Good evening!

Just posting a quickie update tonight to let you know we haven’t died over the weekend! Today’s largely been a continuation of work from late last week– monster stuff, mostly. We’ve finished up adding support for the new .partparams configuration file format (see this post), fixed a bug where monsters rapidly vibrate back and forth, and worked on some more improvement to monster behavior/attacks.

We’re still working on bigger content updates- we’ll get ship upgrades and stuff out as soon as they’re ready, of course. :D We should also be pushing an update to unstable sometime tonight or early morning (no, really, I mean it!), so I’ll be posting the changelog for that tomorrow.

Today we’ve been working on a new method of defining which skills monsters have access to.

We now have master lists that tie skills to monster body parts. Rather than configuring the skills on a per body part basis.

This makes it far easier for us to test individual skills and we’re going to use it to begin building lots of new monster attacks for increased variety.

We’ve also been working on the new Psi-staff weapon type we mentioned in previous posts and adding secondary attacks to weaponry.

We loved reading through everyone’s feedback on the weapons yesterday, there was lots of useful information in there. So today I’m going to ask specifically for suggestions for monster skills/attacks.

So for our first combat change push (coming to unstable today/tomorrow most likely). Here are the following changes for discussion.

– Axes, shortswords, daggers, spears and some miscellaneous weapons are now aimable

– Broadswords and Hammers remain non directional but have long range and a big swing arc

– The swoosh speed is faster, meaning greater timing required (Need to test this with latency online)

– Monsters have been made 50% slower across the board. Monsters still have different speeds based on their legs however, so spider legged monsters still run much faster than the others.

– Monster jump height has been reduced

– Monsters feel heavier and knockback has been tweaked

Here are some known issues

– The rotational arm sprite breaks when it’s behind the player

– The spear is now far too good, it has always had greater damage than other weapons given how hard it has been to hit monsters with it.

– There is a small delay ( a couple miliseconds) between hitting a monster and the monster reacting with knockback we need to look at removing

Here are some planned additions

– Two handed weapons will get secondary attacks

– Broadswords will have a short (you can’t hold it indefinitely) timed block

– Hammers will have a new swipe that does lower damage for increased knockback

– Spears are open to discussion

– A new weapon class the psi-staff is coming. A device that amplifies psychic ability to produce magic like effects. Gameplay wise this will spawn various projectiles at your mouse cursor, you’ll need to click and hold down the attack button to charge the staff before a projectile appears and moving will cancel the charge.

– Making common guns more common and legendary guns more rare

– Increasing the differences between different guns