Exclusive Look: Crafting Kiln

Have you ever wondered what it takes to develop a feature with new functionality like the Crafting Kiln? If so, you'll want to keep reading!

Creating a feature requires a lot of collaboration and teamwork - taking an idea from a piece of scratch paper to the game is not as easy as it may seem. We had the pleasure of sitting down with the Crafting Kiln Feature Designer, Steve, to get a "behind the scenes" look at the creative process behind our latest release. 

"Howdy Farmers!

My name is Steve and I'm one of the Feature Designers for FarmVille 2. Today I'd like to walk you through how our team built the new Crafting Kiln and how we worked through the challenges to fire it up for success, or as we say -- "kiln'ing it."

Building a new feature for FarmVille 2 is a lot like making pottery in a kiln. What looks easy on the outside can provide surprising challenges when you're in the heat of the moment! Luckily, these bumps in the road can be easily overcome with some exceptional teamwork and solid planning.

For the Kiln, we recognized a desire from our players to pursue XP in the same way the Crafting Kitchen allows you to pursue coins. This became our "mission statement" - a way to check ourselves as we developed the feature to ensure we were moving in the right direction. Our statement was: "When you think of coin, think of the Kitchen. When you think of XP, think of the Kiln." This easy check helped us always stay on track when questions arose.

As the feature evolved, we had a lot of fun thinking about how our new "On Fire" system would work. As you craft in the Kiln you gain XP as normal, but that XP also fills up a gauge that allows you to gain double XP for 5 minutes when it is full! 

Our UI (User Interface) department had a lot of fun building that gauge. These are the folks who are responsible for creating all of the fantastic menus you see in game; because of their hard work, the Crafting Kiln gauge it feels like it really belongs in FarmVille 2.

With the UI design in capable hands, our Concept Team worked on making a kiln that was realistic, conveyed the design goals for the feature, and is uniquely part of the FarmVille 2 world. Concept art often provides guidance for the rest of the team and indeed helped us think about how the Kiln would work for you all. 

This image illustrates the various build states of the Crafting Kiln with notes from the artist about how they envisioned the feature animating in game. 

The image above is a "storyboard" of the Crafting Kiln, which explains the various functions and animations of the feature. 

Once our concept was solid, the Art Team made the actual thing you place on your farm and all the animations it can do. On that note - get to "On Fire" mode… the animation is awesome!

While the awesome art and UI were coming together, the rest of the Kiln team was busy determining how much things should cost, how often things should happen and tweaking the overall experience for our players. Part of this process also involved inventing new Recipes, coming up with some imaginative uses for Mud and making sure the Kiln integrated well with the rest of the game (which is actually a lot harder than it sounds!).

And of course, none of this happens without programming! Our programmers took all of our designs and art and built it into the game. This is where it's important to talk about how each of these steps influenced the other steps. By building this new "On Fire" mode we introduced new concepts into the game - concepts we hope you find amazingly fun - but along the way we tried a lot of things, including odd gauge designs, weird recipes, funny animations and more. Luckily each member of the team was able to help guide one another to a finished feature. A weird recipe might be identified as unworkable by a programmer, or an animation may not work with how the UI team needs it to work. Programmers often are the first to see these things (as they work with everybody), so it’s important to listen when they see a new challenge coming!

 All of us on Team Kiln hope you have appreciated this look into what it takes to make a new feature for FarmVille 2, and we hope you enjoy the Kiln as much as we loved building it for you!"

We hope you have enjoyed this exclusive look into the Crafting Kiln. Please stay tuned for more FarmVille 2 showcases and let us know what else you'd like to see on the blog!