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Starbound now available for preorder [Up: Stretch Goals]
- Thread starter Killthee
- Start date
May 31st Update:
Omni said:Heya folks.
Sorry, but todays update is going to be a bit of a short one. Most of the group had some responsibilities to take care of. Theres always a few people taking care of business, and they generally dont get mentioned in the updates. Today just happened to have most of everyone busy with life. For instance, I spent most of the day mopping and vacuuming my girlfriends floor. But I came online to rescue you, dear reader, from a completely missing update.
Tiy and Kyren worked mostly on the server. Trying to get WordPress plugins installed and make things work. Since the move there have been a few issues, which weve been working slowly but surely to resolve. Hopefully, things should be getting better, but this shit is time consuming. :/
Legris finally finished the Avian Introduction Story Cutscene. Its very pretty, but we cannot reveal it because spoilers, etc.
Kyren is working on enemy monster mechanics still. Shes doing, among other things, fish flopping on land AI. Fun stuff. Next on the plate according to Da List is humanoid enemies, that can have equipment and weapons just like you.
Im still pecking away at the options menu. Sorry about the delay. I had a bit of life get involved, and it turns out that my window for actually spending quality time with the girlfriend ends tomorrow at 9AM. This is sad for me, but wonderful for you, because it means Ill be focusing a lot more on work.
Armagon is working on an Avian Airship dungeon. Think SMB3 style. Its pretty neat.
Bartwe did a very minor change to humanoid drawing order to fix a subtle issue with faces.
And thats it for today! Some of the things that youll see in upcoming days is putting the respawn animation into the game, working on making ships upgradable in game, and more!
Weltall Zero
Member
This might paint me as a sadist, but fishes flopping on land were some of the cooler touches in both Super Mario World and A Link to the Past. In my defense, I always tried to return them to the water in both games (even though it's not exactly easy in World
). Hoooooly crap. SMB3 is my favorite Mario and the airships were among my favorite parts.
This game is starting to look like FTL, in which I play it, think "I paid way too little for this" and then gift several copies to friends.
ilikesanta
Member
The re-spawn animation for plant-folk is dope. Apparently this is from the newsletter.
The re-spawn animation for plant-folk is dope. Apparently this is from the newsletter.
Just saw and came to post it. Now I want to see the Glitch version.
Weltall Zero
Member
The re-spawn animation for plant-folk is dope. Apparently this is from the newsletter.
:O Simply perfect!
perfect free
Member
Argghh. Stop making all the races so cool, I'll never be able to choose!
Personally, I really enjoy the battle themes. Can't wait for the beta of this game. Every news update just feels like another step closer to the beta, haha.
Right? But then you realize that they are STILL adding stuff and working on the intro animations.
This game will rock. I'm glad they're taking their time and not releasing it ASAP.
June 1st Update (It's a big one)
Kinda don't mind tools having durability, as making Hellevators in Terraria basically felt like strip-mining once you had the survival aspect done. It didn't feel like exploring anymore.
So.. i'mokwiththis.jpg
Tiy said:First of the Month! Woo
Development that’s interesting to the end user seems to come in waves. We spend a bunch of time showing off screenshots of cool things, making pixels appear on the screen and then suddenly the wave dips and we’re back doing under the hood work that’s difficult to present besides showing you all a bunch of code or a bunch of spoilers. The under the hood work then leads to a bunch of new cool features we can easily show off. It’s a cycle!
So not a huge amount to show today, a bunch of stuff we’ve talked about recently is still ongoing. Omni is still finishing up the options screen and how it interacts with the rest of the game. (It’s actually a pretty big task). Kyren is still adding a ton of NPC functionality (they’re going to be smart little things). Bartwe is working on various special kinds of damage. Part of which included us finally getting in impact graphics and sound. Armagon made us a a ton of sounds for every weapon type striking flesh and armor. Hammers give nice heavy crunch, swords a satisfying slash. There are also hitsparks and particles.
The screenshot really doesn’t do it justice, it looks great in motion.
We’ve also been working on the way data is structured. We’ve got a nice system where you’re going to be able to just drop ‘pak’ files into a mods folder and immediately have them active. The great thing about this system is that server hosts could transfer missing pak files to the client on connect. Potentially even host a file server with a redirect to make the process extra fast. We’re really hoping once modding takes off each server will be a unique experience.
George is completing the tiered weaponry, there’s at least 60 unique weapons per race (not including any of the randomly generated or non craftable stuff).
Here’s a very small sample of what he’s done, keeping the vast majority back for spoiler reasons.
Rho has been working on respawn animations, you can find one of the new ones in this months newsletter.
Legris is still plugging away at all the intro cinematics.
In other news Chucklefishy news, the Risk of Rain beta has been released and you can pick it up over at www.riskofraingame.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=i84sipkxIV4
The game is absolutely incredible and Chucklefish published so purchasing it goes towards supporting us.
Congrats to the risk of rain dev team for getting it out there.
Finally I’d like to talk a bit about durability in Starbound. It’s been a massively hot topic on our forums and in the comments. Some have speculated that your favourite gun or sword will eventually break, or it will be a constant grind. I wanted to put those fears to rest and explain what we’re proposing for the durability system, and why we think it should have a place in the game.
First of all, durability only affects tools. Things like pickaxes, axes, hoes, etc. Weapons are unaffected, objects are unaffected, armor is unaffected.
Second, durability does not break and delete the tool. Each tool has a healthbar below its slot in the inventory. When this bar hits 0 the tool is marked as ‘blunt’. It’s still usable but its effectiveness is massively reduced.
Returning to your ship automatically repairs and restores to full health every tool in your inventory.
If you’re not on your ship, you can sharpen your tools with ore. Either the ore made to use your tool or something stronger. The sharpening process is super quick and super simple. You just pick up the ore, drag and drop it with right click on top of your tool and the tool’s health goes up.
We decided this system is a good way to encourage thoughtful mining, where making use of ore deposits and finding caves is key to mining quickly. We wanted to discourage digging massive vertical tunnels to the center of the planet (though you can still do that if you’re determined, it won’t be the quickest method of reaching the center anymore) and keep the basic ores useful throughout the entire game.
Also,
<@kyren> I have seen omni naked
That’s all
Kinda don't mind tools having durability, as making Hellevators in Terraria basically felt like strip-mining once you had the survival aspect done. It didn't feel like exploring anymore.
So.. i'mokwiththis.jpg
Weltall Zero
Member
It might sound like a small thing, but impact flashes and proper sounds make a HUGE impact on the feel of combat, so I'm glad they're taking it seriously. The other parts that make attacks feel "meaty" is a properly timed, properly adjusted knockback (some indie games, amusingly enough, often put too much knockback), and a slight animation freeze when the weapon hits something. It'll be interesting to see the final version of it all.
I'm also ok with the durability stuff, seems to encourage strategic play rather than mindless clicking.
I'm also ok with the durability stuff, seems to encourage strategic play rather than mindless clicking.
.... I'm starting to see a lot of GW2 GAF in this and the Terraria thread... which just means you guys have good taste in games.
But yes, it's agonizing waiting for this game. I was hoping the Terraria 1.2 update would be out by now to at least give me something to scratch that itch, but now it seems to be pushed back to the end of July, which does me no good at all.
I'm hoping we get something soon. I had a thought the other day that if it were me, I'd aim to launch, or at announce the launch date on July 20th; the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing, when mankind first set foot on another celestial body.
One small step for gamers, one giant leap for gamer-kind.
Apologies for the Double Post, but the June 2nd update is up:
Hi all,
So we’re in the process of making the websites comment system part of the forums and this post could get lost entirely. So I’m going to keep it very short in case I need to repost it again in the morning.
The options menu was finally completed today. We left some room for additional options but everything is functional.
I know options are dull but it’s a fair bit of work and it’s complete, so yay!
We’ve also got procedurally generated, funky aquatic creatures appearing in oceans and other bodies of water.
We’ll be adding a ton of different behaviours to these over the coming days.
We’re also working on the 3D printer interface and the scanning items procedure at the moment, but no shots of that just yet.
So as I said, keeping this one really short until website maintenance is complete.
Cheers guys!
Yeah, they said a while ago that they were working on a trailer, but it feels like they kind of let that fall to the wayside in favor of these daily updates. They might be holding it back until they're ready to announce a launch date.
I just hope we get something substantial soon. I know they're working hard and making a better game for it, but I can't help but be greedy and a little impatient.
I could do without the references to his personal life and girlfriend and stuff in the updates. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like when you've received over $1,000,000 in pre-purchases you need to be a little more professional than talking about mopping your girlfriend's floor. Who knows, maybe I'm just a curmudgeonly old man now.
Otherwise game looks cool and I hope it turns out as well as I'm hoping.
Otherwise game looks cool and I hope it turns out as well as I'm hoping.
Probably like the zoom in Sword of the Stars: The Pit.
Yeah, I'd say you are acting a bit too curmudgeonly. It was just a small bit of personal info amongst the truckload of information about the game. He's clearly putting the money to good use, which we can see by the daily updates we're receiving. Many kickstarter campaigns give little to no progress reports, so we should be grateful we get as many as we do and not critique him for giving us a smidgen of personal info. I'd rather have a personable developer than a professional completely devoid of character.
i think it's nice to have a little dev personality in the updates. this is a crowdsourced indie title after all, not a VC funded focus group test game.
with Terraria announced for the Vita, I just realized this too could make it over there.
i'm so down for the double dip.
with Terraria announced for the Vita, I just realized this too could make it over there.
i'm so down for the double dip.
I don't see how Starbound would be any more limited on consoles than Terraria. The controls have a good deal of automation, as near as I can tell (I have not double dipped), which makes at least the digging aspect easier. I can't imagine I'd want to spend a lot of time building, but some people have; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfG91r-DRs
Well, you guys saw Terraria is coming for mobile platforms too, right?
I'm surprised to see my video linked here, lol. As someone who has both the PC and PS3 version of the game, the controls on the console version take some getting used to but are actually pretty good, in my opinion.
I could definitely see Starbound heading to consoles at some point. I don't see the controls for consoles limiting it too much. I'm pretty excited to build fun things in Starbound and Terraria patch 1.2.
Ah shit, that is your video! Very nicely done, I would have been impressed if it were done on PC, that it was done with a controller is nothing short of spectacular. Good music choice too, I'm such a whore for Castlevania.
... you know, when 1.2 or Starbound comes out, you and I are going to get onto the GAF server and we are going to make magic.
Zoom options are so, so welcome for 2D games and high resolution monitors.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. I'm a big Castlevania fan as well.
I'd love to be a part of the Gaf server for these games, I just recently had my account here approved a few days ago. Normally, I'd post on Gamefaqs, but I like the structure here a bit better. I already have ideas ready for 1.2 and I can't wait to get started.
Yeah, I've been doodling the last couple of days, even though I know it's pointless since we don't know what exactly will be in there.
But yeah, we had a lot of fun building stuff on the GAF server, but because not everyone got involved at the same time, we never really had a 'golden age' where everyone was playing and building together. Hopefully we'll have that for Starbound.
Haryu has mentioned he'll put the GAF server up when the next terraria patch hits, as a sort of 'farewell' party before Starbound. That'll be fun...
Yeah, I noticed that too! Glad to see GAFGuild holds great taste; and I am also excited for the 1.2 update
and holy crap; that is actually a sweet idea; Chucklefish needs to get behind that..
I liked how Terraria did it. So much view.
June 3rd Update
Hey guys, gonna keep things fairly short today!
There’s lots of work taking place right now across the board. Some of it is technical stuff, there’s AI stuff, and our artists are still hard at work on weapons and mechs. I personally have been crunching on dungeon stuff. Today I pretty much wrapped up on the Avian Tomb dungeon, which has been a refreshing change of pace from the lavishly decorated halls of the Glitch castle dungeon. There’s a number of massive chambers, dedicated to ancient graves, interconnected by smaller passageways filled with tombs and deadly pitfalls for the unwary. Here’s a taste of what you have to look forward to!
Kyren has been busy adding a bunch of new behaviours to our flying NPCs, which are shaping up nicely!
With the tomb wrapped up, I’m going to be taking a week-long vacation in Bali starting tomorrow. While the rest of the team will continue working hard to deliver the best game they can, I’ll be lazing about the side of a pool, probably with a cocktail. Rest assured it’ll be business as usual once I get back, I’m looking forward to seeing how far the game progresses in my absence!
Warablo
Member
The controls and such with Terraria are pretty good, just like you said.. It takes a little getting used to it..
I just think Starbound has a lot more controls and stuff going on in it.. So it maybe a tiny be trickier..
3DS/Vita titles seem perfect for this game also..
Yeah, but if Starbound beta manages to get out before the Terraria patch, I aint putting up jack, unless its a Starbound server. ^O^
They haven't really said much, unfortunately.
Because of this, particularly:
I'd say character saves work almost like Terraria. Servers have the option to force only new characters, only characters made on the server, or you can upload your single player character. The trick here is that I'm seeing mention of uploading your character to the server, but not downloading a character to play on your own later. Anything you do character-wise (of course planet changes won't carry over to your alone time) on a server will possibly stay on the server. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but like HaRyu mentioned, they haven't said much.
June 4th Update:
SHORT ONE FOR YOU TONIGHT LOL NO. Lots of things have happened today. As you may or may not be aware.
First, there were moderately large changes to the website, as chronicled in previous updates. Were now bridging together our website and our forums. Clicking the comments link for all subsequent posts will take you to the forums thread that was automagically created when we make a post. This will help our mod staff actually moderate the comments that were being posted, rather than leaving troll comments around for several days waiting around for Tiy, who is the only person with Disqus mod powers, to remove them. So thats good.
Also in the tin is a roadmap update. You can thank Tiy for putting it together. I just uploaded it. Some percentages were updated. Maybe some text was changed? I dont really know, I didnt pay much attention when I uploaded it. So go exploring.
As far as game work is concerned, Ive been having some difficulty working on it personally lately with all of the website changes. Ill be staying up way late this evening working on the 3D Printing UI. Hopefully, I can have it done before tomorrow morning rolls around. Hopefully.
Bartwe made some major improvements to initial load performance. Start up time is dropping fast. Thats really nice. That combined with some of the stuff a helper elf is working on, means that weve really begun performance tuning on this part of the code. Its important, because it lets us do our edit, compile, run, test cycles much faster. If I understand the plan of attack, next up for bartwe is programming in status effects.
Kyren made a commit that removed the need for redundant asset information to the tune of 3k lines of redundant information removed. This also helps start up time.
So today was more of a performance tuning day. Kyren and Tiy also talked strategy in dev chat, mostly about how were going to need to tackle Humanoid Enemies and NPCs and made some cool plans surrounding that. Boring but necessary. Planning is important.
Here's the twitter feed somebody set up to track all of the changes to the Roadmap, in case anyone is curious what was actually updated; https://twitter.com/StarRoadTracker
People were bitching about "OMG personal garbage, plz b srs about game" so I decided to be proactive and cut down on the number of useless whine posts nobody agrees with by 100%.
People were bitching about "OMG personal garbage, plz b srs about game" so I decided to be proactive and cut down on the number of useless whine posts nobody agrees with by 100%.
Weltall Zero
Member
Well, it has been in development since 2011 at least. If that's 70%, the remaining 30% would be around eight months.
ilikesanta
Member
I thought I remembered reading somewhere that for the BETA they wanted most of the stuff done except save all the story stuff for the release. So if that's true (and not something I made up in my head) where does that leave your estimate for the BETA release?
Hey all,
Today was one of those dreadful days in which I had to take care of a ton of business shenanigans. Accounts and lawyers that sort of thing.
Luckily though, whilst my soul was being destroyed the rest of the team continue to make progress.
Rho completed the last of the respawn animations. I dont think Im going to show any more. We should at least leave a couple as a surprise no?
Kyren continues to work on Humanoid npcs, they need to be quite smart and encompass a lot of different behaviours, so shes probably going to be on that for a few days yet.
Omni has nearly entirely finished the 3D printer system, which is a really nifty thing to have access to (especially with an admin client, print anything in the game for free! Yay!).
Bartwe has finished up all the base work for status effects. Enemies now use the same damage system as the player, so anything we come up with can be applied to both. Next on the agenda is poison, burning and bleeding.
George and our wonderful contributors are still tackling the huge number of ore based melee weapons and isnt too far off completing them now. Some of these are ridiculously cool.
Can you guess which races these two weapons are from?
Legris is still working away at the intro sequences between work on biomes.
We also got the wonderful Logan Cunningham of Bastion fame on board for the voice acting. The samples he sent today were incredible.
Until next time!
I just wanna see Novakid stuff.
-Deadpool-
Member
I just want the game!