Hey!
There’s been confusion recently about how we intend to distribute the beta, and I’d like to clear some of that up.
An important thing to note off the bat is that we do still fully intend to provide customers with a DRM-free non-Steam version of the game! We know how important that is to some of you, who either don’t like or can’t use Steam for one reason or another.

However, the way we’ve decided to go about the beta has left us wondering how best to go about distributing it in its first stages, considering how frequently it’s going to be updated and patched and how much simpler it is to do that via Steam. Hence Tiy’s recent tweets! These are our options:

1) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, and keep them both up to date! This…isn’t the most attractive option. We’d spend far too much of time trying to manage our updates instead of making the game, and as a result updates would have to be slower/less frequent for everyone.
2) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, but update the DRM-free version less frequently. This could work, but the DRM-free version of the game would be incompatible with the Steam version most of the time, which isn’t so great.
3) Provide a Steam key from the start and provide a DRM-free version a little later when the beta is more stable and updates are less frequent. Considering that the ‘Progenitor’ stage of beta is very much intended to be a testing period, a lot of people may want to wait to play when it’s more stable, anyway.

So that’s where we’re at! We don’t gain anything by excluding anyone, so we’re really just trying to figure out how to do what’s best.
Wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts, guys!

Evening!

We’ve been fixing up lots of monster parts and AI, naming weapons, fixing balance issues with everything from armor crafting recipes to monster damage and adding and configuring tech! And we’ve gotten around to naming a bunch of our tiered weapons, too. There’s one called “Baboom”. :D

Hard to give you much more in the way of details, since we’re pretty much just trucking along in preparation for beta at this point. Maybe it’d be better to give you more substantial weekly updates instead of trying to do them daily or every other day? :O

In any case, meet the morphball tech. May still be changes on the way (I think it goes without saying by now that everything is subject to change, but that’s ok because LOOK I’ve turned into a ball:

Hey!

We’ve continued to work on our pre-rendered monsters, with artists finishing up animations and programmers going to town on their AI. Also, as you might have noticed on Tiy’s twitter, we’ve been updating the ship designs!

Today Armagon worked on a dungeon and OH JEEZ WATCH OUT THE FLOOR IS LAVA (or hot coals). He also appears to be really fond of that armor. :O Here’s a screenshot!

We’ve got the usual bug fixes as well including one involving monster/weapon/shield levels, and Tiy and Legris are doing a lot of work on treasure pool distribution for hundreds of items.

And that’s all I’m sayin’ tonight! Goodnight. :)