Apologies for this going up the following morning! The Chucklefish team went out last night to celebrate the arrival of our newest member Rosie (not to be confused with the office pet of the same name) and I forgot to write this when I got home, so that’s on me!

In any case, I’ve been continuing my work with George in setting up a bunch of new weapons and fun loot for the biomes. The status system rework from Kyren and Metadept is almost done, so in the meantime I’ve been working mostly with our existing status effects, in some cases combining them for fun results. It can be a deceptively involved process, particularly if you want to make some nice particle effects to go along with it.

I’m really looking forward to when we can begin implementing some more unusual status effects, like the ones Metadept was prototyping. Then we can really go to town with making fun and, most importantly, unique weapon drops.

Since kyren is getting close to completing her massive status system rework, I’ve spent the past couple of days helping her design and test the new Lua APIs, fix bugs, and preparing to integrate the changes back into our main development branch. One of the most apparent changes is that status effects are now driven by Lua scripts and have access to a wide variety of API functions, making them incredibly flexible and fun to work with. Today we’ve just been testing out features and exploring what kinds of crazy stuff we can do. Here’s one example, a sword with high knockback that makes monsters bounce:

Or how about a “nitroglycerine” effect that causes the player to explode when they fall too hard?

Obviously we’re also reimplementing and improving the existing status effects like fire, poison, and slows, but it’s been a lot of fun testing out the new possibilities! I think a lot of these crazy ideas may make it into the final game in some form or other, to give it a bit of a roguelike flavor.

So you may have noticed over the last few days our artists have been slamming out new content, all in the name of fleshing out the biomes and giving players some interesting incentives and rewards for exploring them. Presently, a heavy focus has been placed on each biome having its own unique resources and loot in the form of costumes, tools, and weapons. Its all in the name of variety!

The task of making most of these new items actually function has fallen to me. I’ve been going through all of them, ensuring they behave the way you’d expect, making sure hitboxes on the projectiles are all appropriately sized, that sort of thing. There’s also a bunch of new recipes being thrown into the mix, so a number of items that you previously could only acquire through drops are becoming craftable. If you’re lucky enough to find some of the consumable weapons (throwing daggers and axes, for instance), you’ll be rewarded with blueprints that will enable you craft them anytime you want, so long as you’ve got the resources necessary to do so.

Some of the new weapons the artists have slung my way have been challenging, but fun to make. One of the new weapons George teased in his tar biome post is a spear that lobs balls of tar when you attack. The tar itself doesn’t do much damage, but it can slow down your enemies, making it easier to keep them at bay while ducking in and out for your melee hits. Having spent so much of my time lately working with our weapon and projectile systems, I’ve learnt a great deal, and its always encouraging when you manage to get things working the way you intended.

Taking advantage of the liquid collection that the upgraded matter manipulator brings with it, you can now bottle your own water, among other things. Once a liquid is bottled you can consume it to receive the effects. For example, some liquids have curative powers when ingested. If you fashion yourself a bottle out of glass, you can collect the liquid with your matter manipulator, bottle it at a cooking table, then use it when you find yourself in a pinch.

As an aside, you actually drink your beverages now! I can’t tell you how many times I winced when listening to my character “consuming” a bottle of whiskey with a distinct crunch. That stuff makes my teeth hurt just thinking about it.

This whole process of configuring everything has been difficult at times, but it’s rewarding when it goes well. I expect to continue with this kind of work over the coming weeks, but in my position I can be made to change gear at any time. Ahhh, the joys of game development!

Good night everybody!