LIFE Development Blog

[Jubal]

Character naming is the only issue, as the rather rudimentary savegame system creates (entirely unencoded) .txt files with the character name as the filename - so the only place I need to check this anyway is in that specific savegame function, to avoid them making a character file that overwrites the storage file!

[Jubal]

I'm still crap at graphics, but oh well - welcome to the famed and deadly Ice Caves of Phrynoris Minor

[comrade_general]

That looks like a good place to throw a thermal pod.

[Jubal]

Yes, I was thinking that. Getting there!

[Jubal]

Some new screenshots from the planet of Mytilenus Beta! Things are progressing quite well, still tons to do but the whole thing feels a lot more do-able than it once did...

[Phoenixguard09]

This looks awesome. Definitely something I'd play.

[Jubal]

Hopefully closed beta will be a thing sometime in the next month or two. I have a LOT of plans I could implement for this thing, but I think I only need about 20-25 more scenes (depending on the number/complexity of ridiculously bad mini-animations I make) produced before I have a beta that you can play through from character start to endgame.

[Jubal]

Back to work! Have added five new puzzles and better explanations to the Time Lord computer, so that will provide a bit more variation between games

[Jubal]

Much, much work has been done recently! Definitely outpacing the feature creeps

Still a little way to go, but several major bits like spaceship add-ons have now been tested and pretty much all the locations are now in (though there are some possible extras that may end up occurring). There are still some quite major tweaks to the mining system to do, and some bits to add onto Phrynoris, but the game feels a lot more completeable than it did a week ago.

[Jubal]

Adding some extra alien beasties that you can cart around in your inventory. The animation process remains hell, and I'm still only on beast one of a planned at-least-three... eep.

[Jubal]

Most recent addition, the civic centre of the main settlement on the Terraformed Moon of Pangloss III (which was a terrible thing to name a place, and then I compounded the problem by splitting the area into a Space Dock and a Planet Surface area, but oh well, I've done it now).

[Jubal]

I created a two-room tutorial level today, which hopefully talks new players through the basics of using a text parser. It's got its own theme music and sound effects, two new short animations, and an extra achievement for completing it (entitled "Nice to meet you - run for your life!")

I'm half-considering overhauling literally all the dialogue in the game to move it to direct speech, but I'm not sure it's worth it given very low takeup for beta testing etc for the game. I'm definitely going to add one more feature, aka "invasion mode", and possibly German keyboard support, and then I think I'll do an open release of the whole thing. I don't feel like I can get it considerably improved without feedback and I don't have the energy to add much more content that people aren't going to use, so I may as well just get it released and then go try and work on something else I guess.

[Jubal]

Decided on a partial dialogue overhaul, adding elements of direct speech to give some extra flavour to interactions with key plot-relevant characters. I've started on this with the main base quest-givers, but not really sure how many & which other characters should get the treatment, and how much of it?