Hi Everybody. Today Daniel is back with a Special Weekly Dev Update, or a SWDU if you would. Actually, no. Don't, thats not great. Maybe SpeWeDUp? Hmm, no something is a bit off about that too. Anyways, lets get on with it. Game Art Balance I: An easy mistake to make is to think that by balancing two things means there should be equal amounts of each. Nothing could be further from the truth, most of the time balancing things against each other means figuring out how much you can squeeze into the less important without messing up the more...

Hello. This week both Adam and Dave have had to take care of some stuff. But never fear! Astrobase progress has not halted. Daniel Hi Everybody! This week I started with making the first pass on a system to manage special effects. This allows us to bundle particle, sound, and other effects into one package. Set up timing and other things on each part of the total effect. This allows not only for a lot more control of how they are played to make a cohesive whole, but also enables a greater amount of re-use of the individual effects. In...

Hi Everybody. Today we're doing another Special Weekly Dev Update. Daniel is continuing right where he left off. Prototype Art II: Concepts, are they worth it? The short answer - No. The long answer; Yes. No! Maybe? You see, it really depends on what the scope and deadline of the prototype is. Sometimes the goal is to have a full pitch package, with a playable bit of game accompanied by concept art to show externals a wider view of the world along with the narrow bit of gameplay you present. If that's the case, and assuming you also have enough...

Daniel This week I jumped in and attacked one of those strange beasts that lie at the intersection between art, design, and code. A GUI (Graphical User Interface). We tend to split these up and do a bit of the work each. However this one was heavily dependent on work and systems I had designed, and Adam was busy with other super important code stuff, so I have been spending my time implementing the Species Creation UI. Or at least the first pass of it. It's a pretty intricate piece of UI. In part because it is tied to (and...

Hi Everybody! Today we're doing a Special Weekly Dev Update. This is a first for us so if there will be more in the future will depend on how you guys like it compared to the increased time investment to make them. The goal of this is to (hopefully) give insight into how and why we do things, and perhaps help you better make your own games in the future. The order of the discipline for the Specials is not in any particular order, in part because of our scheduling restrictions, and in part because its not really do one...

Adam Hey everybody! This week, I finally managed to wrap up connector construction, which brings us one major feature closer to an alpha build! Since I've been spending a lot of time lately integrating a metric butt-ton of cool new arts assets, we've started to encounter performance issues on low-end machines. So, I also started looking into graphics optimizations and thinking about system requirements and settings to expose to players! Daniel Hello, this week I've spent most of my time fixing things, setting up technical art stuff, and looking into how to balance visuals vs performance further. This is of...

Adam Hey Space-Friends! This week, I took some time out for more build stabilization. A recent influx of super cool art from Daniel has left some station parts broken or behaving strangely, so I spent some time getting everything working again. I also continued progress on Connector construction. I'm definitely looking forward to being done with this particular feature, as it will provide a legitimate way for characters to navigate between station “floors”. Daniel Hi Everybody! This Week I've mainly focused on some non-Astrobase work while waiting for Adam to finish some features I need. Next week I will be...

This week has been another business and administration heavy week for everyone except Daniel, next week should have non-art updates aswell. Daniel Greetings Skinjobs! This week I've been working at getting the new hair finished and put in game. This included sculpting the hair, adjusting the low-res meshes, baking normal maps, and painting in some nifty alpha. The alpha channel (rgbA) is used to give the edge of the hair a nice and soft transition where it meets the head. This is done in order to avoid having a super sharp high contrast jagged polygonal line where the two surfaces...

Daniel Hello Humans! This week I've been doing various things. A bit of fixing UV's, some behind the scenes work. added cracks to the types of moon features, and so on. Oh and I've been working on the hairstyles, after doing a pass over the clothes the hair stood out a bit much, in a bad way. So I decided it was time to do the same to them, so I've been sculpting hair quite a bit, but its not finished yet so theres nothing really to show you guys today. Maybe next week. Adam This week has been a...

Daniel Greetings fellow Living Beings! Today I come to you with a bag of animations. As I've previously mentioned we're doing indie-style mocap. This means that I, using a Kinect and some super nifty software, record myself doing things (without having to wear a skintight suit with ping-pong balls glued on it, sadly) that then get interpreted, stabilized, cleaned, scrubbed, massaged and generally processed to get something that's usable in-game. Some examples of the animations in-engine Now, this is actually more tricky than it first appears, not because of the different skills needed for the various software involved but for...