- Time Crystal Crisis Mini-Event! Collect crystals for a head start on our upcoming birthday event and game expansion!
- Upcoming game expansion ANNOUNCEMENT: World Of Hunger! Beta test dropping August 1st!
- Check out a note from the developer!
What’s that strange sensation, you ask?! Krafties has hit an interdimensional time warp!
Time Crystal Crisis Mini-Event!
An anomalous concentration of energy has caused our 13th Birthday party to become lost… somewhere in time! While amassing magic energy, pouring everything into A NEW EXPANSION bringing over 100 new item types and fundamental changes to our world’s core, Krafties has inadvertently caused a time crisis. For a limited time, collect Time Warp Crystals to help Krafties find the lost party (and get a head start on the upcoming expansion and companion event!)
Over the next two weeks, Time Warp Crystals are appearing all over the world of Krafties! These strange crystals will be able to be spent on extra goodies released during the upcoming expansion, allowing crystal collectors to get a small head-start when the celebration rolls around. Collect as many as you can… the future depends on it!
In other words, we’re delaying our annual birthday celebration event a bit this year in order to make it EXTRA special. Read on to learn all about a BIG upcoming expansion being added to the game, set to coincide with this year’s birthday event!
Upcoming Game Expansion ANNOUNCEMENT: World Of Hunger! Beta Test Dropping August 1st!
Designed around survey responses from our recent Gameplay Overhaul feedback round and conversations with players, Krafties has been hard at work crafting something special! Curious about what’s being added and changed? Let’s dive right in!
This upcoming expansion revolves around a simple premise: feed pets food items in order to imbue them with temporary “XP Multiplier Bonuses”. It’s that simple! Or… alright, maybe there’s a little bit more to it.
- All food items in Krafties will introduce a new mechanic: XP Multiplier Bonuses! This change will give players the optional ability to substantially increase their rate of progression, while creating intrinsic value for a class of items that, before now, haven’t seen a lot of love in terms of commerce or gameplay value. Not only will this play a huge role in increasing the amount of experience players earn during gameplay (a change universally supported in feedback surveys), it does so by utilizing well established, core, beloved features of the game.
- Over 100 new food-related items are being added to the game in order to support and bolster this expansion! An assortment of new edible base materials will arrive, which can then be combined during crafting to create more complex edible delicacies and dishes. The more complex or elusive the grub, the greater the XP Multiplier Bonus effect the item has when consumed! Different items will affect the XP Multiplier Bonuses for different stat types, so players are naturally encouraged to explore and participate in more areas of the game as they set new goals for themselves.
- “Coupons” are becoming “Blueprints”, with new Blueprint items being added for EVERY craftable food in the game. In fact, Blueprints will become the ONLY way to craft food! This change has a few wonderful side effects. Most notably, this makes players (and Krafties) less reliant on “energy” when balancing the game’s progression and in-game commerce. This path offers a more immersive and approachable set of goals for players to work toward, and, in general, means that players can get more good stuff, in more fun ways.
- The sources players are able to obtain recipe ingredients and coveted blueprints are varied, spanning across the entire world of Krafties! This change is giving Krafties an opportunity to flesh out areas of the game that haven’t seen new content additions in a while, while setting things up to make the experience a bit more immersive. One minor goal of this expansion is to facilitate “emergent quests” forming for players when they encounter rare blueprints they may not have the ingredients for. In the future, Krafties hopes it may further lend itself to bolster additional, more narrative-heavy feature additions. Putting the RP back in MMORPG!
- Commerce! The World of Hunger Expansion will introduce a large number of new items that are intended to have a high degree of desirability, both as in-game rewards and on the secondary market. A major design goal of this expansion is to create a self-regulating system that naturally lends itself to encouraging trade between players, and what better way to do so than adding a massive number of useful, interdependent items to collect and use!
- Bounties return with a vengeance! After the successful test-run of our bounty system a few months back, and a positive reception during feedback, bounties are being permanently added to Krafties! This system is tightly integrated into the expansion, and will play significant role in procuring certain important ingredients and blueprints.
They say a picture is worth a lot of words, or something:
A Note From The Developer:
Hey adventurers! First off, I’d like to start with an apology for the delayed birthday event. Trust me, no one is more disappointed than I am that the timetable didn’t work out for the World of Hunger Expansion and our annual birthday celebration. Months of work have lead up to this, and, in truth, Krafties could have shipped a version of the expansion and event in time. However, it was a bit rushed and hurried, and this one feels important. So, I’d like Krafties to put its best foot forward here and take just a bit more time to round out this release. I couldn’t sit back and let *nothing* happen for our 13th anniversary, though, and I know delays are terrible things. So, while it may be a little bit on the nose, I hope that players find some fun in collecting the Time Warp Crystals created during this *very real* time crisis.
Plus, there’s precedent for birthday parties happening on dates a bit removed from actual birthdates, so… yeah. It’s all good. Right?
Right?
Right! Now, In the past, I’ve used dev notes to discuss tooling and more “behind the scenes” developments, so I’ll take a small moment here to throw out a few recent behind the scenes tooling and content pipeline changes that have me excited.
However, first I’d like to take a moment to shout out everyone who participated in the recent Rexie Texture Painting contest! There were quite a few *incredible* submissions. The results were so surprising, in fact, that it’s made me reconsider a some of the pillars of the game itself… While none of the submissions were *quite* ready to be added directly to the game as-is, some were darn close. And, that’s INCREDIBLY impressive considering the extremely limited set of tools that were provided. There are so many great ideas and submissions, in fact, that it seems borderline irresponsible to set things up so that only a single one is accepted after a vote… However, recreating or touching up all of those textures, and then going through the process of creating THAT MANY new coats, all for a single species (which has already seen a lot of content love) is currently an insurmountable task for Krafties...
All that to say, I haven’t forgotten about your amazing Rexie designs. Far from it! Instead, it forced me to step back and look at the content pipeline for getting new coats (and, subsequently ANY other images) into the game, and allowed me to identify an area to focus on that I think will have some big returns. In simple terms, an automated tool was created that can upload images to the grid. I know, I know. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, does it? However, the time and mental energy that has historically been spent using a graphical viewer to manually upload species/coat textures, and then manually apply them to models in-world is all at once both a small piece of the overall creation process and a monumental exercise in mental effort. With this, that entire process is eliminated, and it’s looking like we’ll get to a point where a texture set for a coat can be finalized on my local system and then make its way into the game in the span of a couple clicks and a few minutes, instead of hundreds of clicks and dozens of minutes. Trust me, those minutes add up! If that process becomes streamlined enough, paired with some improvements in the texture painting app previewed last month, it might even open the door for incorporating player created skins much more deeply into the core premise of the game… But, that’s an idea for another day 😉
This new development may also have some nice, accidental side effects, with a big one relating quite handily to the upcoming expansion! While this isn’t finalized yet, it seems quite likely that this small development could allow the item sprite images that you see in the Krafties Inventory app (along with other images seen throughout the app) to be better synced up with in-world representations. Up until now, I’ve purposefully not bothered with any features or ideas that would require these items to have in-world representation due to the significant overhead created by the manual upload process required to display an image in-world. However, if that process can be fully automated, and *every* item image can be kept in-sync via automatic asset uploads and UUIDs stored in our central servers, that potentially opens the door for these items to have better in-world representation and integration. This could show up in gameplay eventually, but even small QoL things such as displaying item pictures automatically on Item Packages could become possible.
The last thing I’ll touch on is the rapidly growing number of items and recipes, and developments related to how that is being managed moving forward. With only a few dozen recipes and items in the low hundreds, it has been more than manageable to design the crafting aspect of the game using rudimentary tools. However, with this expansion, and the need to deal with hundreds of new pieces of content being introduced at once, all intertwined into a complicated web of interdependent crafting recipes… something else was needed. It’s not perfect yet by any means, but work has been done to make the tooling related to crafting related content *much* better, which I imagine will have impact well beyond the upcoming expansion.
Annnnd, I think that’s all I have to share for the time being!
I’m off once again to try to clear out the remainder of our outstanding support tickets, and then spending every minute I can find making the World of Hunger expansion as awesome as I can. I hope you’re as excited for it as I am!
As always, have fun!
