Good evening guys!

We’ve done lots of work on random encounters this week and it’s getting pretty exciting running across all these little anomalies in the universe– a group of bandits, a lonely house in the woods, cultists, people wearing silly hats. :O There’s sort of an…Elder Scrolls feel to random encounters. Here’s a few screenshots from one I stumbled across earlier this evening.

 Sapfinger the Randomly Generated Floran had just landed on Alpha R CRB 249 II (catchy name) and was searching for new and exciting things to stab when she came upon exactly what she was looking for. A cultist! And an ape that looked a little bit like that guy from that one David Lynch film! Today was truly her lucky day.

 “Death to heathens!” The cultist cried out as Sapfinger approached, which Sapfinger found pretty rude considering they’d only just met. Sapfinger sighed, mildly annoyed with the state of the universe. “You know, we’re living in a society here!” she was sorely tempted to respond, but instead she just stabbed, and the cultist was no more.

We also managed to quickly implement fire. Y’know, the actual burny, destructive sort of fire. Look at it go!

And, AND…remember this guy?

Well, he’s finally actually in-game, too, as you might’ve noticed from one of Tiy’s tweets on Tuesday.

All in all great progress this week. :D Goodnight!

EDIT: Whooops, almost forgot this bonus screenshot. Avians are funny.

Evening everyone!

Posting an update tonight since I haven’t in a few days, and then I’m gonna try condensing things into weekly Friday updates. Some of you are probably happy about this and others undoubtedly aren’t, but hey! We’re doing a lot of the same kind of thing day after day recently, and it’s difficult to post a substantial update every night without getting repetitive or just showing off lots of spoiler-y content.

Over the past few days we’ve done a lot more of the same beta-prep stuff– monsters are being balanced and NPC behaviors added, and swords have been rebalanced as well. I’ve been adding objects that are meant for a dungeon, and Armagon has populated the Glitch castle dungeon with everything from guards to lancers to humble servants. And more NPC dialogue has been added! Woo.

A big thing we’ve started doing is fixing up our random namegen. No longer will we enter the game with randomly generated characters named Beefjim or Baconjeff. RIP, Beefjim and Baconjeff, you served us well. :'(

Today I randomly rolled a human character named Donament, which I think is arguably a better name than Beefjim. Witness here the Very Brief Adventures of Donament the Randomly Generated Human.

 Donament the Randomly Generated Human landed on a snowy planet near sunset and was immediately attacked by a horrific rabbit dinosaur. She kicked its rabbit butt, naturally. She also noted that that tree looks as if it’s being supported by a couple of springy plants, which is probably an odd result of the newer terrain gen but still happens to look pretty neat.

 Then she stumbled across a bridge and into a mean-looking and questionably hostile Glitch guard…but it was getting dark and Donament was pretty famished and it smelled like something tasty was cooking inside, so she risked it and ran into the castle anyway.

 As it turns out, Donament the Randomly Generated Human was never very good at making important life decisions. RIP, Donament. :(

Aaand that’s what I’ve got for tonight. Look for a new update Friday night!

Hey!
There’s been confusion recently about how we intend to distribute the beta, and I’d like to clear some of that up.
An important thing to note off the bat is that we do still fully intend to provide customers with a DRM-free non-Steam version of the game! We know how important that is to some of you, who either don’t like or can’t use Steam for one reason or another.

However, the way we’ve decided to go about the beta has left us wondering how best to go about distributing it in its first stages, considering how frequently it’s going to be updated and patched and how much simpler it is to do that via Steam. Hence Tiy’s recent tweets! These are our options:

1) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, and keep them both up to date! This…isn’t the most attractive option. We’d spend far too much of time trying to manage our updates instead of making the game, and as a result updates would have to be slower/less frequent for everyone.
2) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, but update the DRM-free version less frequently. This could work, but the DRM-free version of the game would be incompatible with the Steam version most of the time, which isn’t so great.
3) Provide a Steam key from the start and provide a DRM-free version a little later when the beta is more stable and updates are less frequent. Considering that the ‘Progenitor’ stage of beta is very much intended to be a testing period, a lot of people may want to wait to play when it’s more stable, anyway.

So that’s where we’re at! We don’t gain anything by excluding anyone, so we’re really just trying to figure out how to do what’s best.
Wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts, guys!