Today’s been a typically busy Monday so we didn’t get around to making any flashy GIFs, but here are a few highlights of the day’s development:

• I’ve been fixing bugs with flying monster behavior, working with kyren to make some big improvements to the Lua entity queries, and playing around with skill balance for small monsters
• Kyren is continuing her rework and optimization of the tile rendering system
• OmnipotentEntity is updating and improving the status effect and character status system
• Supernorn added some new, more military-styled human armors
• Armagon added more microdungeons to improve underground variety
• GeorgeV is still working on some major progression-related art that I probably shouldn’t spoil
• …lots of other bits that I’m sure I’m forgetting. Good night, everyone!

EDIT: Didn’t see Omni’s post when I wrote this so there’s some overlap, but better two posts than none I suppose!

Friday and today I spent most of the day conceptualizing and designing a major change to how Stats and StatusEffects are handled, to make them simplier, data-driven, and lua-capable. I sent it to the other coders for review before I start replacing our current system.

I’ve been kind of out of the loop with most of what’s happening with the rest of the team as a result. Reading through the commit logs, it looks like kyren was doing some cleanup and optimization around how entity lookup queries are handled. Likely as a short brain break because it looks like she’s still tackling TileRendering. It looks like Armagon is adding a bunch of interesting microdungeons for Apex inhabited worlds. And it looks like community member Kawa’s patch to make human hair accessories match undy color was accepted and pushed by Metadept (Thanks Kawa!) And a few other things.

Greetings from London! I’m here in the office for a few weeks, so Tiy and I have been talking a lot about our plans for monsters and making more big changes. Many players seem to be having trouble with the current monsters, especially at the very beginning of the game or when beaming down to new planets, so we’ve been reworking the difficulty to provide a smoother ramp up into the game. One component of this will be changes to the spawning system to prevent monsters from clustering around the beam down point and to make their levels scale more with biome depth. Another component involves changes to the monster types and how they relate.

Small monster variants are going to be weaker, more common, and have a very limited selection of attacks (no projectile attacks, for example). Large monster variants will be rarer and stronger, with more special attacks and abilities. We may also try returning to the ‘family’ concept for monsters, where small and large variants correspond to each other directly, possibly even advancing from the smaller variants to their larger counterparts under certain conditions. I’ve gone through and made the existing biped and quadruped types consistently named and structured to facilitate this change, and I’m working on changing the spawning changes as well.

The main thing I did, however, was implement the large flying monsters that we’ve just finished the art for! Similar to the ground monster types, these are much larger, stronger, and rarer than their small brethren, and we’ve removed projectile attacks from the small flyers to compensate. Here’s one example to show just how much bigger and more detailed they are:

Have a great weekend, everyone!