dcfedor's blog

Happy new year, folks! Hope everyone had a good holiday season. We stayed in town, but we still visited a lot of friends, and had a generally merry time. I also resisted the urge to tinker over the break, hoping the time away would recharge the creative batteries.

And I think it worked! I was definitely excited to get started again, and I feel the extra time thinking before acting again was important.

Hey Folks! Still working away at the social tactics feature. Lots of sharp edges to file down, and things to add so it's more engaging.

A fair amount of data editing has been going on, as we find nonsensical or missing replies. Some moves were not coming up at all. And we still need to make sure AI responses seem more plausible.

Hey Folks! Been a few days of silence here, as I try to get some progress that I can show off.

Today's screenshot shows some of that progress, in the new social tactics UI. It's a lot like the old one, except now we start with a nearly empty list of status effects on them. And as we talk to them more, it reveals information about their state of mind.

Hey Folks! It's been a busy week in the wake of the trailer! A good busy, but still busy. Hard to get actual dev work done.

In what time I could cobble together, however, I was able to make some progress on the social combat system. Now known as "social tactics!" (Combat was growing a bit too narrow a term, as a lot of non-zero-sum stuff is in here, too.)

Hey Folks!

Got a treat for you today: a new teaser video!

So what's new?

We found this dusty old UVD on a derelict sitting in an asteroid shadow. Parts of it are irrecoverable, but the shipboard RST console was able to playback this portion.

Ostranauts Teaser #2

Hey Folks! Some of you may have seen my recent tweet, which includes the screenshot above. And since that shot encapsulates what we've been up to this week pretty well, I figured it was worth talking about it a bit more.

As part of our social loop work, we've been trying to come up with more tools for the player to use during social combat. We want these social "moves" to serve a couple of purposes:

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good week(end). We had a very busy week of seeing friends, eating variations of Thanksgiving meals, and playing games. It was a nice change of pace, and break from the usual. Though pretty exhausting!

Back at the office, work is still a bit slow as I handle some admin tasks for a good chunk of each day. In my actual dev time, I'm brainstorming social tactics players and NPCs can use in conversation. And that list is getting pretty interesting.

Hey Folks! Tomorrow's Thanksgiving here, and I hadn't had a chance to post yet this week, so I wanted to get something out there to keep everyone in the loop before I was off.

It's been a crazy amount of admin work lately, and unfortunately that means little new stuff to show. Most of the fruits of my labor include conversations, spreadsheets, PDFs, and chat logs. All important stuff that should hopefully yield cool stuff in the future, but not much to look at right now.

Hey Folks! I was able to get a full day of development in today, and managed to finish my skill-gating task!

There were a few more code issues that needed fixing. Mostly naming and reference typos. Then began the long slog of updating all of the data to match the new system requirements.

Mostly, this meant adding a non-skilled option to each of the install/uninstall actions, defining their rates of progress, which ones should appear as menu options, plus some triggers to control when they are valid. I made some heavy use of regular expressions, let me tell you :)

Hey Folks! Work on the social loop preparations continues, as does general user experience improvements, and we start preparing for some audio work.

I've nearly got the install/uninstall system switched over to the "destructable style" method. I was able to fix the leftover loose item, and get the install/uninstall to continue working on an item until it reaches a progress threshold.