- A new “Sprit” species, which comes in 13 varieties, is flooding the world for a short time attracted by new Ghostnip items! Ghostnip can be crafted using Brain Bits, which are dropped from last year’s Limited Edition Zombie creatures. Buy them on the secondary market!
- Cursed events are manifesting themselves throughout the next week!
- Pumpkies are back, along with their Stitched counterparts!
- Skelefish are circling the waters for a short time!
- Candy Ghosts are now Candy Sprits! They’re here for a short while
- Vampire, Dark, and Fire attuned wilds are spawning during the spooky season!
Sprits and Ghostnip
Sprits are flooding our world, attracted by the leftovers from last year’s Zombie creatures. Throughout the next two weeks, basic Sprits will be spawning from all Home Temples. However, there are THIRTEEN brand-new varieties of these floaty little friends! How can handlers get their hands on the others? By crafting Ghostnip of course!
Ghostnip is able to be crafted using 5 Brain Bits, which are only dropped from last year’s Zombie Stufflie Limited Edition creatures. These Brain Bits are combined with 200 Energy using a Crafting Temple to form Ghostnip, which can then be activated to attract a huge variety of Sprits over a 30 minute time period.
For the next two weeks, all Sprit varieties will be able to be drawn to handlers who have activated Ghostnip. After those two weeks, however, a portion of the rarer varieties will stop trickling through into our world. Catch them while you can!
Sprits employ a brand new “elemental aura” system Krafties has developed that we’re very excited about. It could mean a new wave of content if well received by players. You can read more in the Developer Notes below!
Cursed Flash Events
Cursed events are manifesting throughout the next week! The random, chaotic energy controlling Flash Events has been taken over by a dark force. The events are flowing nonstop, but will you be able to figure out what’s really going on?
Pumpkies
Pumpkies are here, but not for long! Collect some for yourself before they waddle back into hiding. And that’s not all! Rarer Stitched Pumpkies have joined their plainer friends this year, and are hanging around in our world for a short while.
Candy Sprits
Candy Sprits are spawning now! These spooky friends will leave behind Halloween Surprise Candies when captured. Halloween Surprise Candies may give you delectable treats when you crank that handle, or maybe…. not. You’ll never know until you give it a turn!
Fishing Up Skelefish
Skelefish are lurking in the waters for a limited time! When placed into tanks, these boney undead friends dig up Surprise Candies for their caretakers. Stock up while you can, these spooky fish are the only way to continue getting candies year-round!
Wickedly Attuned Wilds
Vampire, Dark, and Fire attuned wilds are spawning for a short while. With eerie, glowing eyes, these creatures have connected to the rhythms of their respective elements granting them special abilities. During battle their attuned element flows through them, allowing the creatures to use elemental spells as if bonded by a handler. When captured, these creatures retain their attunement in the form of an elemental affinity!
Krafties loves you! Have fun!
A Note From The Developer
From the mind of a Tech Nerd + Game Geek
Hey all, Kris here to briefly chat about a few things!
Tech
First, let’s talk about tech. Like, the cool kind of tech. Like… the cutting-edge kind of tech. This release marks the first, of hopefully many, content release that was assisted by custom tooling I’ve developed, along with some new products that have been released in the past year. This space is going to accelerate quickly, and due to my infinite curiosity, I just had to dive in head-first.
I’m blessed to be able to experiment with a variety of different types of projects and technologies through my work with my nonprofit, along with other projects I tackle to keep my technical chops up-to-date. What’s interesting is that I find that my first love, Krafties, is always on my mind when I come across something new.
Lastly, another exciting thing about this foray into new systems: I believe I’ve found some missing pieces for some features I’ve wanted to implement in the past but wasn’t able to. I can’t make any hard promises there, but it looks promising!
Elemental Auras
When you bond a Sprit, you’ll notice that its textures won’t change. Instead, the Sprit will have an “elemental aura” around it based on the type of element it’s been bonded with. This change may seem small, but it has the potential to be monumental. First, I generally think these look pretty cool. A lot of work was put into making them subtle enough to not bother other players, while still being eye-catching enough that handlers will want to proudly display them. The visual effects are also very easy to iterate on, meaning they can be improved quickly! Even more importantly, though, is that this system is being experimented with to test the waters of a brand-new paradigm of content development and design for Krafties. A paradigm that puts a much larger emphasis on gameplay, while trying to maintain a level of aesthetic quality everyone is happy with.
That may not be worded clearly enough to be useful, so maybe outlining the problem we’re attempting to solve on the development front will help explain things better.
As it currently stands, it’s very hard to introduce new elements into the game. If you’ve been playing for a long time you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a while since a new elemental soul type has been introduced. Rest assured, this isn’t due to a lack of ideas on my part! The real problem lies in the ever-increasing number of species that have been introduced to the game. I’m looking at a list of almost 50! Now, due to how Second Life handles textures and the specific limitations there, along with how we have to handle models, this becomes even more unwieldy when you consider that every element+species combo is made up of, on average, 6 different texture images. Right now, our database holds exactly 1,778 species+element combinations…. If we do a basic mathematical calculation that’s…
1,778 x 6 textures each = Roughly 10,668 textures…
Now, I’ve built a ton of tooling around this, and it’s “manageable” for the most part. But it’s not fun, and the idea of adding a new element into the mix is daunting, to say the least. It means that, currently, we need to create around 300 textures to make that happen. Even worse, that number increases at an exponential rate with each species we add!
On the other hand, auras are much more developer friendly. If players like this direction, it would free up a lot of time to focus on other types of content aside from texture images. More time could be put into coats and species variations like you see with Sprits, upgrading UI and gameplay mechanics, focusing on spells, etc. Along with that, it would mean new elements can be created in a manageable way which, in my personal opinion, would be a huge plus for players.
No matter what, I hope this write-up helps you all understand our perspective a little bit better. Enjoy the fun new things!
– <3 Kris
