Our Patreon page and our web site are finally out! It has been quite a journey producing the content and sorting everything out. I hope you guys are enjoying what you are seeing so far! It is great to finally have something to show after so many hours of work.

To give you a brief history of the project, it all started when Alex and I (Shex) were discussing about browser games and why developers didn’t take advantage of this platform. We loved the fact that everyone can be unified under one banner regardless of their device.  After some arguing, we then had almost the same idea at the same time; let’s create a get together game! Let’s build something where players can have fun together at the same time, at the same spot, cooperatively.

I was so excited with the concept that I’ve immediately started tinkering with toys and stuff I had at home to spark design ideas. After stepping upon a small plastic toy house (that poor house), I’ve said to myself “I know! Let’s have people build a city! The biggest virtual one the world has ever known”. I took out an old blank map I was using when playing D&D games back in the days, took up some loose coins, pieces of plastics and physically designed some early game mechanics. I even took a picture of a design session for Alex to see as it was a bit messy on the floor. After scrolling back through conversations, I’ve found it. You can view it here (writings are half in french and half in english, my head was mixed up that day ):

http://cdn.craftcitygame.com/posts/20200717/concept.jpg

It was a great start! Unfortunately though, something was lacking. Creating buildings and managing a layout of tiles was fun, but not for long. I was missing a purpose, why do players want to do this? What’s their motivation? In each of my initial concepts, I had always instinctively added resources as something that could be fetched from buildings, like wood from sawmills or ores from mines.  After having coded, uncoded (is that a word?), coded and uncoded again a small prototype, we were finally able to put a finger on what was wrong. Actually it was Alex, the hero that day who found it :

Crafting!

With a crafting system, players would have a reason to gather resources. The system would also give them a better feel of progression while providing them with a meaning to participate in the city’s growth. From that point on, we kept the whole idea and went further.

As soon as we were ready for production, we needed some help on the visual side as I can do a lot of things, and Alex helps with the IT tasks, but an ambitious project like that is very demanding. We needed help to unload some work off our shoulders and Fallonna came into play. She was someone we already knew; fortunately she was looking for something new to work on. With her help, we’ve built the foundation of what we have today.  The value of gender diversity in a team is invaluable as she brought her feminine point of view on many aspects which helped steer the artistic direction is a great way. She came up with unusual concepts which gave personality to the game.

After having managed to create a real-time multiplayer environment (which I keep all the details for another post later), we are now getting closer of a playable build for people to try. This project is very ambitious and technologically demanding but we take great pride in our success so far. We hope you will like it as much as we had fun making it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post  =)

Shex

Lead creator