Hi guys,

Today we’ve been focusing on getting the battle music working just right, fading it in when the action ramps up and fading it out again seamlessly when things get a little calmer. It’s a nightmare of tweaking to get right but the end affect is one we think you’ll be really happy with.

The tutorial quest line has been more or less finished. It’s entirely optional but it gives you a good idea of how to play the game should you be new to sandbox titles.

The last of the ore distribution changes are complete.

Aside from some finishing touches on the battle music, the music changes are complete.

We’re working on humanoid NPC behaviours now, the way they chat with the player and react to each other.

We’re also looking to get the party interface completed soon, here’s a mockup of that:

Take care guys!

Hi guys,

Today was all about the music, getting it playing at the right times, choosing what tracks go where. That kind of thing.

It took us almost the entire day to sort everything out (we have so much music now!) but Curtis has done a wonderful job and the music just fits beautifully.

We’ve also spent a lot of the day play testing the new ore distributions and seeing if they work for us. I think they still need a bit of tweaking but they’re close thankfully.

Aside from that there’s been the usual round of bug fixing and tweaking. Adding of new items and expanding the content.

It’s great that it’s now so easy to add content to the game that our artists can simply throw in more content whilst the programmers work on other things entirely.

Hi guys,

So ore distributions based on planet levels (we’ve had regular ore distribution for a long time) was finished today. My god the numbers, the numbers!!

I’m currently drowning in probabilities making sure I’m happy with how often each ore spawns, at each level, at each depth.

A bunch more biome work was completed. Particularly on ice and glacier minibiomes.

A bunch more of the initial tutorial quests were finished. We also added a nice jingle that occurs when the quest complete screen pops up. Jingles are important!

I should probably stop posting pictures of quest windows. Especially when I’m posting about sound. But it’s just so satisfying when they pop up!

Work on the first boss is going well, can you guess what it is? We should get a boss idea thread going on the forums.

With ore distribution out of the way, we’re going to be moving onto the finer points of humanoid NPCs. Having them chat to you, give you quests and sell you goodies.

That will likely come after the weekend though. Ideas for fun features we should work on in our down time this weekend?