Sundays are relatively slow days at Chucklefish, we all work such silly long hours during the rest of the week, Sunday is our chance to get some chores done outside of the game.

That said we still put a bunch of hours in. Sunday is also our day in which we experiment with adding things to the game that might not be in the beta, or even the final game. Little side projects that aren’t on the todo list and can only be completed on following Sundays.

I took that opportunity today to experiment with space stations. The idea being that once you are pretty far into the game you’ll be able to register an organisation/guild that will get its own spacestation.

Think ‘Guild Hall’ in an MMO.



I added our old Spacestation to the game as a test (we had spacestations early on and switched them out for personal/upgrade-able ships.)

Exploring this huge structure was massively atmospheric and made me pretty positive about the idea.



So that was my Sunday experiment.

The rest of the team continue to work on those big multiday tasks, so not a huge amount to report there. Though Kyren and Bartwe have made big progress on theirs and I might be able to show some stuff off from that tomorrow or the day after.

Hope you had a good weekend guys

Short one today.

Jordo continues his awesome work on monster scripting, adding a few new attacks and behaviors to the small flying creatures we have currently. Good work

Bartwe has done some awesome work with damage, working out the specifics of how cooldowns work across different damage types, as well as adding a new damage database and doing a ton of great organizational work with how damage sources interact with things. Really cool!

Tiy has done some cool apex dungeon work! I can’t wait to see it in action.

Aaaaaaaand….

*checks calendar*

I may have missed the 10th of June here.

More tomorrow (today).

(Edit) To make up for my lateness, here’s a picture of what rho’s been working on:

The days go by so fast.

So how about those E3 conferences?

I think we’re getting to the point now that hardware is starting not to matter anymore.

Sure the graphics might be a little bit better, but there seems to be very few nextgen games that couldn’t have been produced on current gen systems.

It used to be that each time a new generation of console popped up it allowed for the creation of entirely new gameplay experiences. From what I’ve seen so far the experiences seem to be exactly the same with slightly shinier paint.

Things have stagnated.

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of playing the same old games over and over again. I want new hardware to drive innovation in software.

That said, well done to Sony for allowing indies to self publish on the ps4. It’s a good first step.



Anyway!

Bartwe completed a ton of work on status effects. We can now apply all sorts of awesome status effects to monsters. It’s super easy to make new ones too.

I made burning and poison status effects this evening with the system, both with some nice visual FX




Burned creatures give off flames, and when the burning runs out, a puff of smoke.

Poisoned creatures produce little green bubbles.

Kyren has nude humanoid NPCs running around in the game, she’ll be clothing those really soon and giving them weapon support. I’d like to do a video of a populated village once some more of their behaviors are done, if I can find a spare moment.

Omni has all but completed the 3D printer, which is a huge part of the game. Screenshots of that once I configure the interface for it. Which is a small task.

Legris has completed the human intro.

George and Rho continue to work on weaponry, but they’ve almost finished the preset weaponry collection. And it’s huge! Our wonderful contributors are working with them on that.

We’re also working on a new suggestion part of the site, where you’ll be able to upvote/downvote your fav suggestions Reddit style so we can see what everyone wants most.

Cheers guys



- edit -



Right after I posted this, the sun went down on the world I took the second screenshot in. That world also happened to have an aurora borealis. It was very pretty. So here’s that:

Hey guys,

Today the pixel printer was finished for the most part. This was a big change with lots of moving parts so it’s nice to see it complete.

Well done Omni!



Weapon wise we’re at around 350/360 tiered (ore) weapons complete. I wish I could show them to you, they’re very cool. But this is exactly the kind of thing I shouldn’t spoil.

Here’s a little sample though:



Here’s a mockup of the new suggestion page you’ll see on the site some time soon.



Don’t worry, the people working on this aren’t the same lot working on the game. It won’t slow anything down.

I look forwards to seeing what everyone’s fav suggestions are though.

Hi there,

I have been officially restricted from trolling during the daily update.

Today, I mostly worked on bug fixes for the crafting interface and the 3dprinter, (they use the same backend of the code). There were some issues with certain recipes not showing up, and with some items being able to be “eaten” by the printer then they shouldn’t have been. As well as some crashing bugs. Then I worked on my laptop moving data around and properly upgrading the hard drive, (I had previously just thrown the hard drive in an installed Linux, I’m going back and making sure my dual boot works properly and that my data is backed up off of my old HD and that’s taking time. Exciting, I know). Recently, I did some big asset changes that eliminated lots of redundant information (inventory items and automatic 3dprinter recipes for objects), and we’re just generating that on the fly now. My next project is going to be rather boring. Bug hunting!

Kyren made a huuuuuuuuuge merge, and now we have humanoid NPCs. They’re naked for right now, and they only walk left and right. But it’s a really big change. The game’s coming together! And I’m excited

Bartwe is working on the damage system, doing scaled knockbacks and he recently rewrote the status effect system. Huge change. Lots of redundant code eliminated.

Tiy’s been helping out Bartwe and I deal with the ridiculous numbers of config files that need to be mutated from the recent changes. Lots of hard work, hat’s off to him.

Work has moved from Glitch Castle to Apex Heights on the dungeon design front. And Armagon added a frying pan that goes bang when you hit someone with it.

That’s it for today. Good job PaRappa, you can go on to the next stage now. (Noting my previous restriction on trolling, this link has nothing to do with Starbound).

Welcome to the update, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Omni, I’ll be your guide for today.

Once upon a time earlier today, I spent several hours resolving a bug where certain object items would not scan. And although I could reproduce the issue, it was strange that sometimes I’d scan the same item and it would work. Eventually, working together with Tiy, we stumbled across the actual problem. It was a difference in the metadata. A empty Variant and a Variant containing an empty VariantMap are two different things. And items spawned by different parts of the code were spawned in very subtly different ways. I spent a good solid 9 hours working on this issue before I hit on that, so my total committed code output for today was 9 lines added, 13 removed. Whoo. I’m also in the middle of making money a thing with scanning items and connecting that to the UI. But that will have to be finished tomorrow because that one bug killed me today.

Kyren is going through and cleaning up some of our core code to be less easy to screw up. Because she wound up running into some bugs that revolved around references to objects living longer that the objects themselves. And our core code shouldn’t be that easy to shoot yourself in the foot like that. So she’s updating some of the older code to be both a) more efficient and b) less brittle. So that’s pretty awesome. She also put clothes on those poor, poor NPCs.

Bartwe is also going through the core code and tuning performance. He’s modifying some of the hotter string functions and various other things to avoid unnecessary copies. He also troubleshot a problem that involved SDL lying about the true size of the window :O

Anyways, now that the NPCs have covered their shameful nudity, I can show you a picture of a bunch of NPCs walking around. Here they are, just derping right along.



Tomorrow, kyren’s wife is going to go to New Orleans, I think she’s dragging kyren along with her. So she might be out of commission. I’ll be gone Sunday, spending time with the old man. I’m unsure what everyone else’s plans are for Father’s Day weekend. How about you guys? What are you planning on doing if anything?

Hello guys,

Today has been a day of optimisations and bug fixes. We have to take a little time out to do these routinely throughout development to make sure everything stays streamlined and fast. It’s not the most interesting thing in the world but it’s very important and has to be done. Sorry it’s dull news.

Logan recorded a bunch more intro narrations for us today, they’re absolutely wonderful. I can’t wait for everyone to hear them.

All of the weapon art we’ve been working on is finally done, there’s a huge number and this coming week we’re going to get them all into the game.

Flying npcs now have a range of behaviours, some of them swoop down on you, some land from time to time, others shoot projectiles. There’s a lot of variety now and it feels great to be taken by surprise in our own game.

We’ve also been working on refining the combat mechanics to make them really tight, one part of this is the way knock back functions with varying amounts of damage. At very low damage your character/enemies won’t experience any knock back at all. At low-medium damage your character will skid backwards a short distance. At medium damage you’ll skid backwards a bit further and be stunned for a short duration. At medium-high damage you’ll fly through the air a short distance and land stunned for a moment and at very high damage you’ll fly a long distance and be stunned for some time. There’s also varying amounts of invincibility after being hit by different amounts of damage.

The human intro is pretty much done and we’ll be moving on to a new one.

One of our weekend activities recently (and a great way to test the game) is playing our own little version of The hunger games inside Starbound. It’s a ton of fun. We divide the devs into teams and see which team can survive the longest. PVP is turned on but dealing with the environment and monsters is a big part of it too. The rules state that once you die you have to dress up as a fairy (yes there’s a fairy costume) and turn admin mode on / pvp off, so you’re essentially a spectator. I’d actually like to stream one of these sessions to you when we get the opportunity (which might not be for a while). so I set up a new twitch tv channel for everyone at Chucklefish to use and you can follow it here: http://twitch.tv/chucklefishlive

So again I’m sorry for not having a great deal to report today. These bug fixes/optimisations are likely to last a few more days then it’s back to the interesting stuff.

Cheers

Hi guys,

Happy Father’s day to any Dads that might be reading this.

A lot of the team were busy today attending to the aforementioned holiday.

As one of our weekend side projects we did get a bunch of work done on twitch.tv integration though.

You’ll be able to access the twitch settings panel from an in game console that currently looks like this:



And begin streaming to twitch from directly within the game.

I’m hoping that one day {some time after release) we’ll be able to integrate more services in this way.



It’d be nice to show that service integration doesn’t have to be appalling.

Twitter/facebook integration in games has always irritated me, you usually end up with a bunch of logos plastered everywhere and annoying reminders or panels popping up that you have to dismiss. But I don’t think the idea in itself is bad, just the implementation is terrible. I’d like to have posting on twitter/facebook accessible from an item you place in the world/hold in your inventory. Much like the twitch panel. It’d be completely unintrusive, completely transparent and would only ever appear if you WANT to use it. What do you think?

- Edit -



Just to clear up some fears. Of course you won’t need twitter or facebook to play the game, of course it won’t post things automatically. This is what I meant by doing it right. If we do have time to implement this after release it’ll be a single item you can craft that’ll allow you to tweet/post. Outside of that you’ll never hear a single thing about facebook, twitter or twitch. Essentially if you’re not interested in any of these things, you won’t even know they’re there .

Also, personally I don’t use facebook at all, it’s creepy.