- A new bonded creature, Miracle Talum, is available now for a short time! They contain a shiny new Miracle Soul and can have one of three brand new coats!
- Each Miracle Talum has three never before seen miraculous traits, with the ability to mutate even more exclusive traits perfect for transferring to other bonded creatures using the new Mystical Conduit items!
The wait is over! This year’s limited edition creature is now available, with some very interesting new mechanics…
Limited Edition Miracle Talum creatures are available now, with three awesome new coat varieties! Due to their general shape and characteristics, Talum creatures possess the unique ability to contain traits no other creatures are able to obtain naturally. Depending on the soul in a Talum, it may manifest incredible new traits and attributes specific to its elemental bond. Combined with a Miracle soul… well, who knows what might be hiding inside these new friends!
Each limited edition creature comes with three miraculous new traits: Sustenance, Resurrection, and Surging Salves. Due to the combination of this particular species with this particular soul, there are other miraculous traits that may be mutated using Radioactive Candy! We’ll leave those a mystery for now though… The three included traits have the following effects:
- Sustenance: When food is fed to this creature, it may miraculously be converted into experience points
- Resurrection: When this creature dies, it may miraculously revive at full health with increased strength
- Surging Salves: When this creature is healed, it may gain a miraculous increase in strength
Each creature will have a +5 for each natural stat, and all will be level 1. They have a special Miracle Soul complete with unique spells not found on any other type, and all have matching affinity bodies. When purchased, players have a 45% chance of getting a BronzeTrim coat, a 35% chance for a SilverTrim coat, or a 20% chance for a GoldTrim coat. The vendor is in front of the main store, and will only be available from December 24th through January 2nd. They are priced at L$2,000.
Happy holidays from Krafties! Have fun!
A Note From The Developer
Phew… This one was a lot of work, but I think it’s really paid off! After doing these Limited Edition releases for the past 5 years now, all based on similar holiday themes, it starts to get harder and harder to find the inspiration for the next one each time. This year I had to approach things a bit differently and may have bitten off more than I was intending to chew, but in the end, I believe the experience is going to be incredibly useful moving forward.
Before we get into all of that, though, I’d like to address the elephant in the room: this year’s proceeds aren’t going to a charity. This was a hard decision, but this time around everything is going to be re-invested back into Krafties! Now don’t worry, we’re still doing good in the world. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been dedicating time and resources to a nonprofit I founded a year ago called Dev Launchers. We help anyone and everyone learn computer-related skills by making fun things, and are building something intended to bridge technology-related opportunity gaps in a big way. No one, single experience has helped me learn and grow more than Dev Launchers has. I know others feel the same way, and many more will soon!
Now, back to this release and the content it contains. Specifically, the question: what was done differently this time around?
Well, as I mentioned before, inspiration was… scarce this year. Even with my incredible powers of time management, and planning for this release a month and a half before the release window, I just couldn’t get my brain to work how I wanted it to. However, I loathe not being productive, so instead of sitting around and scratching my head I got us started on improving our existing tools and building new ones!
Here’s a sneak peek at how this manifested:
Texturing Pipeline
A lot of work was done to make massive improvements in our texturing pipeline. This allows lighting and effects from our 3D modeling tool Blender to be baked into layered textures, across multiple images required for our sculpted creatures. All with a few clicks. The results of this can be seen in the Talum LE, which I think has some of the nicest baked in lighting we’ve achieved yet. Before this, most of the “baked in” lighting was hand-painted. All of this took a fraction of the time it would have taken before this addition, and I can’t wait to play with it even more.
Game Design Document Improvements
A big addition to Krafties overall Game Design document which breaks the entire game down into a few easy to understand components: Player Behaviors, Byproducts of those Behaviors, and the relative development work required to deliver either of those two things to players using a standardized metric.
Inspiration didn’t strike me this year, I reached out and clawed at it with everything I had using this document. I honestly think, though, that this release might be the best set of additions we’ve had in some time! Right when the idea was cemented I was able to reach out to some of our contractors and lay out exactly what was needed in almost no time at all. All thanks to a few pieces of paper. Incredible!
Lisp Code Documentation
The last piece of the puzzle here was yet another massive piece of documentation: a full outline for the programming language that runs inside of Krafties objects. This language is a variant of an old language called Lisp which I developed years ago when we first moved to the HUD based system.
This is how most of the items you use in the HUD work: When you click something, the HUD asks the server what to do. The server then feeds the HUD the code it needs to run in order to accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish by sending code back to it. I should stress that this is a very Krafties specific system, I’m not sure if anyone else is using something like this. It definitely has some downsides, like code execution being slower and memory being more scarce, but the upside is enormous: new content and behavior can be added on the fly without having to send out difficult updates!
When the idea for miracles, traits, and talums was finally cemented, this document is what actually made it so we could build the cool new traits and push extra things live, all without inconveniencing our players. Looking at it now, I’m already buzzing with new ideas that had never occurred to me before now!
In Conclusion
Whoops, looks like I wrote a lot again… Hopefully one of you finds it interesting! I want to end this with a huge thank you. Thank you for your patience, for enjoying the work we do, and for being a community full of kind and helpful people. I hope you all have a great rest of your holiday season!
– Kris
