Hi guys,

Happy Father’s day to any Dads that might be reading this.

A lot of the team were busy today attending to the aforementioned holiday.

As one of our weekend side projects we did get a bunch of work done on twitch.tv integration though.

You’ll be able to access the twitch settings panel from an in game console that currently looks like this:

And begin streaming to twitch from directly within the game.

I’m hoping that one day {some time after release) we’ll be able to integrate more services in this way.

It’d be nice to show that service integration doesn’t have to be appalling.

Twitter/facebook integration in games has always irritated me, you usually end up with a bunch of logos plastered everywhere and annoying reminders or panels popping up that you have to dismiss.  But I don’t think the idea in itself is bad, just the implementation is terrible. I’d like to have posting on twitter/facebook accessible from an item you place in the world/hold in your inventory. Much like the twitch panel. It’d be completely unintrusive, completely transparent and would only ever appear if you WANT to use it. What do you think?

– Edit –

Just to clear up some fears. Of course you won’t need twitter or facebook to play the game, of course it won’t post things automatically. This is what I meant by doing it right. If we do have time to implement this after release it’ll be a single item you can craft that’ll allow you to tweet/post. Outside of that you’ll never hear a single thing about facebook, twitter or twitch. Essentially if you’re not interested in any of these things, you won’t even know they’re there :).

Also, personally I don’t use facebook at all, it’s creepy.

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

Hey guys,

Today the pixel printer was finished for the most part. This was a big change with lots of moving parts so it’s nice to see it complete.

Well done Omni!

Weapon wise we’re at around 350/360 tiered (ore) weapons complete. I wish I could show them to you, they’re very cool. But this is exactly the kind of thing I shouldn’t spoil.

Here’s a little sample though:

Here’s a mockup of the new suggestion page you’ll see on the site some time soon.

Don’t worry, the people working on this aren’t the same lot working on the game. It won’t slow anything down.

I look forwards to seeing what everyone’s fav suggestions are though.