Jellyfish Spreading Round The World

Global Reach

It’s been quiet for a while because the team was spread across the globe, working our magic on intrastellar goodwill away missions. Although this has slowed our work somewhat, our wayward tribbles are quickly being herded back home where they will be put to good work or tossed out the airlock.

By the way, if you’re asking about that incident with that thing in France, Adam had nothing to do with it.

Manic Mechanics

Don’t fret, though. We’ve taken great strides in implementing several of the core game mechanics. We’re steaming hard towards our goal of having a complete game loop in place for our first playable. Having front end loaded a significant amount of design effort by prototyping many iterations of the concepts in Excel, we’ve been rapidly converting it into playable code over the past couple weeks. We recently got item procedural generation worked out and now have our set sights on implementing the combat system.

Tweaks and Polish

Coding isn’t always pretty, so even though all of our work is now being done in production code, there’s an ever-present need to look at what has been done and tighten up loose ends. We’re busily cleaning up what has been done to date, as well as hacking away at a large list of “to dos” that we need to have in place for the first playable. There’s also the ever-present bug list that we have to take swats at. We are now starting to see over the horizon, and have even begun tallying up the list of items that we have to start thinking about for the work that will come after our first internally-playable version is complete.

Animated Masters

We’re also getting a grip on the new set of animation tools, and are really liking what we’re seeing. After a bit of effort we now have a pipeline that allows us to take raw motion capture and plop it down into the game with a minimum of hassle. Our setup so far is quite nice, for basic motion at the very least, and should help us save a lot of effort when it comes to animating googly-eyed aliens to invade your beloved astrobase. The low-cost solutions that are now available have really made mocap accessible to small indie projects. It is an exciting time indeed.

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