In a continued effort to make the crafting more fun, I’ve spent the past week working on a rework of the smithing system. It’s now a lot more in-depth than before, with a lot more items to craft and a brand new minigame!

To start crafting now, you simply walk up to an anvil (found near blacksmiths) and interact with it to open the menu screenshotted below. Selecting an item category changes the list on the right side. The number to the far right signals how many bars of the selected type you need to start crafting the item.

After selecting an item to craft, the next step of the process begins.

The goal of this minigame is to hit the correct button (WASD for keyboard or the ABXY for Xbox or PS buttons on a PlayStation controller) as the blocks fall down and cross the line near the bottom of the window. Doing so enough times results in the item being crafted. You’re also supposed to see your character between the two windows there, but I haven’t gotten to that stage just yet (still prototyping it).

There’s also new icons for the different materials and their ore, as seen here. This is part of the work of replacing all the icons in the game with higher resolution and re-drawn icons.

Different materials will have the blocks move faster and require more hits before being successful. You will also receive more XP if you craft the item without any misses! Leveling up your Smithing skill will make the blocks fall a bit slower or become slightly bigger. More materials are also unlocked by reaching higher levels.

What else is new?

Apart from the reworked smithing gameplay, there’s a lot of other small (and some big) changes and additions coming to the game in version 0.3.0, such as interiors to all the houses in the world, fully furnished and interactive, lighting improvements, tons of bug fixes, improved AI and new quests to complete.

There’s also brand new icons for almost all items. So far I’ve drawn around 80 new icons, but there are over 400 items in the game that also need new unique icons. Phew. Here’s some previews of new icons:

In the item icons you can see the background color has changed, again. I have almost finished yet another re-do of the interfaces, this time with a new color theme and better scaling to different resolutions.