Development that’s interesting to the end user seems to come in waves. We spend a bunch of time showing off screenshots of cool things, making pixels appear on the screen and then suddenly the wave dips and we’re back doing under the hood work that’s difficult to present besides showing you all a bunch of code or a bunch of spoilers. The under the hood work then leads to a bunch of new cool features we can easily show off. It’s a cycle!
So not a huge amount to show today, a bunch of stuff we’ve talked about recently is still ongoing. Omni is still finishing up the options screen and how it interacts with the rest of the game. (It’s actually a pretty big task). Kyren is still adding a ton of NPC functionality (they’re going to be smart little things). Bartwe is working on various special kinds of damage. Part of which included us finally getting in impact graphics and sound. Armagon made us a a ton of sounds for every weapon type striking flesh and armor. Hammers give nice heavy crunch, swords a satisfying slash. There are also hitsparks and particles.
The screenshot really doesn’t do it justice, it looks great in motion.
We’ve also been working on the way data is structured. We’ve got a nice system where you’re going to be able to just drop ‘pak’ files into a mods folder and immediately have them active. The great thing about this system is that server hosts could transfer missing pak files to the client on connect. Potentially even host a file server with a redirect to make the process extra fast. We’re really hoping once modding takes off each server will be a unique experience.
George is completing the tiered weaponry, there’s at least 60 unique weapons per race (not including any of the randomly generated or non craftable stuff).
Here’s a very small sample of what he’s done, keeping the vast majority back for spoiler reasons.
Rho has been working on respawn animations, you can find one of the new ones in this months newsletter.
Legris is still plugging away at all the intro cinematics.
In other news Chucklefishy news, the Risk of Rain beta has been released and you can pick it up over at www.riskofraingame.com
The game is absolutely incredible and Chucklefish published so purchasing it goes towards supporting us.
Congrats to the risk of rain dev team for getting it out there.
Finally I’d like to talk a bit about durability in Starbound. It’s been a massively hot topic on our forums and in the comments. Some have speculated that your favourite gun or sword will eventually break, or it will be a constant grind. I wanted to put those fears to rest and explain what we’re proposing for the durability system, and why we think it should have a place in the game.
First of all, durability only affects tools. Things like pickaxes, axes, hoes, etc. Weapons are unaffected, objects are unaffected, armor is unaffected.
Second, durability does not break and delete the tool. Each tool has a healthbar below its slot in the inventory. When this bar hits 0 the tool is marked as ‘blunt’. It’s still usable but its effectiveness is massively reduced.
Returning to your ship automatically repairs and restores to full health every tool in your inventory.
If you’re not on your ship, you can sharpen your tools with ore. Either the ore made to use your tool or something stronger. The sharpening process is super quick and super simple. You just pick up the ore, drag and drop it with right click on top of your tool and the tool’s health goes up.
We decided this system is a good way to encourage thoughtful mining, where making use of ore deposits and finding caves is key to mining quickly. We wanted to discourage digging massive vertical tunnels to the center of the planet (though you can still do that if you’re determined, it won’t be the quickest method of reaching the center anymore) and keep the basic ores useful throughout the entire game.
