2nd October - Status of the Status Changes
Since kyren is getting close to completing her massive status system rework, I’ve spent the past couple of days helping her design and test the new Lua APIs, fix bugs, and preparing to integrate the changes back into our main development branch. One of the most apparent changes is that status effects are now driven by Lua scripts and have access to a wide variety of API functions, making them incredibly flexible and fun to work with. Today we’ve just been testing out features and exploring what kinds of crazy stuff we can do. Here’s one example, a sword with high knockback that makes monsters bounce:
Or how about a “nitroglycerine” effect that causes the player to explode when they fall too hard?
Obviously we’re also reimplementing and improving the existing status effects like fire, poison, and slows, but it’s been a lot of fun testing out the new possibilities! I think a lot of these crazy ideas may make it into the final game in some form or other, to give it a bit of a roguelike flavor.
—
6th October - Shiny Stuff!
Apologies for this going up the following morning! The Chucklefish team went out last night to celebrate the arrival of our newest member Rosie (not to be confused with the office pet of the same name) and I forgot to write this when I got home, so that’s on me!
In any case, I’ve been continuing my work with George in setting up a bunch of new weapons and fun loot for the biomes. The status system rework from Kyren and Metadept is almost done, so in the meantime I’ve been working mostly with our existing status effects, in some cases combining them for fun results. It can be a deceptively involved process, particularly if you want to make some nice particle effects to go along with it.
I’m really looking forward to when we can begin implementing some more unusual status effects, like the ones Metadept was prototyping. Then we can really go to town with making fun and, most importantly, unique weapon drops.
—
7th October - More Status
Nothing too exciting to post today. We’re getting very close to merging the new status changes into nightly, so kyren and I have been reimplementing lots of the old effects and responsibilities of the old system, and fixing plenty of bugs along the way. It’s going very quickly, which is a good sign because it means the new status system is very easy to work with. Today we rebuilt healing items, beds, liquid status effects, cleaned up some unused and misconfigured effects on objects, added several new functions and missing functions to the API, and added a much better system for light sources on Networked Animators (the class used to display pretty much everything on entities). I made this ridiculous effect to test it out:
—
8th October - Who Doesn't Like New Toys
Some of the recent new additions George and I have been making to the game’s loot pool are made because they’re cool. Others are silly and fun. Then there’s stuff like this that straddles the line.
Seems like a surefire way to win a snowball fight!
Sometimes you’ll find items like this in biome-specific chests, but most of the time you’ll only find blueprints, and its up to you to get the necessary materials together. Typically it will require a component you can only get from that biome.
There’s more to come!
Also! In case you missed it, we've got Steam trading cards now! Collect 'em all to craft Steam profile backgrounds, badges and emotes. You'll get about one card drop per hour of play.
ːSBHorseː ːSBchickenː ːSBpandaː ːSBpenguinː
Have a nice weekend!
