Space Dingus Developer Log #9

Still crushed with work! We ended up devoting a lot of work time this month to a new location type. It was one that has a lot of new technology involving multiple entrances/exits and multiple floors. We did this because it will make future location types easy. Particularly things like multiple building cities and colonies, with multiple story buildings being possible. We're still hoping to hit a deadline for the 10th anniversary of Death Road to Canada, but still not sure if we'll make it. Too close to say. If not, we'll still have some extra Space Dingus news prepared for that.

Development News

Since last month:

• Mostly finished a new location type: Barren Planet with Bunkers

• New support for upstairs/downstairs and inside/outside transitions between floors

• Full support for different randomization parameters for multiple floor locations

  

• New support for tunnels! This could be used for all sorts of things

• Better support for modular special rooms and prize areas. Missions can better mix and match a location with a big goal room

• Bug hunting, including squashing a memory crash

• Missions clear properly when entering a new mission. There were extra things being stored, so going through many missions could eventually hurt FPS

• More lighting system work, with ways to hijack lighting setups to change them for special areas

• Better aggro handling for multiple players, enemies will switch to a closer player more reliably now

• Better UI for health (still working on ammo UI, though the placeholder is pretty good so may delay that one for later)

  

• Floor indicators for going up and down stairs or changing locations. We default to floor numbers, but these can be changed to say whatever we want depending on location

• Sound limits for occasions where a ton would have played at once (there's a lot of enemies, so this could happen a lot)

• MORE EVENT/SCRIPTING WORK

• Limits on sounds for when there's a lot of things playing the same sound. EXAMPLE: 20 zombies yelling at once when they first see you

• Tweaks on weapon stats and how they knock down enemies, for melee and ranged

Things we're doing currently:

• Ongoing work for new UI for main screen, settings, etc

• Playing with different ideas for monster spawning on Barren Planet

• Some last extra fun things for the Barren Planet

• More work on the special "right mouse button weapon slot"

• Tweaks and balance for the multiple-mission gameplay loop

• More work on Follower AI

New Location: Barren Planet Bunkers

Barren Planet is a big outdoor location you land on, then have to find your way to doors to a multi-floor bunker complex. Multiple bunkers can also be possible. In that case, one will be smaller, and the other will spawn with a very dangerous bottom floor with a lot of supplies.

We plan to add different little points of interest that can spawn outside. Things like other explorers that fell to the monsters of the planet, with the weapons and supplies they left behind.

This new location type let us develop a lot of new level tech, so that we can do a fully developed colony or city location type next. Multiple buildings, with multiple floors. We could even do things like functional sewer shortcuts, leading to different areas on the map.

The multiple floors worked so well for us, that we will also likely go back to older locations we've made and redesign them to support having more than one floor. Some of the current locations are really big to run around in, and I think dividing them up into floors would help a lot. Especially now that each floor could have multiple stairwells, if we want to do this.

Next Up

Lots of taking a look at what we have coming up, and improving how it all feels in a longer multi-mission gameplay loop. Besides that, the most daunting thing we have coming up soon is Follower AI. We want to do a lot of improvements there, and give much more options on how you can control your followers.

Next Dev Log will be on July 31st. This last month was really heavy on new level tech, so next time I will resume my gifs of things blowing up.

Thanks for reading! You can discuss news as we post it in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord, and on the site formerly known as Twitter .