It's been three weeks since our last post. I know we said that we'd do this weekly or bi-weekly, but we've been procrastinating the blogs.
Just try to remember that the appearance of progress (through these blog posts) isn't always the same thing as actual progress. What I mean is that it may appear that we're not doing anything, but we are. Every single day.
We just don't always post about it.
(We're stressed about the alpha deadline, so it's difficult for us to spend time on anything that isn't development. This is why we've been so quiet on social media)
Anyway, here's the actual post:
Music and Sound
We're excited to announce that we'll be working with Dirk Kluesing who will be creating sound effects and music for Starmancer!
Below we have two teaser songs. These are still a work-in-progress, but they'll show you the style of music that we'll have in the game.
We have been messing around with sound effects as well. Victor has been implementing some of them in-game to experiment with, by hooking up different machines and syncing the sounds to the animations.
Colonist Creator
Even further down we have a sneak peek at how the Colonist Creator looks right now. We've been using it to experiment with GUI design, in preparation for Alpha as well as trying out GUI sound effects.
We'll release the Colonist Creator for everyone to play around with, but only those with the Design-a-Colonist reward will have their Colonist permanently added to the game.
We're planning on building this with the Unity Webplayer (and hoping that it won't fail miserably). When you hit save, it will generate a unique code that you can copy and paste into your BackerKit survey.
There's 3 skin colors, 9 eye colors, 14 hair styles, and 13 hair colors (and also 2 genders). So that's 9,828 unique colonist combinations. I don't know if it's really fair to count the eyes, because they're only 2 pixels. So let's say that there's 1092 unique combinations.
Programming Stuff
Whenever you add new people to a team there's an initial productivity decrease, but Evan is becoming more and more acclimated with development and how everything works internally.
Over in programming land we're still working on saving and modding. You can now save placed objects and most colonist things.
Text is boring, so here are some gifs to demonstrate:
In this first one, I'm showing off that you can save (and load) a colonist who is carrying a crate and walking to some object.
There's actually quite a lot involved in this. You have to save all of the pathfinding and animations. Not to mention the entire AI queue.
And here's a gif where I place some floor tiles and then save/load them. (Those green cubes on the ore refinery are where colonists walk to when interacting with objects)
We have a developer script on the ore refinery that automatically gives it ore whenever it's loaded, so the actual refinery animations appear goofy when loading.
That's a bit of a lie. There's actually 2 issues going on here. The first is that the ore is magically being added, and the second is that the refinery is playing the "push out metal" animation because it thinks that the metal it received OnLoad requires an animation to play.
But I prefer to blame the developer script.
And here's a gif where I edit the raw text file to change the prefab that an ore refinery uses. I just changed it to some random number, and it was apparently a warning notification prefab.
I'm actually changing the prefab that the ore pickup position uses.
That's all..
For now.
We'll post the Colonist Creator as soon as it's finished, so stayed tuned for that.
Thanks!
