Hey amigos!

Looks like I’m in charge of tonight’s update.

Kyren’s made changes/tweaks to flying NPCs, to make them a little smarter and more intuitive. Not like, Siri intuitive. I wouldn’t ask one for weather reports, or strike up conversation with one. But still! Moving right along…

Legris is still working on super pretty intro cinematics! Omnipotent Entity is finishing up work on the options menu!

As for me, I’ve been working on…oh god, I’m really setting myself up for jokes here…food! Working on implementing food recipes. Each race will start with its own set of recipes, but you’ll be able to learn every other race’s recipes as well. You’ll craft food at a kitchen counter out of crops, meat and other materials. Some of it will require cooking to reap the full benefits, though. I mean, you CAN eat a raw alien burger, but I can’t promise you won’t regret it later.

And yes, you can totally bake a cake.

Foods and other consumables, on top of having health, hunger and possibly status effects, will be able to be placed on tables and other platforms for decoration. Nifty!

Oh, and here’s a brand new mech from thefluvirus.


See you tomorrow. <3

PS- It’s almost newsletter time! Last chance to send in any art and/or letters for a chance of having them featured!

Hi guys,

Today we worked on a few more UI bits and bobs.

First we made a culinary UI, which can be accessed from a food prep table and various kitchen counters style items.

It will be full of a massive amounts of food recipes. Food is divided into various categories like Entree, sides, snacks, drinks, desserts.







Each category of food will have it’s own use. You’ll also be able to place food in the world, should you want to lay a table.

It’s basic functionality, but we finally got around to making the number of slots in a chest configurable.





We’re putting the final touches on the options menu. Finishing up the final respawn animations and finishing up the avian intro.

Molly is throwing in a ton of food items to go with the cooking system.

And kyren has the ongoing task of increasing NPC intelligence.



beeeep

I need to play this @_@

the more the merrier. you can preorder it to get into the beta when that happens.

Let’s see what’s going on today in Chucklefish Land…

On the creative / artist side, there was some more work done on cooking and cooking recipes, and a lot of cooking recipes were added, along with some more crafting objects to do different sorts of cooking. There was also some code work done to crafting to enable more types of crafting / cooking windows to be opened. Also I believe more hats were drawn.

On the coding side, like I said before there was work done to support more kinds of crafting, bartwe is working on fleshing out more functionality in the container UI code, and omni did some more work on the sound system and also tying some of that functionality to the options screen.

Also, I finally have the monster spawner naturally spawn flying creatures and fish :D

So, bit of a short update today, sorry about that. We’re still hard at work, though! There will be more tomorrow, and hopefully nice juicy screenshots.

Starbound is a game about escaping from your homeworld on a spaceship and starting your life anew. We want to allow players as much creative freedom as possible in shaping their own stories and characters while still providing them with a bit of history.
Now when you create a new character in Starbound, you'll get a short comic-style cinematic that should give you some insight as to why people of each of our seven races might want to pack up and leave home!

Legris has been working on the art for these scenes, and we'll try to keep showing you sneak peeks as things progress!
A lot of you have been sending us voice clips to audition to narrate these opening cinematics, too, and so many of them have been awesome, so thanks!
We maaay or may not have landed someone for the role…more on that later! ;)


Space Cakes!

Another thing we've been working on recently is our cooking mechanic. Each race will start out with its own lore-friendly menu of recipes– entrees, side dishes, desserts, snacks, drinks– but eventually you'll be able to learn to cook other races' food too! Not sure why you'd want to swap a burrito for a Glitch's automato soup, but the option is there! Can't guarantee Avian food will agree with Human stomachs, either…

You'll craft food at culinary tables, from produce, meat and other ingredients that you can harvest yourself, buy in a shop, or trade for. The more rare and expensive the ingredients, the bigger the benefits.
On top of health and status effects, food can also be placed around the world as decorative objects. Set a table fit for a king!



Bonus! Here's Rho's WIP Floran respawn animation.

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.

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

Purdy

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!

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!