Hi mates!
It’s been a while since we last updated you on Craftomation 101, but it's all better now: we have returned to our regular schedule of 1 update per 2-4 weeks, and the plan is to keep them coming.
Today, we’ll walk you through everything that’s happened in the game since… March? Oh boy.
We started with migrating to a new engine version, 1.10.0. Which is always quite risky — you never know what might break. This time, screen zooming started working incorrectly, which meant the camera couldn’t show half of the map, and on top of that, the game wouldn’t even launch on macOS.
To make things worse, the issue didn't reproduce on displays with 100% scaling, so it took some time to figure out what the players were complaining about at all. But in the end, we tracked down the problem and fixed everything.
With that out of the way, we added one small feature that made Craftomation 101 50% more programmerly — we’ve added the block with comments. One little feature for a patch note, and a huge leap for those players who are into serious coding (which turns into hell without having an opportunity to comment).
Then there's DYNAMITE! Yeah, you can now blow up tiles of land, temporarily removing snow out of it. It doesn't do much, but hey - destruction is fun, and we all know it. Let us know if you want more explosive features in the game, will you? Remember, we prioritize features based on your feedback!
With the next little tweak, we wanted to make players’ lives harder and more fun at the same time by adding more sense of progression. So we limited chests in the game by volume. As it sometimes (very often) happens, this change dragged along a bunch of other reworks.
At first, players complained that the storage capacity was too small, so in the next update we increased the maximum size. And naturally, while making these adjustments, we ran into some bugs — as you can see in the screenshot below, something went terribly wrong with the chest art sizes.
Another problem was that replacing a small chest with a larger one turned into a real headache: the player couldn’t move a chest that already had items inside. At the same time, the situation where you want to place a bigger chest in the exact same spot and move the same items there happens pretty often.
After analysing your generous feedback on Steam forums and our Discord server, we made it so you can now simply drag a bigger chest onto a smaller one to replace it — no more tedious back-and-forth item transferring!
We’ve also made lots of other cool small improvements, especially in the interface (though the biggest UI update is still ahead — we’ll talk about that in future posts). We also added plenty of new sounds and tweaked the balance to make life a bit easier for players. After all, we can’t only make things harder — like we did with those storage units!
And now for the most exciting part — what’s next?
The big UI/UX update was already mentioned. The next big thing is sitting in the game's main menu for a while - more maps! It is one of the most requested features, and we're excited to bring it to you. We're now considering ways of adding procedurally generated maps but maybe we'll start with more pre-made maps. Anyway, here's Alex the artist's vision for your (and our) inspiration:
Next on the list was that annoying feature when you programmed a robot to, say, make batteries and carry them to storage — but then the storage got moved by accident, and the robot just froze. That happened because in its code, the robot was told to deliver the fire to a specific spot on the map, not to “the firebone” itself. Also fixed now!
The decision — the arrays of campfires, chests, and other objects. Remember how the moving campfires or storage units could mess up your whole game? With arrays, you’ll always know exactly where each campfire or storage is. We can’t share all the details just yet, but we hope you’ll like it.
To quote one of the greatest robots of all times - Bender B. Rodriguez - we're back, baby! Stay tuned for more news!