Evening folks!

For the past couple of days I’ve been chiefly focusing on the armor balancing that I mentioned last week, as it’s proven surprisingly difficult. I’m beginning to understand the pains that other developers must go through when painstakingly balancing their games, especially the competitive multiplayer ones! Our armor balance is getting to a better place, but it’s looking like there are a number of earlier armors that are going to need to be rebalanced as well to suit our progression changes.

I’ve also been doing little bits of work on the lunar base here and there. I’ve turned it into a floating dungeon type while await the completion of Omni’s work on the skies so I can configure the parallax layers to my liking. I still wish to keep most elements of the mission a surprise, so I’m reluctant to share any further media relating to it and its unique enemies.

The efforts of the rest of the team seems to be stuff that’s mostly under the hood, like the biome threat level changes that Metadept talked about yesterday. He’s continued his efforts on that front but has also been working on the enemies I’ve been trying to stay so elusive about. He’s also fixed a few long-withstanding bugs with the humanoid NPCs that have been present in the nightly build for some time (such as their inability to properly switch between their melee and ranged weapons appropriately).

George on the other hand has been busily devising our other missions, with some seriously cool ideas being laid out. Once I’m done with the lunar base, I’ll be moving right along to start building one of those.

In any case, it’s about time for me to hit the hay. Good night everybody!

One big part of the game’s progression will be the ability to access new planet types as your ship and equipment improve. To facilitate this, we’re making biomes correspond with threat levels as you advance through tiers.

What does this mean, exactly? Previously, some biomes would only appear on planets with higher threat levels, but there wasn’t much relating a world’s appearance and environment to how challenging it is other than the explicit threat level. We’re now grouping the primary biomes by tier in a way that makes the progression of difficulty more logical and encourages players to visit a wide variety of planet types as they play through the game. When a player acquires gear with the appropriate environmental protection (such as heating systems to insulate them from cold environments), they will gain access to several new primary biome types (such as Tundra, Arctic and Asteroid worlds). We’re making sure to have enough variety within each tier to keep exploration entertaining while still retaining a somewhat consistent theme at each stage.

Once a player has completed the game’s progression and can access all of the various primary planet types, they will be able to visit planets with special high-level versions of the biomes. These will include some of the stranger variations like metallic trees/plants, as well as previously unavailable mini-biomes and dungeons. There’s no need to rush or grind to the endgame, but there will still be lots to discover after reaching it!

I’ve also been working on some smaller biome and planet configuration improvements. I’ve made the biome/sub-biome combinations more reasonable, so you won’t find ice trees growing next to pools of lava, and improved the matching of planet types to the distance from their star so you can reliably look for hot worlds in near orbits, temperate worlds in the habitable zone and frozen worlds in the outer fringes.

So a while back I mentioned that I made some changes to sky to decouple them from the coordinate information. Today I hooked it up to the WorldParameter system so that it could actually begin to be used on Floating Dungeons and stuff. There’s more work to be done, because currently there’s no randomization in this area. But we can put any sky on the outpost worlds now. Here’s an example: