A Look at Crafting Experiences

By Paul Carrico on November 22, 2016 | Developer Journals | 0

Hello, my name is Paul Carrico and I am excited to be working alongside so many talented people at Pixelmage. I have been making games for about 16 years now. I am a game designer and work on creating and implementing content. I find myself always being drawn back to crafting systems. Working with the crafting communities of EverQuest, EverQuest II, and H1Z1 were some of my favorite times doing design. I am using that experience to add crafting systems that I think would be the most fun and rewarding to play within Hero’s Song.

In Hero’s Song, crafting is meant to be accessible with lots of depth. It is accessible to all players – from seasoned crafting veterans to those who typically do not gravitate to these types of systems. This will become more apparent in a future crafting patch when recipe discovery is added. The intention is that discovering recipes will pull people into crafting. As important components are found, recipe discoveries will happen automatically. Discovering recipes in this way gives context for recently found items. This can create a personal objective to gather the remaining components and craft the newly discovered recipe.

Components can be found all over the world. They can be lying on the ground, living in the world, inside of an object like a mining node, or obtained from killing enemies. Some of the components might be difficult to come by and may only appear in specific locations, at specific times, or during specific phases of the moon.

Crimson Bloom growing in the forest which can be used to make health potions.

Gold ore extracted from a gold vein to make one of the highest tiers of weapons.

Leathery Skin dropped from a Grizzly Bear which can be used to make Leather Armor.

Crafted items can be very powerful. Since the game is a roguelike and the life of a character is finite, upgrades can be very meaningful and offer a large impact on character power. Hero’s Song does not have skill points or level requirements on crafting. The only requirement is to find the ingredients. With a little bit of luck powerful components can be found to make interesting items quickly.

One example of a powerful crafted item is one that has reactive effects on it. From the power of the effect alone, item builds might form around it. The combination of different crafting items and dropped items could generate really interesting sets of gear.

Sentinel Ring has a chance to react to melee attacks and freeze the attacker for a long duration

Please check out the game and please leave feedback at http://forums.pixelmagegames.com/. We are making the game that we want to play, but we also want to make the game that you want to play.