Hello guys,

Today has been a day of optimisations and bug fixes. We have to take a little time out to do these routinely throughout development to make sure everything stays streamlined and fast. It’s not the most interesting thing in the world but it’s very important and has to be done. Sorry it’s dull news.

Logan recorded a bunch more intro narrations for us today, they’re absolutely wonderful. I can’t wait for everyone to hear them.

All of the weapon art we’ve been working on is finally done, there’s a huge number and this coming week we’re going to get them all into the game.

Flying npcs now have a range of behaviours, some of them swoop down on you, some land from time to time, others shoot projectiles.  There’s a lot of variety now and it feels great to be taken by surprise in our own game.

We’ve also been working on refining the combat mechanics to make them really tight, one part of this is the way knock back functions with varying amounts of damage.  At very low damage your character/enemies won’t experience any knock back at all. At low-medium damage your character will skid backwards a short distance. At medium damage you’ll skid backwards a bit further and be stunned for a short duration. At medium-high damage you’ll fly through the air a short distance and land stunned for a moment and at very high damage you’ll fly a long distance and be stunned for some time. There’s also varying amounts of invincibility after being hit by different amounts of damage.

The human intro is pretty much done and we’ll be moving on to a new one.

One of our weekend activities recently (and a great way to test the game) is playing our own little version of The hunger games inside Starbound. It’s a ton of fun. We divide the devs into teams and see which team can survive the longest. PVP is turned on but dealing with the environment and monsters is a big part of it too. The rules state that once you die you have to dress up as a fairy (yes there’s a fairy costume) and turn admin mode on / pvp off, so you’re essentially a spectator.  I’d actually like to stream one of these sessions to you when we get the opportunity (which might not be for a while). so I set up a new twitch tv channel for everyone at Chucklefish to use and you can follow it here: http://twitch.tv/chucklefishlive

So again I’m sorry for not having a great deal to report today. These bug fixes/optimisations are likely to last a few more days then it’s back to the interesting stuff.

Cheers