Hey everybody! Adam here. Sorry again for the delay on this update! I had a 48-hour game jam this weekend and it ate into my posting time on Friday and completely fried my brain for Monday. Now, oooon with the show! Daniel Hello fellow humans! This week I've actually spent with more behind the scenes boring stuff that isn't very interesting so instead of that I'll talk a bit about the character work I did the other week. Some examples of the updated characters Now, there are two major parts to this work with a common goal. The goal was...

Hey there Astro-friends! We'll be bringing you this week's dev update next Monday. The team have been working their space-butts off!

Daniel Hi Everybody! Since we last updated you on what was going on a lot of work has been done. For me it's been split into two main chunks of work, space and characters. For the characters I've been adding detail and updating their procedural textures to fully take advantage of the new possibilities in Unity 5. Space on the other hand has been more of an extension than an iteration. Instead of as previously only having an earth-like planet we now have gas planets, ring systems, rocky planets, and moons. Today I'll talk more about the moons. Some moons...

Daniel Hi Dr. Nick! These last couple of weeks I've mainly worked on fixing stuff, reworking things and iterating on objects. This isn't very sexy work, it's a lot of grind and technical stuff. But it is something that is vital to an agile and iterative workflow. What would be the point even considering evaluating the current state of anything if you do not have the freedom to change it (aside from learning from past mistakes). Often its easy to go on and just remake stuff, because it feels like you are being more creative. While that might be true...

Hey there Astro-friends! We'll be posting this week's Dev Update on Monday to let Dave enjoy a long overdue weekend with his beloved. No matter how hard we try, the guy won't take time off, so this is an important event for us! Tune in early next week for our update!

Adam The Unity 5 upgrade brought about a lot of opportunities, both visual and otherwise. I was able to integrate Daniel's new character models, uniforms, body types, genders and all. I was also able to integrate some of the missing UI and wrap up the desk content. I also had an opportunity to fix some early usability bugs (turns out it's tricky having 3D GUI!). This week has been spent mostly on some new Datapad programs, including the Equipment Manager. Once complete, it will allow us to managed gear assigned to characters in our crew. Since away teams sent out...

Dave While Adam was working on the upgrade to Unity 5, I decided to tackle the largest unsolved design problem with missions which is making the traits fundamental to the character decision making. It can't be +1 here -1 there, it has to be integral to the system. Because I need the game to be able to say "this is an ethical decision, and ethical people do A and unethical people do B" (just using ethics as an example of one of the MANY possible aspects of a character personality). Because Astrobase isn't content-driven, I can't just write it into...

Daniel Hello everybody! This week I've spent mainly making parts for projectile weapons. The main challenge with this is to make sure all the different pieces work together while at the same time giving enough variety to be worth it. Currently there are well over 1000 different permutations of them. I made a little video to illustrate some options. These combinations are completely random so some might not look as good as others. http://www.new.astrobasecommand.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/projectile_gif_02.mp4 Dave This week I worked on upgrading our procedurally generated planet weather system into something more detailed that I could tie into missions. One thing that's...

Daniel Hi Everybody! Since last week I was surprised by Adam with the functionality to combine skinned meshes, which allows me to build characters from pieces instead in-game instead of having to have one mesh per permutation or some other dirty dirty solution to modularity in character visuals; I began this week by weighting the skinning (when preparing a mesh to be animated you bind its vertices to its bones, the default initial skinning is pretty good nowadays but in some areas it is lacking) for all the character meshes we have in game so far. This means that characters...

Daniel Greetings! This week I've spent with shoestring budget mo-cap. In other words, from now on I will be able to ambulate just like you humans and my infiltration attempt will be successful. Also, it means that we now have a bucket load of emotive animations to help out with visually indicating how, for example, a conversation between two crew-members is going. Dave This week I've been working on designs for the (hopefully, final) version of the mission system. The difficulty is I need to tie in traits, skills, stats and planet hazards to give characters some sort of non-linear...