Lately I've been thinking about how crafting should work in my game. There are so many options to consider that it's a bit overwhelming to start from scratch. Rather than stumble around blindly I figured I'd take a look at how some of my favorite games have designed their crafting systems.

I'll be examining World of Warcraft (both pre and post warlords), Guild Wars 2, Minecraft (primarily vanilla, perhaps some modded), and The Witcher 3. I'm planning to cover these topics over the next week or two:

1. Overview of Systems
2. Material Acquisition & Diversity of Materials
3. Improving the Skill & Gating Mechanics
4. Permanence & Usefulness
5. Opinions and Lessons Learned

With that said, let's jump into the overview.

I've been working on a fire themed icon pack for a while now and I'm finally ready to release it!

I've been trying out caricature style for my character designs and I'm quite pleased with how some of them have turned out.

The core gameplay in my game is going to revolve around exploring the world and gathering resources. To me this means two things:

1. The most basic action of pushing the gather button should be satisfying
2. Gathering should never feel like a chore

The latter point is an issue of balancing resource costs and designing areas that make gathering challenging and interesting. When I start focusing on level layout I’ll delve more deeply into that topic but for today I’m going to be focusing on the first objective.

And how better to get started than with the first draft of my main character's running animation!