Starbound #HO

While Tiy, Omni and Metadept have been working their butts off overhauling the combat, I spent the day doing a number of different jobs here and there.

The lion’s share was spent working on putting together a key for our outpost dungeons, which will serve as a hub of sorts for the player to sell their crops, trophies, and so on. The keys can be pretty involved to put together, as it essentially needs to show me exactly what objects I get with each given brush, the brush’s color (which I have to make sure is not duplicated anywhere), and the object orientations.

In the absence of a dedicated toolset, these keys are crucial to my ability to create the dungeons. For those who missed our early dungeon creation posts, this image should give you a pretty good sense of how this stuff works.

LevelDesign

I’ve tried to make these keys as easy to read as possible so our modding community could dive right into any one of our existing dungeons and add new rooms and layouts if they wished.

Typically while adding all the objects to the key, I go through and make sure they behave the way they should, making sure their image positions line up properly in the world, switches function as intended, and if their omission is glaring enough, sound effects. I’m keenly aware that there are still many objects lacking appropriate sounds and I intend to check them all in detail at a later date when the progression update is done and dusted.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t had the odd sound task here and there. I had to devote some time away today to put together samples for our shields, chiefly designing sounds for perfect blocks and guard breaks. This sometimes can be a fairly straightforward matter, especially when I’m able to find that single perfect sample (like the footsteps, breakable objects, etc). At other times it can be fairly involved, requiring me to layer multiple samples and effects with careful balancing to get the sound I want (plasma weapons, monster sounds, and environmental ambience tracks were generally put together in this fashion). In the case of the shield sounds I had to make today, it was definitely the latter approach.

Fortunately it seems to have paid off, as combat is feeling that little bit extra satisfying now.

Tomorrow it’s back to work on the key and the objects. Once the key itself is completed, the next step is to take all the tiles and objects from the key and turn them into actual functioning brushes within a dungeon file. I’m aiming have the dungeon file done later this week so I’m able to start building the outpost proper. I look forward to sharing more on that with you soon!