management and more. Check out the patch notes.

After working on the patch I have focused on an update to Berry Bushes. They should no longer spawn in hippo habitats, which could doom an early city from the get-go. Followers should no longer plant berry bushes in hippo habitats either. Also, when followers plant bushes they are now placed in a more clustered formation that looks more natural than it did earlier. Before they made a diamond shape around the city.

I have also worked with iterating the look of the Word Tablet. There is now more spacing around words, the cut-off point where the scroll view cut images when scrolling is adjusted and the verbs now have a fancy border.

Design

Emelie I have been working full time with the water system, it’s a complex system to balance. I have to decide how much water should drain from each tile type during each season and how fast it should be refilled by the water source (river) to make it appear natural. Another factor to think about is how much water rain brings into the mix and when a new river should appear.

All of this together makes for a complicated system but I think that I am on my way to complete it. It will be good when the island’s eco-system can survive forever without followers doing things. When it’s done then I will start add to the followers impact on nature, making sure that each action that they do will affect nature, giving the player a different kind of urgency (fingers crossed).

Production

Marcus This week has seen a lessened focus on production from my part as I have been more involved in the company side of things. However, I have still managed to playtest the new features and balance changes that have been worked on, and I’ve got to say that it’s looking good. So look forward to the next patch update!Speaking of patches, we have taken last weeks small fiasco to heart and will make doubly sure that the next patch doesn’t break everything quite as spectacularly as that one did :)

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #162 - A New Dawn

Concerns have been raised by the community if we've been replaced by robots. Not without reason if you look at all the stuff we managed to do this week!

Community

There will be a new patch coming today bringing great changes. It will fix the glitching of the animations as well as triple the overall performance of the game! Yes, Johannes has been busy doing some black magic this week to achieve this miracle! A heads up: The price for Crest will be raised next week to $14.89. This will be the third and final price raise. If you haven't yet, now is a perfect opportunity to get the game cheap because we don't plan to do any major discounts until the end of the year.

Art

Martin

What a fun week! I've started working on the[censored] for the incoming [censored], mainly doing the [censored]. The late Carl Sagan once said that "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the Universe" and that's what I have to do to make this [censored]. You see, it's about the creation of everything. So first I have to come up with how the universe was created before I can make the [censored], luckily I've studied a little bit of astronomy before so I can put that knowledge to good use. More information coming next week! [Editor's note: Sorry, spoilers! :D]

Emma

This week, I spent half of the week at home sick and the other half doing UI work and playtests. For example, this week we realized that the way we had planned the new word discovery UI wouldn't actually work as intended! This was simply because it turned out too messy when all the words were included with their connections. At times like these, you simply go back to the mock-up phase and take these factors into consideration. After some design changes on Emelie's part, I could start over from the beginning and come up with a whole new look for the UI; which you can see below.

Code

Jens

This week I've been continuing work on the Word Discovery. I started to implement a UI for the Word Tree but after a while it started to reveal an underlying flaw in the feature. In the first iteration (seen in the picture below), we wanted the words clustered in a tree with certain words blocking others. This blocking relation was displayed through lines drawn between the words in the Word Discovery screen. The biggest flaws were both an imbalance between the word categories, making the tree look slanted, as well as the blocking lines becoming confusing with a lot of lines crossing each other making it hard to read. We went back to the drawing board and came up with much cleaner and more understandable design. Words will be added to different tiers. Tiers are unlocked by discovering a set amount of words from lower tiers. Thankfully it wasn't a huge amount of code refactoring even though it looked like a big change at first and it is well on its way to being finished.

Johannes W

This week I finished the new mountain clouds, created design tools for balancing the water system and added functionality to different GUI's, for example the new world overview window that will be in the game.

I also started with changing how food resources are handled in the game. Before, the total food in a city was based on the total food that every follower carried. Now, the food will be fully stored and handled by the city. Every follower will still carry food but the big difference is that they gain food only when they visit their home hut.

Johannes

This has been quite a productive week. I finished the new decorator which made quite a huge performance improvement over the old one. I was quite surprised myself.

I also managed squeeze in a new feature in the water system so that new rivers can be formed, to make the environment more dynamic and changeable over time. 

Tomas

I have continued my work on the commandment definition mechanics, what commandments actually make followers do. I have worked on minor changed in the UI. There is an issue with the version of Unity we are using at the moment which has made this work harder than it should be. Hopefully the Unity devs will patch it soon because these tasks cannot be completed until it is. One of the UI changes is the implementation of the new City Needs tab in the City Popup. There are now separate bars that show each of the six needs instead of the old radar chart. Hopefully it will ease the understanding of city and follower needs.

Design

Emelie

This week has been a real hell with Unity for me, it's been "arguing" with me and things were not working as intended... Anyway, I have been updating how each individual commandment combination affect the needs, this decides how a city with a doctrine will react to those commandments. For instance, "produce farms" will have a huge effect on the need "food" and maybe not so much on the other needs which means that if the doctrine likes food then they will like the commandment. This took the majority of the week because there are quite a few combinations. Even though Unity has been making my life miserable, I have managed to playtest a few things that needed balancing this week, such as the new word discovery tech tree.

Production

Marcus

Lots of company stuff this week as Eat Create Sleep is going to San Francisco and GDC this March! Well, parts of us anyway, so I have begun working on our gameplan for that little excursion. I have also been involved in giving feedback to the new word discovery system that we have been hard at work with these past few weeks. Beyond that, we are still hard at work with getting our intended features into the game, without breaking everything, so look forward to future patches that will fix many of Crests current problems.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #161 - The Fruits of Labour

Our first blog post in 2018! This year will have a lot in store for our little team, so let's start right away with all the work we managed to get done in the recent days.

Community

We've only been back a week but the progress we made in this short amount of time is incredible! Some of it you will get to see next week, when we release the next patch. The patch will fix first and foremost the snapping of followers/animals. We'll see what else we can get in there the coming days because we first have to test it to see if it's stable enough to put out.

Art

Martin

An eventful week, I spent it with preparing for an investor meetup to talk about further funding for our company, sent a lot of emails to possible business partners and also managed to be sick, but I've too much to do so I said to the virus "please get it over with" and it did, polite virus that.

Emma

This week, I've been finishing up the last UI tasks and then helped with playtesting. Last blog, I showcased one of the mock-ups of the new Needs window; now it was time to actually export all that UI to build a prefab in Unity. Same with the new Faith window, which also needed to be put together in Unity from the mock-ups.

The new Faith tab can be seen in the picture below, along with the two new buttons in our menu bar! We updated our Unity version this week, which resulted in a nasty problem with our UI; it's been a real struggle working around it but in the end, it all worked out!

Code

Johannes

This week I finished the new water system - until Emelie immediately found a bug, so it's obviously not entirey done :)

I have for the moment moved on to working on the decorator though. The decorator is what we're calling the system that "decorates" the island with trees and bushes in the jungle, and stones and cactuses in the desert, etc. It is, together with the old water system, a big part of our performance problems. The plan is to completely rewrite it from scratch with a custom culling and LOD system.

Jens

The follower actions for the berries I implemented before the christmas break are now in and working since last week. The three actions are Pick Berries, Plant Berries, and Destroy Berries. Picking berries will be a good food source at the start of the game to get your followers expansion going. Since farming will need to be unlocked, the followers will have to sustain themselves with foraging and hunting. Planting berries will require an initial investment of food that will later return a lot more when the new bush has grown.

This week I have been working on the new system for discovering and unlocking words. Words will now be ordered in a tree where words on lower branches will block the words on higher branches until the lower ones are discovered. Each word also has one ore more conditions that need to be fulfilled before they unlock. The back end code is pretty much done, but I first need to fix save compatibility and implement it in the game. Before the feature is fully complete I'll have to make the UI work, which will hopefully be done during next week.

Johannes W

I removed the old rain clouds and added snow clouds that now surround mountains. Before in-game rain season, clouds appear above mountains. During rain season, the clouds snow and fill up the mountains with snow. The clouds then disappear when the season is over. This feature is a visual feedback on how the water works in Crest and how new rivers are created. The other Johannes, the lead programmer, re-made and optimized the water system and these snow clouds are connected to visualize some of it. See the GIF for how it looks like at this moment!

Along with the new water system in Crest, new development tools are required. I started later this week creating a debug tool to see game objects that add or drain water to the islands. The objects are supposed to be categorized to animals, animal types, followers, farms, etc. This tool will help our designer to create a nice and balanced ecosystem.

Tomas

I am back from the christmas and new years vacation and I have been a busy bee this week.

I have made the word tablet show slots where future words are placed and all words have their own unique slot, the same slot, every game. The discovered/undiscovered tabs are a thing of the past.

I have added more information to the follower popup window, displaying in more detail why followers do their actions. Instead of only displaying "because we want to", they will now say things like "because we are starving" or "because we want to feel safe".

The major change I've worked on is updating the commandment definition mechanics, which means what all commandments actually makes followers do. I have added a new action that allows followers to scare away animals from their city. To write a scare off commandment you need to place Distribute in the verb slot and an animal word in the target slot. Aside from the new scare animals action, do-verbs are now working properly. The don't-verbs still need to be looked at however. I will work on that next week.

Design

Emelie

I have finally gotten my hands on the new water system, it changes a lot on how nature is going to affect the world. I have been spending all my time tweaking numbers and watching how it affects every thing, it is quite tricky and will probably consume most of my time for the next couple of days.

When the water system is "ok" then I have to start tweaking outside sources that will affect nature such as animals, farms and seasons, so it's going to be a lot of back and forth between everything. The gif shows how it was before balancing was done, you can see that it needs work in order to feel more "natural".

Production

Marcus

This week has been full of structuring the planning after returning from the winter holidays. There has also been a lot of work to do on behind-the-scenes company stuff as well, but it is good to be back!

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #160 - Uphill Battle

Many battles have been won this week and an immense progress was made in tackling some of the long-overdue issues.

Community

A new patch will be released today. Johannes is still working on it with full force together with Jens but it'll come out very soon.

We'll keep it short in the Community section this week but don't worry, there will be a special blog post on Tuesday, keep a lookout for that! Also be aware of our Discord channel, holiday season seems to make everyone a bit...silly.

Art

Martin

Until all of the new exciting features and revamped systems are done by code, I'm in a bit of a slump when it comes to content. Bottlenecks sometimes happen, usually for us non-programmers and especially in a procedural game.

So what we do is trying to do meaningful work that doesn't increase the workload for the programmers. I'm designing hats! Each doctrine's city leader will have their animal symbol as a hat to make it easier to know at a glance which doctrine a certain city follows.

Code

Johannes

I've been making good progress on the new water system. It's very satisfying to see it come together. I can't wait for it to be finished and working together with the rest of the game systems.I've also done some work on today's patch release, mostly merging fixes back from the dev branch.

Jens

Most of this week I've felt like I'm making a nature documentary film. I have tweaked, continued to improved, and tested the migration behaviours of all animals. Made sure that they all migrate at appropriate times. This involves a lot of observations and documentation of data related to migration and feeding of the animals. Herbivores moves when they are out of food or if they are being hunted heavily by predators. And when they move, the predators soon migrate after.

The balancing of values will be further worked on but we can already see huge improvements in how impactful the followers are on the eco system. If followers decimate a predators food source, the predators will move to another food source that maybe already sustains another group of predators. Now two groups are hunting from the same herbivore habitat, resulting in a slow and steady collaps if one is not careful.

I also made a change to pathing to ensure that followers will now avoid walking through a hippo habitat if they can find a better way. Hopefully this will prevent the massacres we've had previously...

Johannes W 

You may have noticed in the game that followers and animals are glitching/snapping to positions when they are walking. Until now, the walking animation was dependent on a variable we call "time units". Time units are a sort of currency for how many actions a follower or an animal can do before they need to rest. Time units are updated on a constant time interval. Walking from A to B costs the amount of time units relative to the total distance to walk. The speed in which the characters moved was determined by the animation, which made it difficult to sync the updated time units and the animations. Now, the walking animations control when time units are spent. This thing should be implemented before the christmas holiday. Tomas

I have been working with Follower & City Needs this week. The system has not been working as intended and was finally rectified. It is a complex system of cravings and basic needs that determines followers' happiness and what they do with their free will actions. I added a bunch of debug tools so that the system is easier to balance, which should make Emelie's work easier.

Production

Marcus

This week I have been doing some playtesting and helping out with game design stuff, in addition to my ordinary work of keeping track of the project and making sure that everyone knows what they're doing. I have also started planning work for beginning of next year.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #159 - Let it Snow

Wait, what? Snow? In Crest?! Yes! This week has been all about water, in its liquid as well as in its solid form.

Community

You will read a lot about Crest's water system in this blog. What that means in short: We redirected almost all resources to improve the performance issues Crest has to make it run much smoother.

What does the water have to do with the performance issues? Although invisible to you at the moment, water is the main resource in Crest. Every island consists of thousands of tiles and each tile has it's own water-level, which gets constantly updated by the system. This worked fine in the beginning, when there was only one island and not so much stuff happening in the world, but it didn't scale well over time and needs to be reworked now.

Art

Martin

I've been spending this week with working on the new feedback for the water system. It's always been hard to see how the water works in Crest, and since it's such a critical resource we want it to be more clear. In real life clouds dump their water on the mountains as snow, which later melts and become rivers. There's not as much snow on the African continent as on others and this is where a bit of abstraction comes in. We'd rather have an easy to understand game than 100% realism. The mountain works like a batter, the more snow there is the more water can be "taken" to the rivers by nature. Below you can see a mockup of this new system.

Emma

This week has been all about doing mockups for UI in the game. We're doing some small changes to make it easier to navigate and understand it, making it more convenient for the players to use it. 

For example, below, you can see the new mockup to the left which will be replacing the current spider chart to the right. The new system with bars will make it easier for players to just throw a glance at the City Needs, to immediately know which need is in danger.

Code

Johannes

This week the other programmers and I sat down to figure out how we should fix the water system. The water system has always been kind of broken, and we've tried to fix it several times to no avail. So this time we decided to rethink it from the ground up. The solution we came up with should allow for more dynamic changes of the environment, and should be a lot less demanding on performance. So I'm very happy about that. We'll see how well it works once it's actually implemented :)

Johannes W

I participated on the discussion for the new water system during the beginning of the week and I think the new changes will make a big difference to the game, which I'm personally excited about.

The programming stuff for me this week included updating migration for both followers and animals in Crest. The followers now migrate only from commandments by the player and not by their free will. The animals now migrate to new habitats based on a grid layout on the islands. The reason for this is to have more control over where animals migrate compared to before, where a lot of randomization was used.

Another reason is for optimization. For example, when a herd of antelopes wants to migrate, we can search through each center tile in the grid and make basic assumptions where they don't want to move, for example the jungle or how far they can migrate. Then we can search the area around the center tile and make other more specific assumptions.

These updates on the migration system are just on a early stage and may be updated later. However, the new water system will have a big impact on migration for followers and animals and therefore we want to have a lot of control when we later have to create a good balance.

Jens

This week I have been cooperating with Johannes W to fix the migration of animals. At first I started to increase the affect herbivores have on their environment. If the number of animals in a habitat gets too big, they will drain the soil for resources. When they can no longer find food, they will try to find a new area for their habitat.

The result is that we will see animals moving more across the island. And where the herbivores move, the carnivores will follow. The aim is to get islands that feel more dynamic and ever-changing. I still need to wait for the reworked water system before I can finish, since it is so closely tied to how animals eat and find suitable habitat areas.

Tomas

At the start of this week I was mostly involved in design discussions. One major discussion was regarding the water system in Crest and how to improve it to affect gameplay and performance in positive ways. We found a solution that should do both. At the end of the week I have been reworking the season system to allow for harsh and mild conditions. This required a rework of how seasons are queued and changed. It can now be balanced more easily and dynamically.

Design

Emelie 

This week have been busy for me, I don't think that I have been involved in so many different things in one week before. It all started with the redesign of the water system because it has never really worked properly, this will make the nature part of Crest have more consequences. We also discussed the new look of the city needs since the spider chart could be a bit difficult to read at times, hopefully the changes will make it more clear to the player what is going on. After we had finished those discussions, I moved on to make the design for the berry bushes. We want to pace the game in the beginning a bit better because farms are too powerful. It feels more natural to have a hunter/gatherer society at first and then evolving into farming when they got enough knowledge. I hope this will make it more interesting, as with all the things that we have planned to fix.

Production

Marcus

This week I have been busy with introducing a new planning platform and making sure that everything is up to date and that everyone understands how to use it. It will be an iterative process in how we will be handling everything going forward but the team seems to like it so far.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #158 - Back to bug squashing

Before the Community Module is after the Community Module - after some stressful days of panicking, we return to squashing bugs in a more relaxed manner. This week we go a bit more into the specific problems we encountered while doing so. 

Community

The Community Module finally arrived! How do you like all the new features and changes we implemented so far? Today we'll release the first patch fixing some of the bugs and afterwards we'll continue releasing patches every 2-3 weeks, while also working on the improvements we talked about in The Future of Crest.

Also, our new trailer could definitely need some more love, check it out if you haven't yet:

Art

Martin

What a week! It jumpstarted with finishing the trailer. Even if you plan carefully sometimes not everything fits, and some things don't turn out as you expected. Then you have to improvise, like I had to do this time, and usually it can lead to a better result. Careful planning and spur of the moment inspiration works best for me. Hope you like the new trailer!

Emma

This week has been all about finishing trailer, this time animating the rest of the scenes. I've been struggling with a running cycle, as the NLA editor doesn't wanna cooperate when I'm locking the hands to a tablet they're holding. So, I had a small mental break-down and started working on the slightly easier scenes, with mostly poses with slow movement (and no evil tablets!).

Code

Johannes

This week I've been completely focused on making saves work. The build on Steam that we released this Tuesday is fairly stable with regards to saves, but there's still a few issues that I've been ironing out.

Jens

After the release of the community module I have been working on fixing the bugs we found while testing. The two main concerns for me were terraforming and war.

Terraforming stopped working due to a problem with how spaces were delegated around the city. Monuments and expertise buildings claimed a lot of room causing terraform projects to fail. While working on getting it to behave nicely I also made some other improvements, for example terraformers now gather water from sources closer to the terraform project.

We saw that war had problems with cities constantly attacking each back and forth. Now they have a longer "cooling off period", and are not as eager to start a war if they have just been in one. There was also an issue with the commandment "... produce war" causing cities to start wars back to back that is fixed in today's update.

Johannes W 

My week has been about fixing bugs. It included updating filter toggles in the Underworld, updating GUI for different screen resolutions, limiting the amount of messages from the Bulletin Board (the thing that shows the player events that happen in the game), and more. 

I did also make remnants from dead animals and followers disappear after a time. We realized that the islands turned into graveyards of dead bodies if remnants weren't removed. We want traces to be left in the world, but for right now, removing remnants after a while appeared to be the best solution. Tomas

This week I began with fixing general bugs in the game. Then I was play testing and quality assuring, trying to find more bugs and issues. After the release of the community module I have once again been fixing bugs. One bug, that I just now squished, had to do with building placement. Several buildings had a tendency to clip into each other, mostly expertise buildings and monuments. This should now be resolved and will be included in an upcoming patch.

Design

Emelie 

Playtesting, playtesting and more playtesting is what I have been doing this week. The days have flown by and it takes a lot of time and effort to try and reproduce certain bugs that are annoying to have. It's also an illuminating experience as I can see, as a game designer, how my systems work or not work as intended which will be really useful to know for when we finish Crest. It's also really clear after all these days of playtesting that balancing has been neglected for way to long, this will be next on my list of things to do.

Production

Marcus

This week was a major update week, so I've been busy with making sure that the community update was as smooth as possible, and I've also been organizing a follow-up patch that we will roll out today. Apart from the update my time has been spent with setting up our new planning tools and what priorities we have in production going forward towards the next milestone for Crest.

Have a nice weekend!

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #157 - The Final Module

Today it's just you and me. In order to not distract people from their work I decided to do this week's Dev Blog alone, but I can sum up the week in a nutshell for you: 

Emma & Martin: working on the trailer Emelie & Marcus: playtesting Johannes, Tomas, Jens & Johannes W: bug fixing We're all giving our best to deliver a polished build until next Tuesday, which will be our finale module launch before we transition into the pre-release phase and we'll start releasing updates/patches every 2-3 weeks. The perfect time to look back again how far we've come in the last 4 (!) years. It's no secret, if you've read the Development History of Crest, you know about all the hardships we've been through - from the initial hype to bankruptcy and now; our Indian Summer - we always pushed through. It's incredible to see how much Crest has changed since the beginning. You can still check out our initial prototype over at Gamejolt to see for yourself. Here's a small montage how Crest evolved over the years up until the Exploration Module:

Like many of you, when I first played Crest I saw the potential it had and was very fond of the philosophical approach to the classic god game genre but everything had still been very raw. Now, with the release of the Community Module, we're getting one step closer again to fulfill that potential. I'm pretty sure you'll will be impressed by how much the game has evolved in the last four months but also bare in mind: it's still early access, we're not finished. There will be performance issues, bugs and unbalanced features that will get smoothed out over timee. But we've only come so far thanks to the support and feedback of all of you, hence the name of the module; to commemorate you. Most of the new features and improvements in the module are based on suggestions from you. So please keep that feedback coming to make Crest even greater in the coming months. Next Tuesday a new era will start. Until then, keep updated by following us on Twitter & Facebook or have a chat with us on our verified Discord server.

I wish you all a splendid weekend! 

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #156 - Let’s hear it!

We continue teasing you about the forthcoming update, but for a change we also present a little treat for your ears. Find out what it is and what everyone's been working on this week.

Community

We found a lot of bugs at last weeks QA session at the university and more importantly, what causes them. A lot of them already got smashed but we're going to dedicate the entire week before the launch of the Community Module to fix as many as possible.

By the way we're now less than two weeks away from the release of the Community Module! Here's the song that will accompany the new trailer, made by Tuomas Nikkinen:

Art

Martin

The trailer is nearing completion, or at least the setting up part, I've created a lot of scenes, which I will now start animating. I usually split my time between all of the work I have to do. If there's several deliverables for the same project (in this case a trailer) I divide my time. So for example, if there's five scenes I've got to do, I split a day for 1-2 hours per scene. This keeps me focused on the big picture and I don't get lost in the details. What happens otherwise is that I might spend a day on one scene and the other ones are completely underdeveloped. Below you can see another work in progress render!

Emma

This week has been about 2-3 days of UI work and the rest on the trailer again! It's closing in on the animation phase, with some last touches to the setup of each scene. While I've been working on the trailer, the programmers have made some changes to how some of the UI works; which means that some of the original layouts didn't work anymore. So, small fixes to layouts and new graphics for the tutorial was on the agenda for this week.

Code

Johannes

After spending several days debugging a big freeze bug, I finally ended up fixing it by adding a single character in the right spot. That's programming for you. For the rest of the week I started working on making saves work again, as they always break during the development of a module. 

Jens

This week my focus has been on getting alliances and war to work properly. Alliances are now working fine, rewarding the cities with a sense of fellowship, better trade agreements, and free movement within each others borders. The war has been a harder nut to crack but it is getting there. Some unexpected bugs were also found and fixed which will result in reliable looting and raiding if the attacking nation wins the war. We have also made sure that the player commandments now have a lot more impact on how cities treat each other. Even though a lot has been improved, there is still a lot of balancing and tweaking left to be done before the module release.

Johannes W

This week I fixed the code for the new UI window that shows which cities are faithful, faithless, or undecided towards the player. The design for the faith and influence system was slightly changed, which I made sure was implemented in the code.

Influence is now based on the total amount of followers in faithful cities and faithless cities, where every follower in a faithful city adds 1 influence point as reward and every follower in a faithless city subtracts 1 point. Undecided followers add zero influence. A base influence value is added to make sure the player always receives influence points no matter what.

Tomas

I have worked closely with Emelie this week on continuing the development of the new tutorial. It is coming along nicely. The new tutorial should have a much better flow than the previous one and it is in the world, pointing to UI elements and in-world objects that are being described. It should be easier to learn the game with this iteration of the tutorial. Hopefully it's the last major rework of it! Most of the tutorial is actually completed, only minor tweaks remain for next week.

Design

Emelie

This week I have been working on the tutorial, working closely with Tomas. The text and the position of the bubbles have been iterated quite a bit and there are still things to be done, the structure is there and the focus now is to make the flow better and more guiding for the player. Other than the tutorial I've been playtesting in order to find bugs.

Production

Marcus

This week I have been going through the results from the playtesting we did last friday and documenting any found bugs to be exterminated. I have also done some additional playtesting on my own to make sure the new stuff we've been working on isn't broken. Together with this I have been setting up the planning for our final push to the Community Module, while also doing some company stuff.

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #155 - We got a date!

Lots of sneak peeks in this week's Dev Blog, let's cut straight to it!

Community

The Community Module will launch on 28th November! But hopefully you've already seen that by now. Once again, here what's going to be in there: Community Module - All the Infos

Today we're having a QA day at the local university, where we're trying to find as many bugs as possible together with the help of the students. Since this is still going, I can only show you a picture from the final preparations in the morning:

Art

Martin

Another week with the trailer and now I'm starting to see some real progress! It's pretty hard to make a trailer for Crest since the gameplay is not something you can understand at a glance like say a platformer or fps game. But our solution is to make cinematic trailers with some gameplay bits. Creating a cinematic for a game where most of the story is procedural and made by the player requires some finesse, you can't really tell a story of the characters in the game, because they're not important to the story, so what I can do is use symbolism, to try and tell an allegorical story that fits what you can experience inside of the game. Below you can see a test render of one of these symbolic scenes.

Emma

This week has been all about the trailer again, I am still new to Blender so a LOT of time this week has been about trying to figure out different systems and handling weird bugs(?). It's been a tiring week, but I learned a lot! Below is a funny setup in one of the scenes, inspired by the world in Animal Crossing. The mines are supposed to appear after the second character joins the first character, so this was a try to see how it would look if it rotated into view!

  Code

Johannes

This week I've finished implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This allows us to see what commandments are being used, how long people survive and so on. It also allows us to capture crashes and errors. It will be a great help to make sure that the game is balanced and bug free in the final release. 

Johannes W

This week I've completed the new story builder, graveyard, and end-screen feature. As this is the first complete version, it may need a revisit later for additional tweaks and added functionality. I think it works great at the moment and I look forward to see what stories our players will create when it's released! The next thing I'm working on is for a new UI window that will show information about the players Faith from cities and followers.

Tomas

I have implemented an entirely new tutorial system from scratch. It will be a more fluid approach, that wont interrupt gameplay as much as the old one did. I am especially pleased with how the tutorial window behaves when it is attached to objects in the game world, it follows them around. The basic functionality of the system is done but more is needed to finalize it and I will continue with it next week.

Jens

I have continued working on the disposition system, and now have finished the foundation. This means that I can move on to the branching subsystems which are trade, forming of alliances and waging war. The trade is almost finished, but some testing and balancing remains. Trading is now less convoluted and will emerge later during the gameplay to not overwhelm the player as soon as new cities start to form. We want the player to have more control of how and when trading occurs and it is now better tied into the disposition system.

Design

Emelie

I have been working on some design tasks from our big meeting a few weeks back, specifically on some special cases with hunger, looking a bit more into associations and the pacing of the game. It's essentially for the full release of the game and not for the community module, so it's not really our biggest priority now, which was why I went back to my other duties as QA for the last half of the week.

Production

Marcus

This week I have been busy with making sure that we are on track with the development of the game and preparing for our open QA session. Lots of playtesting on the schedule!

Have a nice weekend! 

[eatcreatesleepstudios]

Dev Blog #154 - Praise the Moon

Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached confidently. I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:

Community

The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm, where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board. 

In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.

Art

Martin

I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!

Emma

After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.

Code

Johannes

This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values.

I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing.

Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us.

Johannes W

This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs. We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week!

Tomas

I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments. I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it. With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week. Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder. 

Jens

A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it. It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.

Design

Emelie

This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance. I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well. 

Production

Marcus

This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken.

Have a nice weekend!