Hello!

Development is now back at pretty much full speed again with most of us back home, we’ve had a busy day making a few balance tweaks after seeing roughly how people play the game the first few minutes for the first time. I’ve also been trying to wrap up the last biome additions on surface level, feels really great to see just how much stuff there is to explore right now! Game progression is another of our top priorities right now, things like what ore spawns where, how and where you unlock new crafting etc.

Code wise I believe some optimizations are being made currently, they all seem to be asleep right now, I’m on sweden time so no real surprise there really!

Lastly, what kind of person would I be if I didn’t leave you with a few screenshots, right? Enjoy!


Tower put together from random things from across the universe.



House built from early game materials.

Hi guys,

So I’m trying to get this going regularly again.

Today we largely worked on tier 2 progression. For the most part it’s now complete save for some of the unique items/features that appear in tier 2.

It is however in a place where you can play all the way through tier 2 now.

We spent quite some time figuring out a method of creating steel, an alloy, that would make sense to the player. (The actual process is quite complex).

A bunch of members are still only just getting home and some are recovering from jetlag. But our programmers have got back into the swing of things.

Bartwe massively improved server performance (again!) today.

A bunch of work was done on the navigator, ensuring it’s ready to enable progression through additional tiers.

Full steam ahead!

Hi again!

Is this the 31st or the 30th aug progress really? I don’t know, I’m on sweden time and we’ve been working hard! Yesterday we worked on a bunch of visual improvements for the ship mainly to make it easier for new players to navigate and figure out what’s what. Our surface biomes is still getting a lot of finishing touches as well as tier 2 content, everything is going really well!

Code is being done on the ship’s navigation system right now, few things to make sure the player can easily navigate the stars as well as set a planet as your ‘home planet’, making it easy to go back home after exploring the universe. We really want to make it accessible for you, the players to move around through the galaxies and share your experiences with others, coordinates, explorations etc.


New and improved savannah trees!

Bit short of an update today but we’ve got work to do! thanks for reading

Hi!

Work has been done once again! Yesterday we tweaked a lot of npc behaviour and monster skills, trying to get a good balance where combat is fun but challenging, flying monsters in particular got a lot of attention. A lot of talk and concepting were made on bosses as well, i think we have some really nice things coming togethere on that front Other than that a lot of work has been made to make the games first few minutes a lot more user friendly, to make sure people don’t get lost on what to do and that the interface makes sense to new players.

I don’t really have anything new to show in game so I’ll just leave you with this:

- Work was completed on the Savannah biome, including new trees and foliage.

- Improvements were made to the UFO boss

- Movement code was tweaked as part of the implementation of the tech system

- Improvements were made to various areas of the GUI

- Flying monsters were given new animations for their attacks

- New costumes were added

- The game remembers if it was maximised when quit.

- New AI patterns were added

- Work on new dungeons is underway

- A number of bug fixes and performance improvements

Evening folks! Work has continued as usual today with a bunch of stuff being fixed and added across the board. Here’s a quick rundown!

- Lava now appropriately hurts you and even sets on you fire! Ouch!

- That object count just keeps on climbing! A bunch of new objects have been implemented and many others have received tweaks and improvements.

- More unique dungeon NPC progress from our artists!

- New light type added: Spotlights!

- Bug fixes and more optimization! Hooray for better framerates and cleaner sound loops!

- More dungeon work from yours truly!

Speaking as the dungeon guy, the spotlight feature (courtesy of the always-helpful Kyren) is something I’m really pleased to finally have. Essentially we can now have any light-casting object project that light in a cone, much the same way our flashlights do! It sounds like a really mundane feature, but it has opened up a wealth of possibilities in creating truly atmospheric dungeons. I mean, take a look at how much cooler I can make my ship look with just a few spotlights!



Up until this point all lights that could be placed in the world simply lit the area immediately around them, regardless of the appearance. I always found it a bit limiting, creatively, and often it just plain wouldn’t make sense (like having a set of floodlights that are clearly pointed one way, casting light behind them as well). It was fine for things like the fire torches that light the more archaic dungeons, but now I’m getting into some of the higher tech locales, where spotlights could and should exist.

I’ve already started putting them to good use in the dungeon I’m currently working on. A prison should be a bit ominous, and spotlights seem to be remarkably effective at creating that effect.



That’s probably the last sneak peek you’re going to get of this particular dungeon for a while, so I hope you guys like what you’ve seen so far!

On a personal note I’d like to thank everyone who rocked up to i49 and provided us with so much positive feedback and invaluable criticism. I did not fully appreciate how much people cared about this game until I was granted the opportunity to meet members of our community in Telford. Now, more than ever, I want to make this game the best it can be! Thank you for your continued support; it means a great deal to both myself, and the team!

Good night everybody!
Bean Daddy out!

Hey, sorry for the late update!

Yesterday we made a bunch of progress on unique NPCs. GeorgeV posted one of his creations on Twitter– The Po! One of the game’s sillier enemies, The Po lives in the sewers and they are…made of poop. So there you go. They come in a few variations, but here’s one:





The cutest little poop you’ve ever seen.

Double jump was implemented, which is slightly more complicated than it sounds. One of those really simple but widely used features. We made a bunch of progress on the dungeon Armagon’s been showing off, but we’ve already shown a few screenshots of that and I’d rather not spoil the whole thing.

Today we’re largely on the same track! Working on unique monsters is especially really exciting, because it’s something we haven’t had a chance to concentrate on in awhile.

Til tomorrow!

Alright! In an effort to catch up and stop lagging a day behind on updates, I’ll fill you guys in on the last couple of days. Still pretty brief, but here goes:

-Work continued on unique NPCs! We’ve done loads of them recently! Here’s one:



- Kyren’s been working on constellations! They’re not fully implemented, but they’re getting there. The starmap is huge, and constellations serve as really useful landmarks to get an idea of where you are in the universe. They’re also pretty.

- Some more costumes have been added! Here’s a sneak peek at one of those:



- And, as always, more work’s been done on balancing things out and making the game more of a game. I promise we’ll have some more substantial, interesting daily updates really soon!

Afternoon ladies and gents!

Daily updates feel silly lately because where we’re at right now, we’re focusing on just about the same things each day. Sorry for the repetitiveness and repetitive lateness.

We’ve got Kyren still working out navigation with the star map and Bartwe working on in-game tech like the double-jump and dash, with artists assisting on animations to make everything look all pretty.

We’re still hard at work on making cool monsters and configuring them to work in-game. I’ll show you a mockup of an unfinished monster called a Divern!



We’re also still working away on dungeons– Armagon put in loads of hours on the prison dungeon this week and has been tweaking some of his older dungeon rooms just a bit because he’s a perfectionist.

In other news, we’ve been arguing over who looks better in a dress: me or Tiy. This is really important.

Work continues across the board, with lots of work under the hood and some really cool gameplay stuff being added! The double jump tech is pretty much finished save for a little more work on the animation itself. I’ve found myself loading my character with the double jump tech and some gliding gear, gaining an exhilarating sense of freedom as I soar through the open air.

The recently added dash is getting to a really good place right now too, with some really cool animation effects that were added today. It’s proven to be a fantastic tech, particularly for melee-focused characters, due to its utility as both an offensive and defensive ability. Click the image below to see the dash in motion! I recommend allowing it time to fully load so you can see it at its actual speed.

Click it!

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/8467/lss.gif

That’s all for now, good night everyone!

Heya guys!

I know you’ve been antsy about the lack of daily updates, and yeah, I said I’d make sure we got them back on schedule. Honestly, while we’ve steadily been doing work and making progress this past week, things are still sort of jumbled up because we have a few core team members moving house and taking care of other “real life” stuff (pshhh). Makes it difficult to organize the update posts!

Upon asking Omni what he’s been up to today, he said a lot of things that I did not understand. Then he summed it up for me: “Massive changes were made to the core library to unify some types that had been weirdly different.”

Also, some quick improvements were made to tree-cutting particles/sounds, Bart made it impossible to beam down to planets in the middle of FTL travel, changes were made to smooth out networked item-swinging (i.e- how swinging a tool or weapon shows up to other players on a multiplayer server). Some very old bugs were apparently fixed with Line Rect intersections, which had been subtly causing problems for quite awhile.

But enough about bug fixes! A pretty cool set of enemies with some unique behaviors were added to the game! Here’s a sneak peak of one of ‘em– meet Repairbot.



Repairbot’s not too cool with you shooting his friends.

I will leave you with a vague gif.



‘Til tomorrow!

Waz! Salutations! Hello! It’s my turn to do the update again, please be gentle!

Work has been continuing on the same fronts. Omni’s been doing a ton of back-end stuff to allow for more special items, which judging by what he said, sounded complicated as heck. Bartwe implemented particle effects for death/near death states such as freezing, starvation, etc, and art assets have been supplied in turn. Kyren is working on navigation stuff (sector unlocks, travel logs) and object scripting, the latter of which might sound innocuous, but it paves the way for some really cool things down the line like monster spawners and traps.

On the art side of things, we’re continuing to pump out unique NPCs for dungeons, a couple of which were posted yesterday. It’s a lot of fun being able to return to doing unique NPCs – so far the Apex and Human sets are completed, while all the others have at least one implemented or ready to go. We’ve had a lot of creative freedom with the unique NPCs we design, which helps a lot with forging different gameplay styles for each dungeon. Much of this is thanks to Jordo, a coder who’s been implementing each of these NPCs specifically with their own unique behaviours and been extremely patient with our reckless artist demands.

I’d divulge more, but at Chucklefish spoilers are kept to a minimum, so you’ll have to wait!

As penance, I leave you with chickens.



And a rare look at what goes on inside our chat:

<@kyren> IIIIII hate OOOOOObjects
<@kyren> booooo Objects
<@kyren> boo Object

Thank you, goodnight! Much love!

Hello!

GeorgeV here. Today I’m going to talk about a small change (still in testing) that we’ve done due to some experiences at i49.

Basically the demo at the booth went pretty smoothly except for one detail. Towards the beginning of the game some players would get a bit confused. The first thing you’re supposed to do when you get on the ship is read the quest that you’re being offered. It ideally would direct you to the ship’s locker where all of your gear is. However, apparently the ship locker wasn’t obvious enough and many players simply beamed straight down to the planet without gear and without knowing what to do. Some players simply didn’t know where the ship’s locker is or what the different objects on the ship were leading to stuff like beaming down on accident.

The good news though is once they got past that bump in the road generally everyone was easily able to play and have a good time. So us booth people would only need to check up on new players to make sure they didn’t get confused and beam down to the planet too early.

So we’ve thought up a few ways to address this issue. One step is simply labeling! Yeah, the text is a bit… texty but when it comes to playability maybe easier is better? The booth at i49 was practically a first Beta test as we discovered several things us Devs overlooked. It makes me look forward to the Beta Testing even more!



Hopefully now it’ll be painfully obvious what everything on the ship is. And it’s been brought up that it might be TOO texty and obvious so who knows, maybe we’ll change it. We are still in the testing phase after all! We also might use other systems to help make the “tutorial” even easier such as quest markers or anything that’ll help people unfamiliar with Starbound get around and play our game (at least for the early part of it).



Anyways, that’s that! See you next time. Feel free to discuss the “texty” looks. Everything is subject to change.

-GeorgeV

Hey guys, another double-update for you! I apologize for the tardiness on these posts, but rest assured everyone has been very busy working and a lot of really great stuff has made its way into the game these past couple of days. Of course more unique dungeon NPCs have been thrown into the mix, with some really cool AI behaviours being hammered out by the ever-talented Jordo. We now have NPCs that can chatter to themselves (right now for instance, they say “open sesame” when they open doors) and we’re very close to having them deliver dialogue when interacted with. The rest of our coders have been making sweeping optimizations under the hood, improving a lot of functionality that was lacking in places, all in the name of making a better (and more mod-friendly) game.

The wire system in particular that was put on the backburner a few months ago is finally getting some much-needed attention. While previously you could rig up doors to switches and it would work well enough, there were a handful of very specific functions I was still waiting on. One really cool addition in particular is that we can now attach wires to objects with AI like automated turrets and security cameras. This paves the way for things like alarms going off when a camera spots you, summoning more enemies, and locking you in until the alarm is stopped! Soon I should be able to start really going to town with some trap and puzzle orientated setups (there’s are a couple of dungeons I’ve specifically avoided starting on until these functions were ready).

As per usual, this past week I’ve mostly busied myself with this work on the dungeons. I’ve pretty much wrapped up on the prison for now, though I’ll likely come back to it after we launch the beta to add more content and expand it further (it’s already pretty big). It’s been interesting to tackle an inherently darker dungeon like this one, and I’ve occasionally surprised myself with the results I can get with creative use of just a handful of different block types.



I’ve long appreciated games that can tell the player a story purely through the design of the environment itself. Games like Bioshock and Half-Life 2 are still firmly in my mind as two of the greatest examples of this craft, and I’ve tried my best to imbue my work with this same kind of magic. Obviously there are limitations I have to deal with, I certainly couldn’t create something with that amount of detail in a retro-styled game like ours, but I’m hoping that when players will happen upon one of the prison blocks in this dungeon, they’ll be able to look at the contents of every cell and piece together just what kinds of people were kept in each one.



Thank you for your continued patience guys! I realize the tensions are high as many in our community are keen to play the game right now, but rest assured we’re doing everything we can to get the game into your hands in a truly enjoyable state as soon as possible! We’re continually humbled by the sheer amount of passion and eagerness on display from our community, and we’re very fortunate to have you with us! Please bear with us a bit longer!

Good evening!

Today we’ve focused a lot on adding a bunch of the enemies our artists have been creating to dungeons, adding unique behaviors/AI, and configuring loot pools. Hooray, loot!

We’ve also continued working on friendly NPC AI, with NPCs becoming gradually less stupid as we go. Now NPCs will say different things depending on your species, jump over little gaps in terrain, turn around when they’re walking into walls, using emotes, etc. Y’know, the important things. Maybe someday soon they will actually become self-aware and when that happens…well… *shudder*



Although…this guy’s got nothing to say to me. Think it might have something to do with the gun?

Nahhh.

Earlier today Rho introduced a new monster! Sort of a tougher version of GeorgeV’s controversial sewage-based monster, The Po. This one’s proving a bit controversial as well…



Obviously, crude toilet humor isn’t for everyone. We don’t expect everyone to agree that a giant walking sewage golem is hilarious, and we don’t plan on adding more poop-based enemies.

Starbound’s not an overly serious game, though. It’s got elements of serious storytelling and the opportunity for serious roleplay, but overall it’s meant to be entertaining, and we like throwing in some humor where we can! Usually it’s a little bit more subtle, but hey. Sewage monster kind of fits in with a sewer-themed dungeon. Sorry if that’s not your thing! I believe we’ve got enough serious-business intimidating monsters to make up for it.

Anyway! Onwards to tomorrow, lovely Starbounders. Goodnight!

Hey!

Today was an awesome day, because today Omni’s long-awaited grappling hook tech– while still in need of tweaking– was finally ready to show off. It’s reeeaally fun!



Armagon started work on the Glitch village “dungeon” map, which is one we’ve been really excited to see in all its procedurally generated, Armagon-designed glory.

And Bart continued his work on NPC behaviors! It’s been really interesting to watch how they’ve evolved, intelligence-wise. Sleeping, sitting down and no longer walking into walls. Good stuff.

While we’re posting videos, last night Bart uploaded a video of the developer livestream we recorded late one night at I49! Loads of people missed out on it at the time, so here it is for your viewing pleasure.



Today we addressed some questions and feedback about communication/how we spread information, and how we can do better. It’s been a long day, but I’m working on getting the website up to date with the sort of news we regularly post on the forums, IRC and elsewhere that doesn’t quite make it onto the front page. So, look for all that plus the roadmap to be updated by the end of the week! Apologies if it seems like we’ve sort of slacked on it.

Goodnight, guys!

Back to our regularly scheduled updates!

We’re still working on NPC AI! NPCs are currently sitting around, going to sleep when it’s night time, and more advanced pathfinding is in the works so that they’ll stop bumping into obstacles. Getting there!

NPCs are configurable via JSON and LUA files, like…most other things, really! Once this system is fully in place, we’ll be able to easily spawn NPCs of different types.

“What do all of these words meeeeannn?” Here’s my best attempt at explaining!



The NPC script folder looks like this right now! It’s got a bunch of scripts defining current types of NPCs and what their behaviors mean. Let’s take a look at the default NPC type…



So NPC types define things like what the NPC may be wearing, their health and energy stats, default dialogue towards each race (not shown), and other elements of NPC behavior. The second type of .npctype file you see there is for guards, which would obviously have different dialogue, different equipment and behaviors.

This is exciting! When we’re finally able to fully configure loads of different NPCs and have them behave properly in-game, it’ll feel a lot less lonely out in space.

…here’s a rather interesting couple wearing a hat you may recognize from the Create-a-Hat Contest.



Most of what we’re doing to prepare for beta involves configuring each tier of the game– implementing the relevant objects, configuring things like ore spawn rates, monster types/abilities, finishing up dungeons, etc. We’ve also still got folks working on minibiomes, which are ever-useful in adding some diversity to the landscape.

I leave you with a big flowery bed from a minibiome: