Hi guys,

A couple of the devs were completely indisposed today (Kyren moved to Orlando! (temporarily) )

so we decided to continue with our weekend work and work on core features through the coming Saturday instead.

The extra time allowed us to polish up the music system a little more. It now reads ABC files perfectly and has a range of instruments.

Check out a little recording here: http://www.twitch.tv/chucklefishlive/c/2509131

That said, I continued to make progress on the descriptions. Only the human set left now!

George has completed some wonderful work on the Hylotl villages.

Rho completed the art for a couple of NPCs

Legris is finishing up an intro

Omni is adding a ninja rope.

This coming week we’re going to take a whole bunch of systems and tie them together to create progression. It’s an exciting week!



Edit:

A present from George in the form of a screenshot.

This is some of the Hylotl stuff he’s working on. It’ll be below the ocean when it’s finished.

Hi Guys,

Kyren is still busy moving stuff around, but today has been very productive.

We’re working a ton on progression right now. Lots of bits and pieces are coming together and our goal is to get the game fully playable without any admin commands. That means every important item needs to be craftable, getting the costs right and the leveling right for everything that has a level. Making sure ore distributions are correct. That sort of thing. It’s going to take us a while but it’s a major step towards the completion of the game.

We’re also working on the quest system which is going to help give the player direction (if he or she wants one) and alternative ways to earn money and items.

On top of that we’ve been giving each of the random monsters an evolution. You can see an example of an evolved monster hanging around with his base chums here:

http://playstarbound.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/adult.png

Evening everyone! Quick update tonight.

We finished the Floran intro, which is appropriately barbaric. You can see a shot of that here:



We also finished off a bunch of base work that will allow us to do new things with player characters, and continued work on unique NPCs.

And lots of testing was done! Hooray for testing. We’ve been testing how smooth progression is in the beginning of the game. It’s crucial that players understand what they’re doing and why, that crafting and survival make sense and aren’t too daunting, and that the UI is intuitive and easy to understand. And that the game is interesting, of course! So far so good.

Happy Independence Day to you Americans out there.

We’re still working on bits and pieces that play into the progression system. This is going to be a running theme for a while as we get it sorted out.

Kyren is now fully moved and is back to programming. Right now she’s writing a small piece of code that will allow us to play around with leveling curves and get everything exactly as it should be. It’s a process that’s going to require a lot of tweaking and testing but once it’s out of the way it’ll be glorious.

We’ve also finished up the design of the quest screens. You can see a mockup here:



These will be implemented once Bartwe is done with some deep level voodoo.

Also, because yesterday’s post was so controversial. Here’s another image from the Floran intro.

Hi guys,

So today we finally got the bed functionality in. It was a lot more complex than it should have been because it required some deep changes to make the player pose-able in new ways. But it’s done at last and now I can go through each of the beds configuring the sleeping animation. Good job Bartwe!



This is a good example of a feature taking longer than expected because a bunch of changes needed to occur to get it working as intended. But it’s there now and tomorrow we can apply the finishing touches to the poses.

Would you prefer the player to be clothed or stripped of their armor when entering a bed?

Outside of this, Kyren is making great strides with the leveling system. She’s currently working on NPC leveling and soon moving onto ore multipliers for planets of varying threat levels.

Omni is finishing up work on a brand new tool, if all goes well we might be able to show it to you tomorrow or the day after. Depending on how many bug fixes need to happen.

Legris has started work on the Glitch intro after finishing all the art for the Floran intro.

George finished up the last of the quest mockups. They’re looking really slick.

Until tomorrow!

Hi guys,

So another weekend another set of side projects.

Today I experimented with the idea of building extra sections onto your ship block by block. I ended up with something that allowed me to do this:



Honestly I’m not all that happy with how it looks, the mismatch between predrawn + block built ships really doesn’t look good.

Perhaps it’ll work out with some blocks made especially for this purpose? Hull blocks maybe?

I need to experiment with it a bit more and see how it ends up. If I can’t get it looking any better it might not make it into the game … though I suppose if you don’t build out your ship you don’t have to.

We also got campsites spawning on planets. They’re pretty rare but they’re nice to come across. You’ll meet NPCs at some of them that may or may not be friendly.



We’ve also configured all the beds in the game now, so when you do find a campsite you can take a rest at one. Resting restores health.



Omni hasn’t quite finished up his new tools yet. He ran into some bugs that slowed him down but he’s back on track now, so *HOPEFULLY* I can show you something of those tomorrow.

Cheers guys

Hey guys!

Tiyuri has kindly allowed me to hijack today’s progress report (not without me nagging him repeatedly, mind) to talk a little about what I’ve been working on the past few days with our musical instruments.

Bartwe worked hard last weekend to get the system in place, and I’ve been taking full advantage, testing various potential instruments with dozens of ABC files.

At present there’s almost 20 instruments already in the game, with more to come as time goes on.

It’s been a bit of a time-consuming task collecting all the necessary samples to make it work well, but hopefully the video below will demonstrate that it’s an effort that’s paying off nicely!

[video=youtube;JdfawUC-NRo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdfawUC-NRo[/video]

Hope you guys like what you hear!

All that remains really as far as the instruments are concerned is some pretty graphics to make them look the part, proper animations with the hands, a user interface so players can easily select their song of choice, and getting synchronized performances across multiple players.

It’s shaping up to be a great feature considering it started as a weekend project, expect to hear more soon!

Good night everybody!

Oh man it’s me again..

So, what’s the scoop.. Well, like Tiy said I’ve moved to Orlando! Holy cow is moving 420 miles with two people and two cats in a pickup truck not as fun as I imagined it to be! But Orlando is nice and as of today I now have a desk and a bed finally so I should be good to go

Bartwe has spent the day squashing all sorts of bugs all over the place, some with beds, some with status effects, and some others.

Omni is still working out the final touches on the ninja rope. I know it’s taking a few days, but after hearing the explanation of what he’s doing with it.. it’s gonna pretty cool and well worth the wait.

Legris is currently working on the glitch intro, which is coming along nicely and we’re all very excited about!

Like Tiy said I’ve been working on leveling.. everything. This is the part of the development cycle where the game really starts to take shape as a real game, and it’s important that it’s done properly and in a flexible way that allows us to adjust and balance everything properly. Sit down while I get technical for a second:

Because so many things in the game are dynamically generated or at the very least flexible, an awful lot of things really can’t just be *set* as a value, because a single value is just too limiting and boring. For example, take a random monster with a certain leg type that we decide should give the monster a ground speed boost. Should that ground speed boost be the same for each level that we can generate monsters with that part, or should the speed boost become greater as the level of the monster rises? Maybe take the same scenario, but with a jumping boost, or an armor boost etc. Some numeric parameters like this *will* be hardcoded, or perhaps specified as some kind of multiplicative factor, but there are an awful lot of inputs for us to deal with and an awful lot of balancing to do, and not everything will work like that.

Any randomly generated monster has a ton of what *could* be level dependent parameters. An incomplete list would be health, energy, physical damage amounts, knockback amounts, status resistances, mass, walking speed, running speed, swimming speed, etc etc etc. Then, after that, it has a list of status effects it gives off, and those have intensity and duration, and then also any projectiles they give off have projectile speed, projectile time to live, projectile physical damage, projectile status effects, etc etc etc.

So how do you take ALL THESE PARAMETERS that are more or less randomly selected and turn it into something that can be balanced? The trick is, is that really none of these parameters can just be a value, they have to be a function of the level. We don’t want to hard-code anything in source code because there’s a lot of tweaking / balancing to do with a TON of inputs, besides being really really difficult to manage in code. The best most flexible solution we found was to allow these fields to be specified, in JSON, as a *function* of the level.

Now, I don’t really want to write a math parser to handle real mathematical functions, which is good because exactly nobody wants to write real mathematical functions either. Instead, tons and tons and tons and tons of parameters in our configuration files will look like this:

“baseMaxHealth” : ["cubic", "clamp", [1, 20.0], [50, 500], [80, 1000], [100, 3000]]

Which is a pretty simple to understand thing, it’s just a table of <level> and <value>. But through the miracle of *cubic spline interpolation* it turns into a nice smooth curve which I’m too lazy to draw right now. In this way, we’re able to specify *how parameters change with level* rather than just specify the parameter directly. This will also allow us to do the huge amount of balancing and tweaking that we will have to do with as little pain as possible, which is probably still quite a bit of pain

So, I’ve pretty much gotten this applied at least in some form to most things that use damage and stats, but there’s still a *lot* left to do, and not everything that is leveled is this simple! There are biome and ore distributions to adjust, the existing gun and sword and shield generator math needs to be looked at again, there will probably be a large number of parameters to monster and npc generators that are not curves but tables of what parameters are acceptable at what level, and on and on.

So, sorry for talking your ear off,

Kyren Out.

Edit: It has been pointed out by Havoc that the curve listed looks weird with cubic interpolation, which is true! In fact, these are a) values I pulled out of the air, and b) it comes from a code example which is linear interpolation rather than cubic, and I changed it because I thought cubic was more interesting for a post. Nice catch, though, should have plotted it before posting it as an example!

And he’s right it is weird, and shows that you have to be careful when using different types of interpolation or you might end up with a not monotonic increasing function!

Can you believe we’ve been doing these for two months? Crazy. To celebrate I’m going to be doing a rather technical update, which several people have told me that they wanted. So you’ll get everything, including badly drawn diagrams using my trackball, and my oddly disjoint ramblings.

Today, I finally got the grappling hook in the game, as in you spawn it and equip it and doesn’t crash or break or anything. But there’s many different glitches I need to fix before I can show you off. So for today’s update I thought I’d talk you guys through the logic of how it’s (already should, but doesn’t quite yet) operate.

As I mentioned before in various places, but many of you may not have yet seen. I’m basing the behavior against an old SNES game that very few people have heard of called “Umihara Kawase,” a game which I was introduced to back in 2004 by a TASVideos run.

So let’s talk about grappling hooks and the properties thereof. First off, let’s talk about how the stretch mechanics works. If you remember back to your physics class, we’re going to be using pretty much just the spring equation to calculate this. This is simply F = kx, where k is a constant that we’re going to define in a config file, and x is how far the rope is stretched from “rest.” Of course, you can make the rope’s rest length longer and shorter while you swing around. So all we need to do is calculate how long the rope is. Well… how do we do that? Especially considering that the rope might wind up going around blocks.

Well, we need to keep track of where the rope has bent around something, of course. So, let’s talk about what defines a corner point. Well, first it needs to be anchored to the block it’s curving around somehow, so it needs an anchor point, which is typically one of the corners of a specific block. But blocks share corners in a tile based world, so we need to know which block it’s curving around. Which means we need to keep track of a list of these pairs of values, one tile coordinate, and one spacial coordinate.

But the real source of complexity in this problem is the ability to add and remove blocks. Most other games that I’m aware of with an interesting and complicated grappling hook (Umihara Kawase, Worms, Hedgewars, I’m sure there are more than a few others), don’t have to worry about mutable terrain. We do. This means that at any time one of the blocks that an anchor point is sitting against can simply disappear. What happens then? Or what happens if a block is placed over the line?

Well, in the case of a block disappearing, we want to detect that and then move the anchor point toward the midpoint of the line formed by the previous and next anchor points. Unless the anchor point that disappeared was the hook. In that case we just want to break the connection and watch the poor sap plummet to his doom. Actually, I’m probably going to change that up a bit and just make gravity nom the hook, rather than making the line disappear, but right now I just want it good enough to get on the screen and start testing so I didn’t implement it.



After we flag the anchor point as moving (over the course of several frames) towards the midpoint, we also need to check the lines before and after to make sure that we didn’t accidentally drag the line into the wall as a result of the move. We also need to check to see if we’re close enough to the middle to remove the anchor point entirely and treat it as a straight shot through.

How about for the case where a block appears in our path? Well! That’s actually similar to (but not the same as) the case where you’re moving around and the line runs into the wall. So I can just write one set of rules to handle that.

If the path between point A and point B is blocked, we first must determine all of the tiles that it’s colliding with. Then figure out which one is the closest. This will be our working block. Now there’s two cases here. The first case is when you’re looking at the block face on, in which case you’re going to need to consider the two corners that you can see. The second case is looking at the tile edge on, which means you need to consider the two opposite corners.



We consider one side, then the other, which means that I eventually need to introduce a randomness element so it doesn’t consistently favor one path over the other. Anyway in the first case we try the left corner, and check to see if we can actually go around this way (by checking the tiles adjacent to the corner), then if that works, we repeat the algorithm until it returns that we made it (so we try to draw another line between the corner and the far point, discover that we’re travelling through the block again, and then aim at the other corner.) Additionally, there are some checks that prevent doubling back or doing otherwise impossible things. This is a rather crude depth first search through sort of an impromptu graph. I don’t even keep a visited list, those I might need to in future iterations of the code for reasons of not having infinite loops.

There also are other cases, for instance you’re swinging around a wall and your grapple pulls away from the wall, we need to detect that (by detecting that the angle formed is greater than 180 degrees.)

There are some more complicated bits, but it’s now 5AM in my part of the world, and I have to get up at 9AM to start work again on this stuff. Hopefully, we’ll be able to show this off in the next few days. Sorry, I jumped the gun a bit and promised Tiy that I was going to make a video on it when I got it done in a day or two (which was like 4 days ago…), I had some code problems that slowed me down dealing with unimplemented areas of C++11 that I expected to be there (specifically the function I wanted was std::deque::insert(DestInterator locationToInsert, SourceIterator begin, SourceIterator end); I expected it to return an iterator, because when you call insert on deques it invalidates all current iterators to the deque, but it didn’t, because it hadn’t been implemented yet.)

As far as what everyone else has been doing, I honestly have no clue. I’ve managed to wall myself off to work on this for a few days, and it’s been a bit stressful, but ultimately rewarding. This was really fun to work on, and thank you so much for your indulgence. And I hope this wasn’t too boring or frankly terrible oh my god I can’t believe you call that drawing what is wrong with you.

Hi chaps

A busy day at Chucklefish.

We’ve been doing a bunch of design work today.

Consolidating our final todo list (it’s getting shorter!), working on boss designs, fixing a ton of bugs, tweaking a bunch of UI elements, slotting items and features into the progression system.

We’re also working on the leveling system and the quest log.

Omnis grappling hook is now in the game but requires some bug fixing before he can show it off. I know he’s super eager to do so. The grapple hook code is actually going to be used in a whole bunch of different items.

Through play testing we felt that the inventory was just too small, so we reorganized it and increased its size a bit. What do you think?

Hi guys,

An exciting day today with lots of fun things going on. We’re (finally!!) starting to enter that stage of development where the additions come thick and fast.

Today we implemented a plethora of new items and accessories. Sadly they’re exactly the kind of thing I’d prefer you to find on your own out in the game world so I’m not going to spoil them here.

We also implemented throwable items (which have been a long time coming). Pretty much anything you can throw will use this system and we’ve already started abusing it to make a ton of items.

We also implemented the first of the quest interface pieces. I know you guys have seen this before, but here it is in game!



We also implemented a whole bunch of rusty, wooden or otherwise purposefully rubbish looking weaponry for the first tier of gameplay!

Our chest database is almost complete, it’s a way of managing what will appear in chests across different planets/dungeons/planet levels/biomes and so forth.

We’re also working on throwing in a bunch of ‘breakables’, these are objects you can smash open with your gun or sword for goodies.

A bunch of biomes have been tweaked and now look a lot prettier and a great deal of evolved monster pieces have been completed.



We also took on board the feedback from yesterday and agree that the player portrait in the inventory window should be a bit bigger, so that’s done



In other Chucklefish news, we have a game in the steam sale!

Wanderlust (developed by Yeti Trunk, published by chucklefish) is available to buy at £1.74 at the moment. It’s a great online, coop, arcadey, action RPG and sales directly support Chucklefish.

So for those interested you can grab Wanderlust here: http://store.steampowered.com/app/211580/

Hi guys,

Today has been wonderfully productive again.

We added another big set of items to find, from flares to ocarinas. We’ve got a list of items we want to get in that will provide a whole bunch of fun things to play with.

We also worked on the way biomes spawn objects. These include smashables, crops and chests and works hand in hand with the chest database we’ve been working on lately.

Work is also continuing on our quest system, the first quests we’re adding are a small number of tutorial quests that teach you the absolute basics.

Given that most of this update is a ‘we’re continuing what we were doing yesterday’ update, I figured I’d show you something Stephen our audio guy is doing.

It’s massively WIP and can sound a little odd at times, but it’s hilarious. Here is singing in Starbound

[video=youtube;PyvuOvo_G08]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PyvuOvo_G08[/video]

In other Chucklefish news, the Risk of Rain dev team is announcing the addition of Online coop to Risk of Rain tonight. I’ve tried it out and it’s a crazy amount of fun.

Check out their trailer here:

[video=youtube;aDFFSede0j8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aDFFSede0j8[/video]

Also, here are a few keys if you want to grab the Risk of Rain prerelease.

https://www.humblebundle.com/s?gift=eaNCukw77U6C

https://www.humblebundle.com/s?gift=am4tGPdez23M

https://www.humblebundle.com/s?gift=rHBYrKeRpuXV

https://www.humblebundle.com/s?gift=Ms3hahXCW2uF

https://www.humblebundle.com/s?gift=AYHk7EVXtcVT

And if you want to help the Risk of Rain guys out (and my extension, us!) here is their greenlight page:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=131467288/

Evening folks!

It’s the weekend, and weekends are for side projects/polishing up.


The song system’s GUI is finished now! Band functionality is fully…functional! So you can enter a band name to play music with your friends. Traverse the universe in your kick-ass tourship. Serenade Big Ape with your sultry jazz tunes! The possibilities… Note that the songs listed in the screenshot below won’t be in-game. You’ll have to add them in yourself using ABC notation files! It’ll be super easy, though.




A bunch of hats were implemented today too, because you should never underestimate the importance of hats.


Bartwe spent his day off working through quest functionality, which is coming along nicely! We’re really anticipating finally being able to test out some quests.


The last of the race-specific item descriptions were finished today…at least, for existing items! We’ll be adding loads more, of course.


And I continue to work on the food system when I can spare a moment. It’s fun and surprisingly challenging to try and form race-specific food menus that are balanced and interesting.


See you tomorrow! <3

ello peeps!

Another small update for you. This time from the art side of things.

We’ve been doing work on everything from finishing dungeon objects to polishing and replacing old art that doesn’t quite fit. We’ve been adding hats and working on tiered rewards. We’ve been working on a lot.

Here is a tiny glimpse into some of the recent work. Some breakable objects.

Hello everyone!

Apologies for the post being a little late tonight, but rest assured that’s because we’ve been working hard! We’ve been testing a lot of things with the planetary leveling today, particularly in regards to the hostile mobs that you’ll find on the worlds. One of our foremost objectives is making sure that fighting enemies with a level similar to that of your own gear is challenging, but fun! It’s not quite at that point yet, but we’re getting there little by little!

We’ve scaled back the way enemies will attack you with projectiles, as it was annoying to deal with the faster enemies that could continuously run backwards while shooting at you! Especially when they could attack so rapidly you couldn’t even close in on them without taking damage. Now they’re still dangerous, but not annoying.

We also got crops spawning in the game today! So in your travels you might be lucky enough to find plants that you can get fruit and seeds from. If you’re lacking a reliable food source, you can plant the seeds to build up your own little farm! This plant here gave me banana seeds!



At the end of the night we did a big group survival run, where we tested the combat with a big group playing from all over the world to make sure it was still playable and fun when playing in spite of lag. As the resident Australian on the team, I routinely deal with lag around 450ms playing on a UK server, but I was still able to pull my weight in melee combat without too much difficulty. As it began to get dark, we chopped down a bunch of trees and built ourselves a watchtower for shelter where Tiy and Molly took some much-needed rest while I was on lookout duty upstairs.

Looks like somebody was drinking and dozed off on the job! But no, she’s just resting her eyes.



I’d personally just like thank all of you for your continued support and patience! This game has taken longer to make than I’m sure a lot of us anticipated, but it’s shaping up to be better than I had ever imagined. Having spent a year working with these people now, I have absolute confidence in the quality of work that this team is putting in on a daily basis, and we’re especially grateful to have such a dedicated (and passionate!) community backing us.

Good night everybody!

Hi chaps and chapettes.

A busy one today.

A lot of work has gone into combat, particularly with the way monsters react to damage and shields. They now clash with your shield with a satisfying bump. It’s also possible to stun an NPC with your shield to give you time to counter attack.

Kyren is still working on the leveling database, she expects a big chunk of it to be finished by tomorrow morning.

Planets now have different lighting depending on the kind of star they orbit and their proximity to it.

Here’s a planet VERY close to a red dwarf:



I think we might need to tone it down a little

A bunch of cool new items were added, making good use of the addition of the throwable item system.



We’ve begun adding bows which are going to be specifically used for hunting early on in the game.

Right now they’re using the gun system so they’re a bit ugly. But we’ll improve them.



and a bazillion more tweaks and refinements.