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[JobLeonard]

I saw someone hunt an antelope, so he must have gathered food, no? And yet the "have your people gather food" box didn't tick

[Greipur]

I saw someone hunt an antelope, so he must have gathered food, no? And yet the "have your people gather food" box didn't tick

Ah, I see. If I recall correctly we turn off the "get food" instinct in the tutorial, but since we've remodeled their behaviour in the new city needs system it's quite possible that the programmers didn't have time to fix that part of the tutorial. I think the tick only checks if they hunt and you told them to, it's possible they hunted on their own accord. Thanks for spotting it.

Having a tutorial for this game in early access is tricky since the core is in constant flux due to the added systems. Perhaps we should make a future tutorial cut off from the rest of the game in a permanent tutorial world. Or some other solution, I'm open to suggestions.

[JobLeonard]

I don't think that will solve it, since the underlying issue is one of interlocked systems that are in flux.

I mean, that's just a basic software architecture problem: you want these things to be modular black boxes that only interact through explicitly exposed parts. Which is crazy hard to get right, especially if things change all the time.

[Greipur]

True, it's the nature of the beast. Wouldn't solve your specific problem (systems) of course, but could solve others. Having a fixed tutorial world would make a reproducable environment where we know exactly how the player would experience it. I think one of the problems with the current one is that it's basically the base game with a tutorial on top off it. And in the main game it's fine, it's supposed to be random and sometimes a little bit unfair, but in a tutorial that can be very problematic.


But feel free to try the game again in a few days when we've uploaded a hotfix. I would be interested to hear what you think about the rest of the new update.

[JobLeonard]

Oh, there is one more piece of feedback: could you make the zoom go more smoothly? Especially since you currently zoom in and out of UI elements too (not sure if that was intended or not).

I'm kind of struggling with not being able to read the icons, trying to zoom in, then having the GUI cut off from the screen because the zoom level jumped too much, having to change the perspective and such again.

All the other camera controls are much more fine grained, so currently zooming stands out for that reason too, and not in a good way.

[Greipur]

Oh, there is one more piece of feedback: could you make the zoom go more smoothly? Especially since you currently zoom in and out of UI elements too (not sure if that was intended or not).

I'm kind of struggling with not being able to read the icons, trying to zoom in, then having the GUI cut off from the screen because the zoom level jumped too much, having to change the perspective and such again.

All the other camera controls are much more fine grained, so currently zooming stands out for that reason too, and not in a good way.

Does your problem persist even when you change camera zoom speed in options?

[JobLeonard]

Ah, that helps. However, I noticed another oddity: zooming doesn't happen if my mouse is hovering over a UI element.

Also, I personally prefer if zooming behaves in such a way that it homes in on the mouse cursor instead of the center of the screen, adjusting panning and height as required. It's a well-known "intuitive UI"-thing.

[Greipur]

Ah, that helps. However, I noticed another oddity: zooming doesn't happen if my mouse is hovering over a UI element.

Also, I personally prefer if zooming behaves in such a way that it homes in on the mouse cursor instead of the center of the screen, adjusting panning and height as required. It's a well-known "intuitive UI"-thing.

Thanks for the suggestion!


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We have spent the last three days with making a hotfix (which is live now on Steam and itch). Mainly fixing the biggest problems so the players can see the City State update. Most of the work we have done on the City State update is "late game" stuff, or "mid game", and in the state we released it in a few days ago the players could hardly access that. The simple reason being that the AI was too busy making stupid decisions (such as building too many farms) so they never established more cities, and thus never creating more city states.

[Greipur]

Here's the return of the hyena! Since we're in the middle of new modules Christoffer and I can focus on leftovers, in my case finishing up on the hyena. The walk cycle is the only animation left, this is a WIP gif.

In other news we're still fixing bugs, and Christoffer is making interesting shaders for rivers and lakes, which I will probably share the progress of shortly.

[JobLeonard]

I did not know hyena's had an ambling gait

[Greipur]

I did not know hyena's had an ambling gait

Me neither beforehand! Here's one of the references I've used. Amateur footage on YouTube is a goldmine for animal references I've found (when Muybridge's books are lacking).

[Greipur]

Here's Christoffer's magic shader for rivers and lakes.

The unique problem we have in Crest is that rivers and lakes are procedural and can change, which worked fine in the 2d tile era (and for those simulation games still utilising 2d), but is a little more complex for a 3d game such as Crest. In Crest a single polygon is a tile, and although it's possible to extrude them downwards we would need to do that a lot at runtime since rivers and lakes change with time in the game. At the moment rivers and lakes look like this, which doesn't look believable at all.

To save us some headache Christoffer made a shader that masks vertex colour and uses that as a basis. Since the tile polygons in the game already uses vertex colouring we can plug the shader into that.


The river uses a normal map that rolls across a UV space and also a flow map that makes it look more "runny". The lake has two slowly rolling normal maps that is shifting between each other to create a fake flow map, so we don't have to generate a procedural one. The lake and the river uses the same normal map.

And here's where it gets truly interesting for me, with vertex offset the masked areas are lowered down, which creates the illusion that they are extruded down, but the polygons are still just planar. Though one problem remains and that is that we will use the real vertex colours for the shader, but that's for Johannes to fix, when he's available.

[JobLeonard]

But seriously, looks great!

Feedback on the hyena: based on that footage, I think the front paws should move slightly ahead of the back ones, not in perfect lockstep.

[Greipur]

But seriously, looks great!

Thanks, Job! Wait 'til you see it in-game, I imagine that it will look great anyways.

Feedback on the hyena: based on that footage, I think the front paws should move slightly ahead of the back ones, not in perfect lockstep.

Ok, good suggestion, I will take a look at that now.


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YouTube Coverage = Steam Reviews


Here's a little observation of the day, the little people on YouTube will go a long way in your marketing strategy. Since they are small they are more keen to get noticed, and will use all available channels to be seen. This usually leads to Steam reviews, which I find critical if you want to succeed on the platform. Even if they don't gush endlessly about how great it is they drive the amount of reviews up. They make the game seem less obscure, whatever their opinion is. In return they can get noticed through the biggest desktop game store page on the internet. Don't forget to support this ecosystem, don't forget to look at people who don't have 42 million subscribers.

Co-dependence is the key word here I think. Most of the lets players that have bothered with reviewing Crest usually have less than 10K subs, and I think it's understandable. If I would have say, 100K subs I would've probably gained enough momentum to just focus on making good videos rather than doing guerilla marketing.

This also means that you should help them get noticed, retweet them, make their job easier (we have a press kit designed for YouTube), you will both prosper the more you cooperate.

[JobLeonard]

Feedback on the hyena: based on that footage, I think the front paws should move slightly ahead of the back ones, not in perfect lockstep.

Ok, good suggestion, I will take a look at that now.

On re-examination, it looks like the hip of the back leg almost touches the front leg before the front leg moves might be the other way around

Point is, it looks like it's not quite in sync... somehow. You're probably better at figuring this out than me anyway

As for small youtubers: being "inclusive" is good business in general I guess

[Greipur]

When it comes to art assets we've already started on the upcoming modules, Faith is the next one. That update will make the commandment system more interesting and we will finally update our archaic association system, among other things.


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Christoffer has been working on the priest class. This class is meant to show the player how different cities feel about their personal interpretations and how they will argue with others.

I'm finishing up on the hyena's animation controller.

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Currently the rest of the team is working hard to fix the hiccups in the City State update, with a new hotfix out tomorrow. The most important part being the hunger system, which worked quite bad before. Basically you have a food storage that people put food into and when they are hungry they will take from that resource and reduce their hunger level. Simple enough, but with the old implementation they ate constantly. We have now added thresholds (for example 100, 80, 60 etc.) so they will only take food from storage when getting below, say 40.

In the future we can use this "hunger tolerance" for commandments as well, to make it so that different people are more prone to be greedy. We will see how that plays out.



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In other news it seems that our cooperation with our new PR partner is beginning to bear fruit! Blitzkriegsler played our game yesterday!

[JobLeonard]

> That update will make the commandment system more interesting and we will finally update our archaic association system, among other things.

What's the new system going to be like?

[oldblood]

New video is great. Shows a good taste of the gameplay in a short window of time. Congrats on the new PR partner, definitely looks like its getting some results.

[Greipur]

> That update will make the commandment system more interesting and we will finally update our archaic association system, among other things.

What's the new system going to be like?

In a sense their new faith stems from their situation, in this case our City Needs system. Basically their City Needs will create their comfort zone, which informs what commandments they like. Instead of commandments decaying over time universally and unconditionally they will rather forget what doesn't mean something to them. And what means something might get rewritten to something they prefer (as in fulfilling a need closer to their comfort zone). So associations will not be arbitrarily decided as before.


Also, Job. New hotfix out tomorrow. You should try the tutorial and rest of the game tomorrow after 17:00, UTC +1 if you have the time. I think you'll have a better time than two weeks ago.

New video is great. Shows a good taste of the gameplay in a short window of time. Congrats on the new PR partner, definitely looks like its getting some results.

Thanks Jon! And I also want to add that why I'm not sharing info about our partner freely is just because I think I should be a little more restrained with talking about business partners publicly. I think it's a good habit. But I will of course share more when I feel the time is right.

[JobLeonard]

Also, Job. New hotfix out tomorrow. You should try the tutorial and rest of the game tomorrow after 17:00, UTC +1 if you have the time. I think you'll have a better time than two weeks ago.

Looking forward to giving it a spin! The game is improving slowly but surely