Just to keep you in the loop, they only sent us the router today. They’re bringing our connection online on the 26th.

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

Hello again,

Despite today being Sunday, quite a lot happened today!  I’m a bit tired at the moment so I’m going to run through this pretty quick:

More progress on the tier 1 boss!  There are little sub-boss creatures that it spawns and they have some basic behavior now, as well as other fixes / improvements.

Tiy put in a brand new monster generator!

Bartwe (with a small assist from me) continued working on bugfixes and trying his mad dash of trying to get starbound working under Visual Studio.  There’s a good reason we’re doing this, and it’s because the way we compile on windows is getting old and finicky and creaky (MinGW) and it’s causing us a lot of headaches.  Well, to be frank supporting even the latest latest MSVC compiler is giving us headaches too, but it’s nice to have options :P  This I think is JUST about working finally, so woo.

Omni worked on some weapon tweaks and more bugfixes today.

Artists did artisty things with a few new objects and UI work.

And I pushed a fun new feature… The lighting for morning / midday / evening / night is now much more configurable and also configurable per biome / star.  This sort of completes omni’s previous work with getting lighting colored based on the planet’s star, except now the background sky and parallaxes and all the things not lit in the main world layer are also colored and match nicely, and the effect is overall really good.

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