First of the Month! Woo

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.

Also

<@kyren> I have seen omni naked

That’s all

Heya folks.

Sorry, but today’s update is going to be a bit of a short one.  Most of the group had some responsibilities to take care of.  There’s always a few people taking care of business, and they generally don’t get mentioned in the updates.  Today just happened to have most of everyone busy with life.  For instance, I spent most of the day mopping and vacuuming my girlfriend’s floor.  But I came online to rescue you, dear reader, from a completely missing update.

Tiy and Kyren worked mostly on the server.  Trying to get WordPress plugins installed and make things work.  Since the move there have been a few issues, which we’ve been working slowly but surely to resolve.  Hopefully, things should be getting better, but this shit is time consuming. :/

Legris finally finished the Avian Introduction Story Cutscene.  It’s very pretty, but we cannot reveal it because spoilers, etc. :(

Kyren is working on enemy monster mechanics still.  She’s doing, among other things, “fish flopping on land” AI.  Fun stuff.  Next on the plate according to Da List is humanoid enemies, that can have equipment and weapons just like you.

I’m still pecking away at the options menu.  Sorry about the delay.  I had a bit of life get involved, and it turns out that my window for actually spending quality time with the girlfriend ends tomorrow at 9AM.  This is sad for me, but wonderful for you, because it means I’ll be focusing a lot more on work.

Armagon is working on an Avian Airship dungeon.  Think SMB3 style.  It’s pretty neat.

Bartwe did a very minor change to humanoid drawing order to fix a subtle issue with faces.

And that’s it for today!  Some of the things that you’ll see in upcoming days is putting the respawn animation into the game, working on making ships upgradable in game, and more!

Let’s see what’s going on today in Chucklefish Land…

On the creative / artist side, there was some more work done on cooking and cooking recipes, and a lot of cooking recipes were added, along with some more crafting objects to do different sorts of cooking.  There was also some code work done to crafting to enable more types of crafting / cooking windows to be opened.  Also I believe more hats were drawn.

On the coding side, like I said before there was work done to support more kinds of crafting, bartwe is working on fleshing out more functionality in the container UI code, and omni did some more work on the sound system and also tying some of that functionality to the options screen.

Also, I finally have the monster spawner naturally spawn flying creatures and fish :D

So, bit of a short update today, sorry about that.  We’re still hard at work, though!  There will be more tomorrow, and hopefully nice juicy screenshots.