Hi guys,

We’ve been in Brighton today for the develop awards and gamesbythesea, so not much to report today. I wanted to share our plans for tier 2 with you though.

-warning spoilers ahead-

After repairing the ships thrusters your ship AI scans the surroundings and finds a mysterious ancient gate floating in space. Flying to the gate allows you to land and examine the gate. Which is actually a long abandoned interdimensional transport system.

Traveling through the gate takes you to an asteroid in a pocket dimension where you meet other travelers that have also found these long abandoned gates and chosen to set up a trading post on the asteroid.

The trading post will represent the first static location in Starbound. With its own lore, residents and back story. It exists outside of the procedurally generated star map in its own dimension and can also be accessed from any gate the player finds in space.

At the outpost you’ll find people to give you quests, including quests that lead to a furnace upgrade and a quest to obtain breathing apparatus that allows you to visit moons. To complete these quests you’ll need to visit planets in the solar system the gate is in.

Once the breathing apparatus is obtained players can visit moons where they’ll find structures built from/mining moon stone. Moon stone can be used to fix the ships FTL drives.

On top of all of this of course will be new armors, weapons and crafting progression.

As work continues on progression, the team spent some time today discussing the structure for tier 2 and succeeded in getting a solid plan down. For now I’m slated to continue helping in the design and re-balancing effort, though some of it requires I wait for one of our capable programmers to get a couple of things working. In the meantime, as a side project I’ve been tasked with populating our underground with more microdungeons so there’s more interesting stuff to find as you get deeper. You can look forward to finding more stuff like this!

I’ve also spent some of my free time starting to update the lights to be wirable as I mentioned in my last post. There’s over 250 objects with lighting to go through and determine whether they need the treatment. Most simply need to be configured properly, though some lack “off” frames in the graphics, so I usually need to create them. This process with each object can be quite time-consuming. Doubly so if they’re animated. Because this will have to remain a side-side-project, it’s going to take me a while, but I’ve finished with all the Apex objects at least.

That’s it from me! See you next time guys!

Hey guys, Supernorn here again!

I thought I’d show you guys the finished animation for the Treasured Trophies outpost. This was a complicated one, but I think it came out really well!