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[oldblood]

So we've had a great discussion with the people in our community about what they expect and what kind of support packages we should make. I think we'll stick to digital goods, which we'll have to do for our Indiegogo anyway. And they liked that we were upfront with our financial status.

Just curious, from a business perspective-- why Indiegogo? Kickstarter has a dramatically larger user base and provides more organic users who are likely to stumble on your project even without press. I've never used Indiegogo, but I have used Kickstarter and a surprising percentage (about 40% came organically from Kickstarter as a Staff Pick + various related project tie-ins, 24 hour notices etc). So I can't attest to what to expect from IGG but just vouching that there is a very large market of KS users which will give you a much larger organic base of users.

[Greipur]

So we've had a great discussion with the people in our community about what they expect and what kind of support packages we should make. I think we'll stick to digital goods, which we'll have to do for our Indiegogo anyway. And they liked that we were upfront with our financial status.

Just curious, from a business perspective-- why Indiegogo? Kickstarter has a dramatically larger user base and provides more organic users who are likely to stumble on your project even without press. I've never used Indiegogo, but I have used Kickstarter and a surprising percentage (about 40% came organically from Kickstarter as a Staff Pick + various related project tie-ins, 24 hour notices etc). So I can't attest to what to expect from IGG but just vouching that there is a very large market of KS users which will give you a much larger organic base of users.

It was by necessity rather than choice. Back in June, 2014 our country wasn't eligible for Kickstarter. And we didn't know anyone trustworthy to work with us in the UK or USA. I think the only reason you see game projects on Indiegogo today is because they didn't find a way in. Kickstarter became available in Sweden just a month after we ended our campaign, which was maddening to say the least.

I've also come to the understanding that you gain a lot of visitors from Kickstarter's website itself. We didn't gain many at all from Indiegogo. It was like pulling teeth. We got a lot of exposure last summer, let's plays, write-ups on bigger sites such as Rock, Paper, Shotgun but almost everyone was alienated by the platform. Most backers who actually supported us didn't back anything else which supports the idea that they registered to back our project. That's a pretty steep entry point. I personally prefer to use Kickstarter as a backer.


I wouldn't recommend Indiegogo for digital game projects, but I feel sympathy for those who "have to". When we make our next crowdfunding campaign for a new game we'll pick Kickstarter.


Edit: I re-read everything and I realise that I might've given the impression (in the earlier post) that we're going to make a campaign. But I merely meant that we're going to fulfill the perks for our campaign we had last year. Eitherway, you're right and we will never use Indiegogo again.

[Igor Sandman]

Maybe the grassy bank looks a bit too even? It creates a visual banding that feels a bit unnatural, I think.
I like the colors, that being said.

[Greipur]

Maybe the grassy bank looks a bit too even? It creates a visual banding that feels a bit unnatural, I think.
I like the colors, that being said.

Thanks, that's great feedback. I changed it and it looks much better now. Here's some new colours for the desert and savannah as well.

[JobLeonard]

Oh wow, impressive how much of a difference such a tiny change makes!

[Greipur]

Oh wow, impressive how much of a difference such a tiny change makes!

Yeah, I'm glad I returned to it. Here's the pattern to rule them all:






In Unity every mesh becomes a game object and since we use a procedural tile system every couple of tiles needs their meshes. To change all this at run-time with switching a lot of game objects was really stressful on the system. So we had to group together meshes into one to reduce the amount of game objects. Been tricky to make tileable meshes for that purpose (there can be problems in slopes, for example), but I'm happy I have you people helping out.

[monoRAIL]

Nice to see someone making a decent attempt at a game about religion. I had always wanted to do this but never found the right mechanic to make it work. I had originally intended for my last game (fossil swap - http://fossilswap.com) to be a satire on creationism, but I couldn't incorporate the message into it without distorting the gameplay so much that it became less fun, so I ultimately removed most of the religious stuff.

I like your concept of letting the players write their own commandments. I wonder if players will come to the conclusion that morality must come within and should never be dictated to them by taking on the role of a moral dictator.

[JobLeonard]

It could be the perspective, but did you change the width of the river's edge as well in the new screenshot? Before it had a fixed width and was perfectly aligned with the river.

Might look better if that varies a bit, giving a bit of organic randomness to the landscape?

[Greipur]

Nice to see someone making a decent attempt at a game about religion.

I'm glad you appreciate it. I think the hard part with religion is not taking it too literal, of course I don't mean creationism but belief in a diety (or deities) in general. I think Ursula K. Le Guin has a fantastic quote from one of her sci-fi books.

“The unknown […]the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on.

Ignorance is the base of thought. Unproof is the base of action. If it were proven that there is no god there would be no religion. […]But also if it were proven that there is a god, there would be no religion…”

Faith as I understand it is based on believing in what can't be proven in a material existence. So in order to make mechanics that gives that feeling we had to go for indirect control, and give the people a will to interpret on their own. That's why you can't shape the world in any way, because then god's existance would have been proven by a hundred percent. By having them do things you could just as well imagine that you're some impostor acting like god, sort of like Leto II Atreides in God Emperor of Dune.

I wonder if players will come to the conclusion that morality must come within and should never be dictated to them by taking on the role of a moral dictator.

I and the team would be happy if people came to any conclusions by playing the game. There are several messages in the game for sure, such as that religion can be ambiguous, people have several reasons to believe in something and interpret it differently. I've personally come to the conclusions that extremes and homogeneity can be fatal, which was something that I realised from playing with this emergent system. I hope different people come with their own conclusions.

Regarding dictatorship I would rather say that the player is like a parent and your followers are your children. So it's a dynamic relationship where you need each other, since we focus on expression we want the player to have their own goal with their people. Perhaps they want to create a clone of themselves, or they like to give away love unconditionally, who knows?

It could be the perspective, but did you change the width of the river's edge as well in the new screenshot? Before it had a fixed width and was perfectly aligned with the river.

Might look better if that varies a bit, giving a bit of organic randomness to the landscape?

Since it's a dynamic system related to the amount of water that is always different. Some rivers grow, usually they turn into lakes eventually. The image above was "hand-painted" though, our lead programmer, Johannes did a nifty tool where we can paint tiles to try them out.

The water system is kind of broken at the moment and Johannes is fixing it. He can probably write an interesting summation on how it works later.

[monoRAIL]

if it were proven that there is a god, there would be no religion…”

I think that's a fantastic quote, and very relevant today. Once a god's existence is proven it becomes part of the natural world, and is no longer mysterious or divine. We've seen that in the past, aspects of nature such as volcanoes or lightning were considered divine (Vulcan and Thor for example) but now that we have an understanding of these phenomena the gods that personified them are dead.

Today we're seeing a huge push against evolution and cosmology from evangelical Christians in America, and I think that's because their god has been 'proven', in other words, as we reach a clearer scientific understanding of the diversity of life and the formation of the universe, what was attributed to Yahweh, the Christian creator god, has become part of the natural world and is no longer divine. A god whose realm is understood is doomed to fade away, and that is a painful process for his followers, as we're seeing today.

I suspect that religions that enforce their belief systems more forcefully (such as extreme Islam) or religions that attempt to explain aspects of life still beyond scientific explanation (such as Scientology and their system of alien posession) will overtake Christianity in the coming centuries. One could describe the 'evolution of religions' and predict which ones will fade quite accurately, and perhaps your game could model this with competing religions set against the backdrop of increasing scientific understanding.

[Greipur]

if it were proven that there is a god, there would be no religion…”

I think that's a fantastic quote, and very relevant today. Once a god's existence is proven it becomes part of the natural world, and is no longer mysterious or divine. We've seen that in the past, aspects of nature such as volcanoes or lightning were considered divine (Vulcan and Thor for example) but now that we have an understanding of these phenomena the gods that personified them are dead.

Today we're seeing a huge push against evolution and cosmology from evangelical Christians in America, and I think that's because their god has been 'proven', in other words, as we reach a clearer scientific understanding of the diversity of life and the formation of the universe, what was attributed to Yahweh, the Christian creator god, has become part of the natural world and is no longer divine. A god whose realm is understood is doomed to fade away, and that is a painful process for his followers, as we're seeing today.

I suspect that religions that enforce their belief systems more forcefully (such as extreme Islam) or religions that attempt to explain aspects of life still beyond scientific explanation (such as Scientology and their system of alien posession) will overtake Christianity in the coming centuries. One could describe the 'evolution of religions' and predict which ones will fade quite accurately, and perhaps your game could model this with competing religions set against the backdrop of increasing scientific understanding.

That is certainly one possible way to interpret Ursula's quote. However, I think from the context of the whole quote, and the book in question I read into it that she means the existance of an actual divine being. If it was proven that there is an actual god sitting in the sky controlling our lives we wouldn't need to believe in it. The same would be true if we somehow could peer into an ethereal world and conclude that nope, nobody is home. I don't want to drone on for too long about this here but I wrote a guest blog at Continue Play about this at length. In short I mean that if we live in a literal world we have no need for faith.

Even if there are literal people among us I personally believe that faith comes from somewhere else. And that's why faith can always have a place for some. We can disprove people's claims of the divine in a material world as you say, but not outside of it. My understanding is that religion is much more than explaining natural phenomena today, and I know several people with faith who have no problem with separating the belief in a materialistic and evidence based world and the belief in an ethereal one. There is no inherent conflict if we reconcile them.

Crest is not an anti-religious game, it tries to examine our religious history, why people were (and still are) religious, and how societies evolves by building a religion. If Crest is anti anything then I would say anti-extremism, in the sense that if we close off our world view to a limited set of values we can become hindered.

What the player does in Crest is really to force their people to change in order to survive. And the only constant in the universe is change, as Heraclitus and Frank Herbert says.

[Greipur]

Right now we're working hard for a PR push, which our PR agency has suggested. The core of that push will be our new trailer showcasing new things since April. It's also trying to explain the game concept some more and also give the viewer some flavour of the world.

Since we're going to have monologue and more people than me are working on the trailer I decided to do my own script with a semi-traditional style you find for films. Though, I rejected things I disliked since there's no need to slavishly copy another medium. You can also see our basic storyboard in the background.









Basically I focus on the gameplay bits and Christoffer makes in-between sequences that he animates and render out. It was inspired in part by Hitman GO's abstract representation of people, moving as pieces on a board game. I thought this could serve an instructional purpose in our game and also enhance the impression that Crest is a game about heavy abstraction.







The monologue is inspired partly by the Dishonored 2 trailer, which I personally found very engaging (since I like the franchise and also think it was well crafted). I came across this trailer during E3 and I guess it's a camripped version since it begins 10 seconds into the trailer and seems to be of lesser quality. But it set my mind in motion since I actually like this accidental cut better than the "real" trailer. So my plan is to start the monologue just a second in, just as The Outsider here starts with "Again".

I have to issue a trigger warning for the trailer below, I'm not particularly squeamish, but there's a sequence in the middle which made me uneasy. Parasitical infestation to be exact.








I want our voice to be delivered in similar undertones, if we're going to stay on the right side of not being pretentious I think we need to cut down the theatrical. We have a person on the island (a team member's friend) who speaks English as their mother tongue so we'll get help delivering a more professional quality.

If you wonder about the peculiar title for our trailer it was inspired by the Dune world (which I mentioned earlier). There one of the characters influence humanity to choose a certain path of moderation. I think Frank Herbert took the concept of the golden mean, or that's my interpretation at least. And I think it's fitting to use these concepts to explain our game. So "Your Golden Path" is really a call to action to the player, that we give them the tools to find their own balance in the game.


I will post more tangible things soon!

[Greipur]

Thanks to Johannes hard work revamping the water and vegetation system Crest's world is starting to resemble a lush world rather than a wasteland!

[JobLeonard]

I feel this sudden urge to sing the Lion King opening theme

[Greipur]

I feel this sudden urge to sing the Lion King opening theme

Then, by all means, sing! Sing!






Though, in all honesty Roland's actual soundtrack tries a little harder at not being stereotypically African.





In other news, we're working on the trailer. Christoffer is finished with the rough version of the cinematic part and I've been filming footage. This is the fifth trailer for Crest I've done so I'm working pretty quickly now to get what I want, which is a welcome change of pace. Oskar also gave me a couple of cheat codes so I don't have to play the game seriously to showcase it, which is a huge boon. I guess it would go without saying, but before I had to play the game for a minute or two in order to get the footage I want, not anymore! It's like a good rig for animation, the more streamlined you make it the more you'll enjoy animating, and the better result you'll see.









Blender might be a wonky program sometimes, but it's proven to be very good when collaborating on making this trailer. They have a concept called "Scenes" where you basically put meshes, textures and animations into one continous strip. This scene can then be appended in the video sequencer and is treated as a video file, even though it's not rasterised. The green strips above are Christoffer's rendered parts and the blue ones are the gameplay I captured with Fraps.








So we planned the timing and lenght together and then I just had to append the scenes from his .blend file into mine and it works flawlessly. I'll probably get into more detail of the editing after the dust settles. We've a deadline that is looming ahead of us!

[Greipur]

Today we recorded the monologue for our new trailer at Roland's own home studio. It was a lot of fun collaborating with Christoffer's friend. Roland also played the audio for the trailer and I would say that it's the best track for Crest yet!

[JobLeonard]

Looking forward to it!

[Greipur]

I think you'll enjoy it, JobLeonard! It's going up on Monday.


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I just wanted to pop in to say that we're going to stream tomorrow, play Crest and talk about production and whatnot. Feel free to drop in and ask us things if you can take the time away from your own games. We're going live on our Twitch channel at 15:00, UTC +2.

[Greipur]

Here is the new trailer, enjoy! If you're interested I'll post more in-depth about how we did it soon.

By the way, Christoffer did this infographic for the history of Crest. It's our way to quickly communicate the progress of Crest to press and our community.

[JobLeonard]

Looks really good! Only point of critique I have is that the clouds draw too much attention.