We've also been posting them in a sub-section of the Steam forums called "Dev Blogs", but several people noted that they'd prefer if we posted a round-up in Announcements as well.
So here's a round-up of front page updates we've posted since the beginning of August! You can find many of these changes in the nightly builds.
—
1 August - Quick Progress Report
Evening folks! Looks like I’m doing another daily update, but since it’s my second in a row, I’ll be keeping it fairly brief. :P
For my part, I did what I set out to do and finished setting up the moon mine dungeon file and key, so I’m good to start building at any time. That said, I opted to spend some time fixing an issue that’s been bugging me for quite a while with all the chests. Up until this point they opened up in a painfully slow fashion and as a side effect were not appropriately playing their closing sounds if players closed them relatively quickly.
As for the others, here’s what I know:
- Supernorn has continued working dilligently on the Novakid ships.
- Metadept has been working on implementing a new item type. Not quite ready to talk about this one yet. ;)
- George has been producing new assets for the gateway to appear in the nav UI, along with some other elements relating to Metadept’s work.
- Kyren has been doing some cool stuff with instancing, specifically concerning how they can be located and reached in the world. I’m afraid I don’t fully understand the specifics, not being a programmer, but she should hopefully be able to make an post about it sometime next week.
Afraid I’m not really clued in on everyone else’s activities, but exciting things are happening. I’m looking forward to starting work on the dungeon next week.
Until next time guys!
—
4 August - Liquidity
Howdy! My main project for the past couple of days has been prototyping a tool for sucking up liquids into the player’s inventory. Aside from the obvious utility of being able to move them around, we plan to make them used as fuels and in crafting recipes, so finding biomes with certain kinds of liquids (such as oil) will become important. Here’s how it looks so far:
Since this is the first real scripted item we’ve built, it’s involved a lot of testing and adding functionality to the Lua item API, so that’s been a nice side benefit. I’m definitely looking forward to making some more interesting scripted items and tools in the future, as well as seeing what modders make with it!
—
5 August - Mission Prototyping
Evening guys! I’ve been up to something a bit different today.
With the recent addition of the floating dungeons and player spawns, I spent my day building a rough prototype for what our missions could be like. The objective was for me to create a level for players to move through from start to finish, with environmental hazards and enemies to fight. The main objective of this test was to assess how long I would need to produce a mission, so we can gauge precisely how many polished missions we could create in time for 1.0, and to highlight any issues we may run into.
When I say the prototype is rough, I mean super rough. I didn’t spend any time dressing it up visually, since it’s just for testing and it only involved me using randomized monsters for now, which means no configuration of behaviours or dialogue as there would be when using humanoid NPCs. I ended up using the glitch dungeon files as the base for the mission.
For my test playthroughs, I would attempt to get through it repeatedly with a tier 1 broadsword, shortsword and shield, 10 bandages, and my starting clothes. It would typically take me anywhere between 10-15 minutes to get through in one go (without dying).
The difficulty of the mission varied greatly since the monsters are randomized on each instance, but when approaching the actual missions we’ll have a good idea of what the players will have by that point and be able to scale the difficulty accordingly, not to mention we’ll be using specific enemy types with known behaviours, making it easier to craft challenges with a bit more thought. I imagine it’ll be a tricky balancing act when we factor in whether you have other players with you too, but that’s just one the many challenges of game design!
This test mission also highlighted what the current benefits and limitations of using wiring within the missions are. Because I am able to plan around a linear approach, I have the ability to set up traps and obstacles that may change as you progress. In the case of the glitch, they have a number of switch objects and even hidden door objects that can also double as platforms when used in an open space, so I was able to create timed alternating platform jump puzzles, passages that only open when all switches in a room are activated and the like.
All in all it’s been a valuable experience that will prove most useful once I start working on the missions proper.
Apologies for the lack of screenshots by the way, I’m writing this from home.
—
6 August - Progression Progress
Everyone’s been working on the various elements for the gate and outpost stuff, and today we’ve started putting them all together!
—
7 August - Blog of Dev
Today one of the many things we worked on was improving the visual distinction between the various ores and bars. This will continue to change over the Beta and this is not final.
Click to enlarge!
BYE!
—
8 August - Mission to the Moon
The last couple of days have been really exciting. As our work on progression continues, we’ve been putting some serious focus into our missions; what they will be, and how they’ll tie into the grand scheme. Those of you who follow the daily updates will likely recall the moon mine George showed a mockup of a little while ago. Well, now you know what it was for!
We sat down and mapped out the overarching goal, structure, events, and enemies for the player’s first mission. Unlike the dungeons where I would generally build a single carefully detailed room at a time, we intend the development of this mission to be a highly iterative process, with feedback and ideas from other members of the team.
For now I’ve got the entire layout boxed out with a loose scale reference, but next week I’m going to really go to town shaping it into an actual environment. Detailed decoration will come later after we’ve got something solid we can actually play through.
I’m honestly really excited. Being able to work on a carefully constructed experience from start to finish will be a refreshing change of pace from having to build dungeons that are inherently dynamic in nature, as I am not bound to the limitations that randomly generated layouts bring with them. In the interest of keeping specific elements a mystery, I won’t be sharing any media of it today, but I’m sure you guys can understand.
In any case, that’s it from me. Take care and good night!
Down with character limits! Onwards to part 2.
