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!

Hey guys! Looks like nobody stepped up to write the update today! Allow me to remedy that situation. :)

Afraid I can’t get too in-depth on what everybody else was doing, as I was mostly continuing with the work I described on Tuesday. I did however spend some time helping folks out with their tasks, so I’ll give you a quick summary of what I know!

– George has been working on a whole bunch of stuff. He’s updated a number of our outpost objects to look even slicker than before, as well as some really cool stuff related to the spoiler-laden post written by Tiy yesterday. If you want the progression kept a surprise, I don’t recommend reading it!

– Kyren has continued to work hard on our new tile rendering code. To my non-coder brain it looks incredibly complex, but by the time she’s finished, the game’s performance overall should be markedly better, which is always nice!

– Metadept continued his excellent work with the monsters. Now once a monster goes aggressive, they will remain aggressive unless you trigger them into a fleeing state (which not every monster will be smart/cowardly enough to do).

I’m afraid I don’t know what everybody else was working on, as I tend to get pretty absorbed in my own stuff. It’s not much, but here’s a small sample of the kind of things you can expect to start finding deep underground. We want to add some entirely unique, non-racial stuff too, but for now, this is what I’ve got to show.

I’m always open to any feedback, positive or negative. What kind of things would you like to find deep underground?

Until next time!