I've been working on a water/frost themed icon pack in the same style as my Fiery icons. Here's a preview of the first six. Larger preview after the break.

At last it’s time to conclude this examination of crafting systems. I’ve learned a lot from the experience, both about the topic at hand and about writing in general. Today I’m going to rank each of the games I’ve been looking at in terms of my personal enjoyment of their crafting systems. I’ll also be including a summary of the rest of the articles in the series as well as considering how to apply what I’ve learned to my game.

Crafting is all about creating products. How useful they are has a huge impact on how the system fits with the rest of the game. The games I’ve been examining throughout this series demonstrate the full range of usefulness, from absolutely critical to largely irrelevant and everything in between. Today I’ll be discussing the impact of product usefulness in each game as well as looking at The Witcher 3’s interesting take on consumables.

In my experience it’s pretty rare to find a game that gives players unlimited access to their crafting system from the start. There is almost always some sort of improvement system or some other means of pacing the crafting process. This can be through a leveling up system, requiring recipes, or even just through material availability. This post will explore how other games have implemented their improvement and gating systems while trying to reach conclusions about the most applicable solution for my own game.

Every crafting system requires raw materials to transform into goods and there are plenty of ways to give your players these materials. Materials could come through gathering nodes, drops from enemies, achievements, quests, vendors, or any other method you can think of. Today I'll be looking at a number of these methods for material acquisition as well as how diversity of materials can affect the overall enjoyment of the crafting system.