Hey guys, another productive day!

A whole bunch of new mini-biomes have gone in, especially in the underground. There’s a good bit of variety in the things you’ll come across as you work your way deeper and deeper, so there’s more to catch your interest while you’re looking for those more precious materials!

Work on improving the combat has continued today, pretty much everyone on the team is really happy with where melee weapons are right now. One of the more significant changes that has come with the hitbox tweaks is that it’s now possible to take cover from projectiles behind walls that are two blocks high (so long as you remember to duck, anyway). This opens up some interesting tactical possibilities that I personally will be factoring into future dungeon design.

Omni has been tackling a lot of GUI work under the hood, making preparations for some cool stuff coming up. Among these, our action bar is starting to undergo some changes and improvements, here’s a glimpse!

The durability system Tiy described yesterday is almost completely finished, we’re in the process of balancing the life of the tools along with the amount restored by each of the ores. I feel it’s getting to a very good place right now, but further playtesting with larger groups is going to be key.

As far as what I’ve been up to, I’ve spent a bit of time balancing and playtesting with the loot pools for our early dungeons. Speaking as someone who routinely would read patch notes for other games to glimpse the mentality behind certain changes, it’s an interesting turn being put in the position of the designer and making those same kinds of balance considerations.

Chiefly it’s a matter of assessing how much loot a player should get out of a dungeon and what the odds should be for particular kinds of loot, especially the rare novelties we’d like players to be able to find, but without making it so common that it loses any significance. The feedback from the rest of the team has been encouraging so far!

I leave you tonight with this snapshot I grabbed when we were playtesting the durability!

Hi guys!

So today work continues on bosses, they’re now doing things in the game but there’s a fair bit to finish there.

We also got the durability system in. I know durability is a controversial subject. So i’ll explain once again what the current plan is with durability (as always, subject to any changes we might thing are required).

So first off, durability is only present on mining tools. Not swords, axes, guns or anything else. Secondly when your mining tool runs out of durability it doesn’t break. It’s simply marked as ‘blunt’ or similar. Blunt tools continue to work but are much less effective.

You can sharpen your mining tool at any time using an ore. The better the ore the sharper it gets. Returning to your ship automatically restores all mining tools to full durability. It’s very easy to keep your tools sharp assuming you aren’t mining straight down. Mining straight down is still an option, it’s simply no longer the most efficient one when it comes to traveling quickly.

Our first milestone for NPCs has been hit today, which means we’re making good progress there.

Some work was completed on sunsets/sunrises and skies.

Network performance was given another big improvement.

Dungeons were filled up nicely with loot.

We continue to add new biomes and content.

A huge amount of work was completed on melee combat to make it tighter and more responsive. The weapons were given new hitboxes, their stats were reconfigured, swing time was reconfigured among a whole bunch of other small tweaks. Combat is looking a lot better.

A whole bunch of other things too!

Hi guys,

So today the finishing touches were made to the battle music system. It fades in and out nicely now and resumes where the previous track left off.

Two very cool new minibiomes were added with new goodies to find and craft.

A whole plethora of bug fixes were made. (I think we stamped out the last (for the moment) crash bug).

A bunch of work was carried out on NPCs and how they converse with the player.

A ton of new sounds were added to objects.

The first boss was given a whole bunch of new animations and vfx.

Personally I’ve had a bunch of (really exciting!) meetings today and I’m exhausted so I’m going to go pass out!

Goodnight all! Here’s a random screenshot from todays playtesting: