Space Dingus Developer Log #10

Trying out a slightly new format for how I do these developer logs. I'm going to have a steady format of one top news item, then a summary of highlights from the past month, then what we're currently or soon working on. This might be nicer than the previous big lists of what we did last month. Plus, things like that will get covered anyway once we start posting public change notes for build updates on Steam.

Death Road 10 Year Anniversary

View on Steam About a week ago, I made a news post for the Death Road to Canada 10 year anniversary. Along with news that we're opening up the Playtest more soon, I posted a video of some recent Space Dingus footage. You can see that video below:

This is actually a mix of newer footage, with some older in the middle. People seemed to like the footage a lot, though common feedback was that it's pretty odd without music. More news on music later! Other notes off the top of my head:

• I swear the explosions were bigger before. Maybe they just look really small in the dark. In any case, they really need to be bigger

• We're going for a HUD for health this time. You can see it often in the bottom right hand corner. Ammo HUD is currently a big placeholder

• To-do: HUD elements for seeing where your friends are in multiplayer

July Highlights

On the programming side, this month was a frenzy of doing a bunch of little things for more full Steam integration, to make wider scale playtesting easier and more finished. An example of this is things like joining other players. Before, you joined someone by console commands. Now, you can do it straight from the Steam Friends interface.

We added some new weapons, including the Ant Spray for the Pest Control Profession you can see at the top of the developer log.

We did a redesign of the (currently placeholder) mission lobby. We had a themed "take missions from the Space Government" thing before, but we decided to do something closer to the real game.

The mission lobby currently still has a room that lets you easily change your Profession/Job. With some improvements, like the job selection working better with your character appearance. This won't be in the full game, this is just in for easy demo and playtesting purposes. Eventually we'll have a full character creator where you choose a Perk, Trait, and Profession for each character you make, along with their appearance. At that point, we will get rid of this room.

We also added screens for your Ship AI to give words of wisdom and encouragement. The current plan is that you will be able to select your Ship AI from different types. They will act as an extra character sometimes in events, and maybe confer some slight bonuses/penalties.

We added a new location type: Desert Planets with multiple caves. Find skeletons, steal their stuff. Sometimes you can find someone to rescue.

The caves have their own new procedural generation methods. The above gif is just one cave layout type.

We implemented generators that can power other things if turned on. Or de-power things, if destroyed. We plan on expanding this more later, into interesting objectives for a mission. Things like move and protect this generator and plug it in, giving you access to new locations.

We also added some new objects, with some experiments. Above is a houseplant with multiple leaf types that can fly out of it, as it gets tossed around.

Current Work and August Plans

The main focus right now is remaining Steam integration and playtest-specific stuff, and some things we had to skip last month. Then it's all polish and testing until we open up wider playtesting. We're playing this by ear, and going for where early feedback takes us. Since this is so programming heavy, we will be able to add more content on the art and design side at the same time.

We're messing with adding semi-customizable shuttles for escaping and entering locations. The above is a little preview. They won't be fully functional for awhile, but they will be in partially soon.

Next Developer Log

Next Dev Log will be on August 28th. I will post another short gameplay video, along with the usual news. Until then, here's some more exploding barrels.

To me, a REAL videogame has a lot of exploding barrels.

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 .