Hello everyone, and welcome to the long-delayed sixth Producer’s Letter for Solace Crafting.
I’m Fab. Today’s letter is dense with updates on where Solace Crafting stands and where it’s heading.
We’ll talk Builder, Optimization, Modding, Creatures, Dungeons, Landscapes, Solaces and more.
A year ago, Kyle and I teamed up to revitalize Solace Crafting. For him, it’s his life’s work and livelihood. For me, it’s about taking projects and people I believe in to the next level. The survival game market has changed fast since Valheim, and we knew Solace Crafting couldn’t sit still.
We didn’t wait for perfect funding or timing. We just jumped in, pulled from ourselves what wasn’t provided, and started building.
At first, momentum was easy. Then life did what it does.
You know what that means. Things that should work but won’t. Upheaval in one’s personal life. Delayed resources. Morphing timelines. Tech that fails.
Yeah.
Not all bad. But gives you pause and delays all your plans.
Today, July 2025, marks our first year working together. It’s marked by the release of our first Builder demo and a wave of new developments, alongside the usual short-term challenges that need overcoming.
Some of these challenges are serious. But Kyle and I don’t quit. If there’s no smooth path forward, we’ll brute-force it with grit and resilience. Your support, through your likes, comments, and shares, has grown warmer and more encouraging, and it helps us tremendously. Keep it coming.
Our first issue is right there. To reach where we want to go, we will need more staff.
We had begun solving that with the onboarding of Newbery, a developer I have personally worked with for years. I have nothing but great things to say about Newbery, he’s a fantastic guy and a fantastic developer.
Unfortunately, we lost him some months ago to the drying up of our resources and a missed appointment with funding. He’s been on standby ever since and everyday we feel the pain of his absence.
Newbery has given a lot, and we can’t just ask him to work for free, he has his own family to take care of. So our absolute first priority, and the one if there was only one to focus on, would be that one.
Newbery is a gameplay developer, very versatile, it’s thanks to him that the game will find its flow, its smoothness, its richness in terms of sheer experience. We need him back!
Another developer or two would not be too many, for sure but we’ll take one Newbery over a bunch of strangers. So he’s our top priority.
In many areas, we are still below standards. Some of you have seen our recent in-engine screenshots, or our general visual upgrades: game logo, company logo, key art. That’s the outer layer. The beast itself needs some serious improvements first and foremost on performance and optimization, then on game design and user experience quality. We are working on all this. It’ll be impossible to make it where the game needs to be and where you deserve to be, without addressing all that. The recent releases, both small (visuals) and bigger (builder demo) are, to us, a kind of statement of this upgrade of standards we want to redefine BKG with from here on out. We have a lot to do, but we’re doing it. This is why we need not only Newbery but maybe another couple of him, as well as other collaborators. But we’re doing it.
Solace Crafting is a product. Companies survive and thrive on business models, which products are a part of. So we need to bring some improvements to the way Solace Crafting exists and makes its living. We will be exploring two ways to do so.
The first is by adding more products to Big Kitty Games’ lineup. Fear not, this is not something that will take us away from Solace Crafting: the Builder defines our approach:
Some of these new releases will be new entry points into Solace Crafting and products and experiences that help develop it. Part standalone thing for those who do not care about Solace Crafting, part modding tool for those who do.
Some of these new targets will be to turn prototypes I have developed over the years into opportunities to offer you more games, small but fun ones, through associations with other partners. Some of these will expand the worlds of Solace Crafting. Some of these will be new IP material entirely. All of it should be fun, wholesome and colorful, for that is BKG’s identity.
The second is offering you meaningful opportunities to support us. The Builder, connected to Solace Crafting, will enable us to inject support packs into our lineup, focusing solely on cosmetic function. We are defining the approach that feels right for BKG, one where those packs are designed and distributed in ways that work and don’t feel excessive, intrusive, awkward or otherwise inappropriate. Most of all, they’re supposed to give you, Solace Crafting and BKG value, not just transfer cash.
First and foremost, we are players, equally disgusted as most of you have been by the way the market/industry have gone and we both literally put our lives and livelihoods on the line to take a shot at making games in a way we’d keep finding healthy and wholesome. So both these goals (new products and value-rich support opportunities) must fit that bill.
We just released the builder demo. Now here are our plans for the rest of the year.
Builder. We’ll keep updating the builder into a more rounded and more content-rich demo, which we will release for free, with its own Steam page. That demo will allow you to build more detailed structures and more lived-in spaces. We will keep supporting it until its September-October release. The demo will ship with cosmetic preorder packs. Our hope is to generate enough traction to stabilize our resources and secure our core needs.
Optimization. We will optimize the game for acceptable performance. It is our current primary focus. It might require us to make some strong choices to how the experience presents itself, maybe dial down some features initially, maybe not. But I think we all agree that walking back the game’s scope for a while to rebuild clean foundations to thrive better and longer on, is better than releasing broken betas that fall apart and set fires to GPUs.
Modding. The builder is the first step towards modding. We have said it elsewhere: we don’t want you to be able to just build characters and buildings. We want you to be able to build worlds. See a cliff you like? See a large tree you want to bring to your backyard? Want to turn this corner of the world into a custom biome? Want a herd of cows grazing your land? The builder is the first step.
Creatures. Brice, a senior 3D artist has kindly lent us his skilled hands to provide new animal assets for the game. We’re starting with the wolves that have been chasing you around and expanding into other forest animals. The wolves come in five forms: Grey Wolf, Brown Wolf, Snow Wolf, Timber Wolf, and Warg. Each has a Young, Adult, and Alpha version. These will be in-game soon. We just need to rig them properly, finalize the swaps, and set up their spawns. Other animals will join them, for you to hunt, be hunted by, or tame and add to you little sanctuary.
Dungeons. We’re improving dungeon assets to support more coherent and organic layouts. The secret here is that dungeon pieces will eventually also be included in the Builder, so you’ll be able to design and share your own dungeons for Solace Crafting. While this is a longer-term, content-heavy development path, it’s a central part of the game’s identity. We’re treating it as a cornerstone of our user-generated content strategy.
Improved Loops & Landscapes. The landscape generation system has stabilized. What it now needs are proper landscape features. The broader creative revamp of Solace Crafting is about giving you more power over the worlds you generate and shape. This new loop will enable you to explore the map for natural structures, then use those structures to customize your world, in effect playing landscaper with rocks, trees and various environmental assets. All you have to do is find their natural blueprint and collect the needed resources to replicate it. We love the idea of a play experience where you don’t have anything other to do than walk around, find and collect impactful, meaningful things to build your world. No UI or metrics to monitor, no creatures to fight, just good old exploration.
Can I bring this tree home, I wonder?
Solaces. Putting the Solaces Back in Solace Crafting is another priority. In a previous Producer’s Letter, we shared our plans to bring more meaning and mystery to Solaces. The first step is to implement them as major landscape features using the Points of Interest system. Solaces will no longer just be the core of your hub. They will become places of power, each offering unique effects: energy to harvest, resources to mine, world-shaping mechanics to experiment with, buffs. They’re becoming actual destinations and solid gameplay nodes.
The past few months have been relatively quiet on the public front, mostly because we’ve been deep in this work and juggling multiple challenges. As you can see, quiet doesn’t mean inactive. Communication-wise, we’ve remained most active on Discord, where you’re welcome to join us and follow more casual and more frequent progress posts. For those of you who dislike Discord, don’t worry, we are never far from the Steam Page.
https://discord.gg/solacecrafting
Thank you, truly, for being here.
If you wanna push us up, either one of these will support us more than you know
Keep up the kind words on our Steam posts and the Likes
You can get and support the builder here: https://bigkittygames.itch.io/solace-builder
Drop by our IndieDB page to help make it visible: https://www.indiedb.com/games/solace-crafting-rebuild
And of course, support on our Ko-fi page for our developer Newbery here: https://ko-fi.com/bigkittygames