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[JobLeonard]

As always, I just throw out ideas without caring about the energy and time it would take; that's your responsibility as the developers

BTW, do the council and the chronicler occupy the same "space", or are they in completely different "worlds"? Since they both represent supernatural afterlife elements I'm wondering how, if at all, they're tied together in-game.

Also, early on in the design the idea was to try and keep it ambiguous if you (the god) were "real" in the divine sense or more of an emergent manifestation of society. The chronicler and council nudges clearly towards the spiritual being "real" in this game. What are your thoughts on that?

[Greipur]

BTW, do the council and the chronicler occupy the same "space", or are they in completely different "worlds"? Since they both represent supernatural afterlife elements I'm wondering how, if at all, they're tied together in-game.

They occupy the same space in time. In a sense The Chonicler is the grandparent of all people, that's what we've come up to thematically at least. The Chronicler was the first human to die and as such is a bit more special than humans coming after, they can't have as much experience. The Chronicler is also cursed or blessed with immortality just as god, so in a sense The Chronicler is the closest person to the player. The advisors fade away after a cycle, which is our take on the "second death" which I've understood some traditional religions on the African continent believed (and believe) in.

Also, early on in the design the idea was to try and keep it ambiguous if you (the god) were "real" in the divine sense or more of an emergent manifestation of society. The chronicler and council nudges clearly towards the spiritual being "real" in this game. What are your thoughts on that?

My first thoughts are that you're beginning to sound like a heretic!  

Jokes aside, we still keep the physical and spiritual realm pretty separate. What I mean by that is that the people who're currently alive could in a sense remain atheist (or agnostic) for all of their life and then wake up in the afterlife and say "huh, I guess I was wrong", an agnostic would just shrug I guess. Anyway, we keep it ambiguous in the player's major play space, i.e. the island (or islands in the future).

The limitations of the medium constricts us to make the statement of agnosticism the be-all and end-all of Crest. In the game we know that god exists, otherwise the player could not exist. The player also needs and wants clear cut feedback delivery methods that are not too ambiguous. We need some way of keeping record of the player's doings, and we also don't want the afrofuturism theme to just be a facade so we try to incorporate different beliefs into the mechanics. I would argue that most god games before Crest operated with the Christian god (the capital G maker) as template, broadening the discussion of different afterlives is a good thing I think.

It could sound like we want to keep the cake and eat it too, and it might be true but read this excerpt from a book I'm currently reading.

"These last [standing stones] had perhaps once been of religious significance to the now atheistical Rime Islers - who were atheists not in the sense that they did not believe in gods (that would have been very difficult for any dweller in the world of Nehwon) but that they did not socialize with any such gods or harken in any way to their commands, threats, and cajolings."

In a sense we might make it so that it looks like atheists are indeed wrong in Crest. Sadly games can seldom be as ambiguous as say, a good film (or other linear media) such as Jacob's Ladder. Who knows what Jacob saw in the end, was it just a dilerious drug trip and impending death hallucinations, or truly a spiritual experience? Who knows, doesn't matter, the viewer nor the creator doesn't need to take sides. We have to, the mechanics demands it. Making a more linear game might've worked, but that makes it hard to interact with faith, rather than having it as window dressing imho.

So in short, yes, Crest might become less ambiguous, but when it comes to the core theme of reinterpretation I think we're still on the money.

[JobLeonard]

Excellent clarificaiton

The loss of ambiguity was kind of inevitable, given that we have a player with agency representing the god. But I think that having it as a goal, even if by definition unreachable, has nudged the design decisions away from taking the path of least resistance and actually come up with some interesting alternatives.

[Greipur]

Excellent clarificaiton

The loss of ambiguity was kind of inevitable, given that we have a player with agency representing the god. But I think that having it as a goal, even if by definition unreachable, has nudged the design decisions away from taking the path of least resistance and actually come up with some interesting alternatives.

I'm glad. Yeah, for sure, I see no problem with having to back out from certain design tenents, as long as you haven't hyped it to hell beforehand, but that's not our style anyway so I think we're all good.


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Our buttons for PAX West just arrived, as is apparently tradition they're sought after and our american pr representative thought we should have them, and here they are. I think we ordered 600 of them. The event starts tomorrow by the way, we'll be at the Minibooth section of the Indie MEGABOOTH area at PAX West.

[s0]

those buttons look cool! 

[io3 creations]

Definitely eye-catching!

[Greipur]

those buttons look cool!  

Thanks, I'm pretty pleased with them, in fact I'd probably wear a few myself, but I'm biased, hehe.

Definitely eye-catching!

Now that's a pun eye don't see everyday.  


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Here's some more concept art! Christoffer is currently making art for our new worker called "socialiser" which walks around making their neighbourhood better, it's meant to be a new action that the player can command.

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Here's more concept art for advisors, this one is meant to be a nature loving Preserver, kind of look like a zombie from Last of Us though.

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We've also uploaded the build we're using for PAX on our debug branch on Steam now btw, feel free to try it out. Our new commandment GUI and association mechanic are some of the stuff we're putting out there to try out.

[JobLeonard]

I think you're on the right track though, with nature "digesting" the remains. I dig the plants growing out of the eye-sockets; reminds me of getting sprouted in Grim Fandango.

"There's nothing more horrible than the bite of the sprouter. Its deadly stinger spreads a green disease through every calcified pore on your body......leaving you veined with roots and flocked with grass......steadily growing thicker and thicker until you crash and bloom out......in a horrifying bouquet of pain and fragrant suffering......screaming until your mouth fills with petals and your nostrils shoot out thorny stems......and the bulbs sprout in your eyes......leaving you nothing but a patch of wildflowers on the ground, swarming with butterflies."

Speaking of which, why not start with a skeleton and adding "muscle" tissue that is actually plant vines and leaves?

[Greipur]

I had totally forgot the sprouting in Grim Fandango, what an oddball game that was (in a good way), too bad the puzzles frustrated me to no end, so I will probably never bother playing it again (I did finish it though). But I digress, yeah, plants go well together with death.

The flowers in the sockets comes from an image I saw from a Famadihana ritual on Madagascar, I thought it was a morbidly beautiful gesture. I've actually consciously tried to stay away from Day of the Dead and Calavera symbolism just because it's so distinct and would dilute Crest's direction, but damn, is it graphically distinct and interesting. Luckily the African continent has a lot fascinating stuff as well regarding ancestor worship.



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Anyway, PAX West is doing well Erik tells me, lots of meetings with press and other devs, will have a more detailed report in the coming week. Here's some of Erik's images.

[quantumpotato]

Can you make it multiplayer where the people are played by humans on an idle game where they press a button every few seconds to perform the next action and get expulsed from the tribe if they don't press the button (obey the commandments) replaced by a new player?

[Greipur]

Can you make it multiplayer where the people are played by humans on an idle game where they press a button every few seconds to perform the next action and get expulsed from the tribe if they don't press the button (obey the commandments) replaced by a new player?

We have joked around with it sometimes, we did it actually this week, some kind of insane MMO. Though, in all seriousness we plan some sort of optional succession game progression similar to the famous Boatmurdered forum play for Dwarf Fortress. But that would still be singleplayer more or less. It would be interesting to see a god game done from the ground up with multiplayer in mind (instead of a mode), I hope someone makes one some day.

[quantumpotato]

Can you make it multiplayer where the people are played by humans on an idle game where they press a button every few seconds to perform the next action and get expulsed from the tribe if they don't press the button (obey the commandments) replaced by a new player?

We have joked around with it sometimes, we did it actually this week, some kind of insane MMO. Though, in all seriousness we plan some sort of optional succession game progression similar to the famous Boatmurdered forum play for Dwarf Fortress. But that would still be singleplayer more or less. It would be interesting to see a god game done from the ground up with multiplayer in mind (instead of a mode), I hope someone makes one some day.

You implemented the multiplayer.. !?

[JobLeonard]

I think he meant that they discussed it this week

[Greipur]

Yeah, we merely joked around with it, sorry if I was unclear. We've never considered multiplayer. It would be way out of scope of what Crest is meant to be. We'd probably need to spend a few more years if so, time we don't have (or have the energy for either for that matter).

[Greipur]

Catching Up With Life Update (Investors, Events and Progress)


So uh, sorry for not staying in touch. Been a few hectic weeks, as usual I might add. In order to make amends here's a chunky dev blog post with lots of different stuff. Here goes!


The reason we've had a little bit of on/off communication here as of late has been due to us running around and preparing for events, either cons or investor meetups. For example last week Johannes and I stood at the Swedish Nasdaq stock market pitching our studio in front of probably 100 investors and industry veterans from Starbreeze, Paradox etc. Probably one of the scariest things I've done since I started as an indie dev three years ago. But it had to be done, we need funding to be able to sustain a healthy company, so we don't just push out Crest quickly and slowly fade away. Regardless of how good Crest does with its full launch you still need a buffer of a few months before the sales drop into your pocket. A proper marketing budget doesn't hurt either.

Johannes and I at the showfloor at Nadsdaq Stockholm, Christoffer took the pictures.

Here's from the dragon's den which was part of the event, that we participated in, we came second out of 4 teams. We managed to find a few interesting contacts, we'll see how it develops.



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Speaking of events Christoffer and Emelie is currently at another event called Startup Sweden, a sort of boot camp for startups (this time around 10 game startups) and meet and greet with the industry and investors. This photo is from last night.

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Regarding Crest a lot has happened since I last wrote. Programming-wise we've come far with the advisor and chronicler systems. In order for the Chroncicler to be able to summarise different time periods you need a big data collector, which Tomas has spent a lot of time on. Apart from that they've done an interface so you can select individual followers (names are placeholder, they will not have English names or any names at all in the final version).

Other than that Jesper has been improving the city needs system, basically they had unlimited "likes" before, which could mean that they had filled the whole spider chart and wanted to do everything all the time. We now "simply" give them x amount of "like points" (or whatever you should call it) so each city will have slightly different needs.

And Johannes is currently making it so that people have personal storage as well as a communal. This is actually a step back to how it was done once, we realised that taking away all resource gathering from individual followers made all followers similar. Since commandments target individuals you can understand where I'm getting at, they won't listen to all of the player's weird commandments. Hopefully we'll find a good middleground of "city state politics" and individual follower behaviour.

And Emelie has been writing a lot of advice texts for the different advisors, she tells me she's written three variants of each advice, which will hopefully won't make the game feel stale after five minutes of use.




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Over to art! Christoffer did a fancy render of the socialiser class.

I've been spending a lot of time in the underworld, apart from pitching our studio that is. Done with the advisor concept art at last.

From left to right: United, Maintainers, Preservers, Hegemony, Profiteers, Flexible

Now I'm spending my time conjuring up how the underworld looks like as a place, I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Lake Natron in Tanzania. But I also think that the Faith trailer experiments has left some lasting ideas in my head, I'm imagining this place as an obsidian place full of sleek surfaces, sort of. Mostly monochrome colour scheme I think, maybe black and gold or blue and black.


Photographer Nick Brandt found animals at Lake Natron which is highly poisonous and calcifies carcasses, here's one of his images. This is also a major inspiration.

I've this idea that the underworld is an underground world not in the usual sense but sort of a shadow world, or a mirror image of our own, mirrorverse? And to me the night sky gives a sense of living in a huge cave, or at least gives a sense of awe, so yeah, underground sea cave with mountains and night sky, no problem, it makes sense. The image above is mostly a photo and paint bash to try the idea out, will do more concept art, please give me feedback on what you like, and what you don't like.


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Puh, what an update, hopefully I'll manage to find time to make weekly updates at least in the coming months.

[JobLeonard]

You could have at least told me you were in Stockholm...

[Greipur]

You could have at least told me you were in Stockholm...

Sorry, been superstressed and superbusy, had tunnel vision before, during and after the Stockholm trip, so didn't really have processing power for anything else. Maybe next time?




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The Question of Scale


This is something that has been on my mind for some time, from time to time people on our forum or YouTube comments/reviewers etc. say that people in Crest are giants, and that it looks weird. I've often ignored these comments in the past, but when it comes to a certain point when fans also start talking about it you can't dismiss it. I'm posting this here because I want some other professional opinions. I've also thought about it, but it's hard to pinpoint, you see, when you've worked on something since 2013 and been so close to it you can sometimes lose perspective, we need your help.


The comments about giants are probably due to one or more of these three reasons:

• People don't expect god games to have this symbolical representation.
• The scale is not "symbolical enough", as in people still think the world is realistic, and the characters aren't.
• The same people who think Crest has giants think that grand strategy games also look weird, as such a matter of taste, nothing else.

The reason for the scaling is of course that it's symbolical, we're simulating the cradle of humankind, which might consist of say, 100,000 people. This would be cumbersome to show and to simulate, probably hard for the player to digest as well. We're using the big people, small world idea inspired by board games and grand strategy games.




Here's a recent screenshot of the current build.

And here's some of the games I previously mentioned, which can be used as a sort of comparison. We've taken conscious inspiration from them all too.

Civilization 5, Firaxis Games

Endless Legend, Amplitude Studios

Total War: Rome II, The Creative Assembly

Armello, League of Geeks

These games are in many aspects very different from Crest of course, yet they need to present information for the player in a similar fashion as we have to for Crest. Of course we've looked at god games for some general cues, but they've long since abandoned the symbolical scale you can see in games such as Populous from 1989.

Populous, Bullfrog

So, with the inspirations and comparisons out of the way, feel free to suggest what Crest could do differently to heighten the symbolical representation that makes it gel better. Thanks!

[JobLeonard]

Why not run with it and say this is set in the age when giant man and beast roamed the world

[Greipur]

Why not run with it and say this is set in the age when giant man and beast roamed the world

The joke is not lost on me, however I don't feel that I can just explain it away. Excuses does not a good game make.

[s0]

my 2 cents: i think the scale is fine as is. in absolute numbers, how many people actually consider this a problem? because there's always going to be a vocal minority asking for more "realism". if you're considering the change due to fear of losing your audience, that might be something to keep in mind. very few strategy games use anywhere near realistic scales because readability takes precedence when you have a lot going on. you already mentioned civ which has people taller than buildings and is one of the most popular strategy series ever.

if you really wanted, you could use more and smaller characters a la the settlers series or you you replace the big characters with groups of small characters with an icon over them for easier readability, though that might end up looking more awkward than what you currently have.

anyway, great game, keep up the good work.