Happy holidays starchasers! It’s the Wintery times, when the red liquid in the thermometer that mommy says you shouldn’t drink drops to a pinprick of nothingness and ninety tons of white pain descends from the sky to ruin your plans to wash your car and freeze your knuckles until they bleed.
In other words, it’s the perfect time to sit inside, mope about, and get a HUGE amount of progress done! Actual work. You know, content and stuff. I could talk about all the things that got done and the current state of all those things here, but I’d rather cover them in each individual section. Let’s get to it!
As always, this is just a paraphrasing of the main article, which you can read here. And of course, as always, be sure to check out our demo and Discord.
System Detailing and Do-overs
Last month I talked briefly about adding detail to star systems. Not points of interest, bosses, or quests, but the little things that add that much needed quality that Skyrim modders sometimes call “immersion”. This month, EVERY single star system has reached its goal for detailing! That’s right, EVERY single one. But what does that mean?
It means hazards around the wreck of every large ship (and mechanics for them). Asteroid miners and big asteroids in asteroid fields. Ships in every shipyard and billboards along most every highway. Subtle rotational effects on planets!
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I’ve also been going back over systems and changing lighting, placements of planets and spawning bubbles to help traffic flow better, or make the lighting from stars less intense.
These redoes will be a thing constantly being done during development as places seem to flow or don’t look quite right. It’s one of those ongoing processes.
Vignettes and Points of Interest
Another massive milestone this month was that every single point of interest had its first draft finished! Some are missing textures or the mechanics aren’t quite where they need to be, but you can now see and view every single one in game.
For example, this time traveling spaceship. Loot its innards for bigtime loot, but don’t get caught in the various warps!
Or the famed Curshian Death Cube. What secrets lie beyond its deadly six sides? We can only wonder.
But we can’t forget about those naturally occurring vignettes too. Hidden coral forests, lost groves of space amber, huge snaking rock spires, and mushroom forests. Who doesn’t like space mushrooms really?
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And much much more!
So, rejoice starchasers. This is a major milestone for the game, and just an example of how much closer we’ve finally gotten to releasing the game.
Campaign and Quest Work
For this month’s campaign work, I blocked out and added a lot of content to the non-unique, non-campaign systems. Those moments, areas, and setpieces that involve them, you know? Be warned, there’s spoilers ahead here!
Quests got a lot of mechanical work done to them. I adjusted how shields work for certain quests, allowed text to parse itself and display data about stats and global variables, and moved around a few old demo quests to new locations, rewriting them appropriately.
Expect to see more work done on quests in the coming months!
Various Other Improvements
Of course, lots of other things are happening as well. You can now customize your character and buy clothes for them, for example. Just be wary, because NPCs and other station interactables can now have restrictions set on them!
Combat lines have been improved, you won’t see chatter as frequently anymore, and it’s been separated out into defensive and offensive lines respectively.
And finally, I’ve made sure to fix up and improve the effects of legendary ships found in stormed areas. For example, this overloaded fighter, whose ship becomes a ticking time bomb that will rip open a rift if not destroyed fast enough (and offers excellent loot to those who manage to do so).
Assetwork
Not too much to say about assets this month. Mostly it was about finishing up the models for various vignettes, or wrecking pre-existing assets for areas where pre-existing assets needed wrecked variants. But we also have a space train! A TRUE space train, in fact.
That’s all for this month folks, Happy Holidays, and check back next month for our yearly overview.
