Greetings and welcome to the third Producer's Letter for Solace Crafting.
I'm Fab, and today, we're going to spend a little time talking game design and what we have in mind for the near-future of Solace Crafting in that area.
Game design is a vast and rich discipline, in that it pertains to any and all aspects that will determine the kind of experience the player will ultimately have. From the numbers that go into a combat system to the way a specific interaction feels, or even the psychology of certain goals and moments of gameplay, or the way lore informs experience, as game designers we must be on top of all that and more.
Solace Crafting is a vast and systems-rich game, with plenty to do. However, if the What can be quite clear most of the time (explore, fight, harvest, build…), streamlining the How, the Why and the What For is part of the update strategy we have recently embarked on.
As those among you who already play the game know, Solace Crafting is named after Solaces, the crystalline nodes around which you will indeed Craft and Build, from a simple workshop at first to an expanding town later on.
Being the central concept of the game, we felt there was much more we could do with them in terms of tying things up together and creating a stronger game. So as we currently update many front end aspects of the experience, such as graphics, controller and enemies, we are preparing to launch a revamp of Solaces themselves.
In the multiverse of Khora, that you’ve been exploring through your worlds creation in Solace Crafting, Solaces act as nodes in a network of energy, enabling forces to circulate. You’ve seen this from the way you can use them as spawn points and fast travel points. Another aspect of Solaces we will be expanding as we tie their gameplay tighter together, is their function as a reality stabilizer or maybe even as a reality manipulator, and their relationship with the player character itself.
We call player characters (and ultimately you, dear players), Astrals, which is also a sort of short for Astral Prodigies, that is souls that have awakened, consciously or not, to the endless breadth of the multiverse and can exist within its worlds. Astrals are connected to Solaces and can operate them in ways others cannot.
First, we plan to make the Solace’s upgrade cycle much more central to your experience. As you venture out, not only will you want to come back to the Solace regularly for crafting and maintenance, but also to upgrade and empower the Solace itself, discovering new functions and powers it grants you.
Second, the worlds of Khora, which you explore and inhabit, will contain scores of pre-existing Solaces. These we call historic Solaces, for they were here before you and have things to bequeath you, from mere lore to new opportunities to weigh upon your worlds.
These Solaces you find, out there in the worlds, could take you to hidden locations, allow you to manipulate time, weather, life cycles within biomes, grant you new powers lasting or temporary, and many more things.
All Solaces exist thanks to a mysterious focus of energy, called by some an Astral Egg, which you can harvest. However, doing so will destroy the Solace, but the Astral Egg can be carried to manifest a new Solace elsewhere or empower an existing one.
This loop of exploring, finding Solaces, interacting with them and deciding what to do with each and with its Astral Egg will be much more prominent in the updated Solace Crafting we are headed to.
The goal of this looming update is to infuse your gameplay with more meaning, with a lot more Why and What For to your actions in the game. So that having a lot that you can possibly do in Solace Crafting also means a lot more reasons to do each thing and to commit to a specific path of play.
This series of updates touching on the game fundamentals should begin around late December to January, and follow on through. We are still very much focused at the moment on more technical or artistic aspect to bring Solace Crafting into the current times in terms of looks and feel, but we are already hard at work planning those gameplay/experience steps as well.
New, or updated ways to interact with the world, will be a thing as well, as previously hinted at. New locomotion modes, more dynamic harvesting, more exciting obstacle navigation and many more.
It’s a titanic undertaking. An interesting thing is, the more experience you have working on games, the more even a small update turns out to be imposing in terms of implications and repercussions. I can remember, way back before getting involved in game design and production, thinking Oh, the devs should do this or that to improve the game. Lots of grand ideas which, on paper, would have made the game better. Now, after about a decade and a half hands-on, every new feature I plan, every new change gets me like this is going to be so much to do…
But we keep pushing, because nothing’s more beautiful than a vision fulfilled and a playerbase happy. It’s a beautiful job, a great opportunity, and as I always say, success and fulfillment follow a lot more easily when you love what you do, love the people you’re doing it with and love the people you’re doing it for.
This was intended as a Producer’s Letter, not quite a Love Letter, but we all know how for Kyle this has been a labour of love and so how could I join this beautiful undertaking with any less than these same feelings?
So here we are. Happy to be here and looking forward to it all!
- Fab