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graynull posted:The progression is just hollow and meaningless, and as a result the game feels empty and joyless. New star systems, skim the surface for ore, make some armor and fight some boss. I'd like to say I was being reductive, but that's about it. At risk of getting a flood of shitpost replies, I'm interested in how people would change the progression to something more satisfying. And by that I mean something that would be doable in the realm of the game as it is right now, not something that would basically mean making a completely different game. I've actually been pondering that question for a while now and the only thing I could come up with is changing the planetary hazards to actual hazards rather than glorified keycards, so to survive on a radioactive planet you'd have to craft a hazmat suit, radiation meds, etc. and just generally add a bunch of different hazards/survival mechanics in. But even that would essentially boil down to resource grind though and I don't know if a block building game like this could ever be more than that so I'm curious if someone else has some good idea. ubachung posted:I've tried really hard to remain optimistic about Starbound but it's getting harder and harder. I hope modding is worthwhile and there are still modders interested by the time it's finished. I've actually been interested in making some kind of large-scale progression overhaul for Starbound for a while now. The problem has been a lack of inspiration, hence my question above. Otherwise I'm in the process of learning LUA and I've made some smaller mods in the past to familiarize myself with Starbound modding, I just need to nail down a good concept so I can actually start working.
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Nov 29, 2015 01:57
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Section Z posted:Make yourself effectively stronger as you progress, not just running a treadmill to be allowed to enter the next area without dying in 1 hit (as opposed to 3). The boring treadmill is their love of making it so you take X hits before you die and need Y hits to kill enemies when they are perfectly matched to your gear. So you're suggesting giving craftable melee weapons tiered alt fires as you go up in the crafting tree? I could see that diversifying combat somewhat but it would need more to truly make late game combat feel different. Maybe lock certain weapon types behind progression, i.e. no rocket launchers/legendary weapons until tier 4 or something? Enemy escalation would have to be considered as well, instead of dumping all the unique enemies right on the starting planet later planets could feature enemies with more powerful abilities. Also locking them to more appropriate biomes might help increase biome diversity and monster "uniqueness". The other thing I would look at are armors. Right now you have a linear progression until Tier 5 when it branches out into defensive, energy/damage and middle of the road armor. It might be better if the split happened right at the start of the game and later game armors introduced special abilities to set them apart from each other further in their respective roles. So the separator sets would grant you a movement bonus or a passive regenerating shield effect, the accelerator set would give passive/sped up energy regen and the manipulator set would do... something (I'd really appreciate if someone can pitch me a good idea for that one). This would also tie nicely into the whole equipment progression, early armors just give you a choice between health and damage, later armors allow you to specialize with unique effects and give you an additional edge against the more difficult enemies on high-tier planets. Maybe add some of the old armors back as stopgaps or sidegrades, e.g. Diamond armor provides even more health and armor than the Impervium armor but its clunky and offers no bonuses/movement speed penalty? Staffs would need some major work to make them not a completely worthless gimmick but I have no idea what to do about them. They seem like something CF shoehorned in for no real reason and with no plan for how they would fit into the game's combat system. If someone has some brilliant idea on how to un-gently caress the staves, please do tell me. That's it for combat but in order to fix the shallow progression I think one thing that has to happen is the universe needs to be less linear. Previously it was just a case of going Garden -> Desert -> Ocean -> Tropical -> Frozen -> Volcanic to grind the ores you need for armor so the game let's you do the next quest. The latest unstable update actually changed the way alloys are made so you can straight-up skip Desert, Tropical and Volcanic altogether. I'd rather have every planet have some kind of environmental hazard associated with it, like extreme heat/cold, radiation, etc. and other planets provide resources you can use to help you survive there. So it wouldn't be so much a game of collect ore -> collect keycard to unlock next tier of planets -> repeat and more a case of letting the player think which and how many resources he needs to collect to survive in any given biome. This could mean collecting water from an ocean planet to survive in a desert to collect oil to craft steel armor, collecting biomatter from a tropical planet to create radiation meds to survive on a radioactive world or collecting liquid nitrogen to power an environmental cooling system to survive on a volcanic world. This would at least provide some diversity in resource gathering if not everything requires mining ores as well as open up the universe to a much more freeform progression where players can decide what they want to go for and when, along with an incentive to revisit previously explored biomes.
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Nov 29, 2015 11:57
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Ror posted:But if you buy Starbound, your purchase will go directly towards the development of the game and help us to get it finished sooner. Mind you, looking at how Tiy always talks about continuing development after 1.0 I think it will most likely end with them just making an arbitrary decision to call some future release 1.0 and carrying on like nothing happened.
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Nov 30, 2015 12:06
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Hitlers Gay Secret posted:You mean like Minecraft? Where it's 1.0 release was literally a price increase? Or Spacebase DF-9 where the 1.0 release did nothing but confirm that the devs gave up? I mean the kind where one day they'll come out and call it 1.0 and then keep developing just like before, so update 1.1 will disable on-touch damage of enemies while 1.2 re-enables it only to be disabled once more in 1.3.
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Nov 30, 2015 20:11
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Mokinokaro posted:Penguin boss is moved. Replaced by a bunch of tedious no fun linear missions Linearity aside, moving towards proper bosses with their own custom arenas was actually a pretty good idea. Before every boss battle boiled down to digging a whole and shooting the boss from where he can't get you. I also thought the missions themselves were pretty fun, at least before the latest updates hosed up the combat again and all the mission enemies got nerfed into oblivion because people were crying about them being too hard. 
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Dec 7, 2015 21:27
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Slime posted:I felt they were less too hard and more that the player wasn't given any opportunities to get more powerful, while at the same time the combat they've been flailing around to try and make fun is simply too janky and poo poo to make a difficult fight fun. Challenging bosses would be fun, if combat wasn't boring garbage. I'm not sure what people are expecting from the combat of a 2D platforming/blockbuilding game but I thought the current stable build had a pretty good system going in terms of timing attacks, blocks, dodges, etc. Its not a particularly complex system but then even Dark Souls boils down to block/dodge -> punish until the enemy is dead, the nuances come mainly from differences in enemy attack patterns and weapons. Take the current stable version, add in weapon specials and the accelerated energy regen from the latest unstable update and you have a decent base for combat that might not be phenomenal or ground-breaking but good enough to be enjoyable. From there its just a matter of fine-tuning the balance of enemies, item progression, etc., like making that legendary Starcleaver I found in a dungeon actually better than the generic twohander I can craft. But instead they opted for lovely Terraria knockback/kiting combat with damage on touch so meh. The bosses never really ran off of that whole darksouls-y concept though and were more traditional platformer bosses. I always thought those were pretty bleh but not really that big of a deal. Kinda makes you wonder though what the reason behind their schizophrenic combat design is. Does one half of the devs want Dark Souls and the other Terraria or are they actually trying to do both? Section Z posted:Standing on a platform out of enemy reach firing literally 15 grenades at them before they died, because they could kill you in about two hits. If you're referring to the shockhopper mech then yeah, that boss had some issues regarding telegraphing. Once you got the pattern down the boss was a pushover, the only problem was that the only way to learn the pattern was to die repeatedly to him. They should have added some proper tells to his attacks so a first-time player actually has a decent chance of avoiding them. "Oh, the boss is spinning up his tracks, I bet he's going to charge at me, better get ready to jump over him" instead of "The boss drove into the corner and then immediately bolted towards the other side of the room and took of 90% of my health before I could react". But instead they decided to just nerf his damage into oblivion. Even worse if you were playing at 3x zoom because then the boss would actually drive off-screen for his charge attack. The whole battle is just not very well thought out.
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Dec 7, 2015 23:47
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Section Z posted:I was talking about non boss enemies in the space mines when they were first implemented, taking that much damage to kill Oh, those guys, I totally forgot about them. Yeah, those were pretty broken initially too, mostly because the intended way to fight them was pretty dumb (run to the left and let the miner NPC's kill him). But my initial point still holds true, the base was there, they just needed some finetuning in terms of damage and windup, a hammer attack that kills you in two hits should have a long enough windup to allow you to dodge.
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Dec 8, 2015 10:55
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Supernorn posted:Hey goons, stable is now out Hey, I was curious if you could shed some light on some of the design process behind this update. You guys removed damage on touch with the previous combat update but now you added it back in, why is that? I mean is this some divisive topic with half the dev team wanting it in and the other half not or something? Why the back and forth? Also I remember it was said that at some point engine support for AoE status effects on objects will be added back in, do you know anything about the status of that?
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Dec 8, 2015 14:42
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XboxPants posted:Can someone post/link this? If not for this one drat stupid thing, this sounds like it'd be a pretty good patch. Cicadas! posted:SPEAKING OF FEATURES
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Dec 8, 2015 22:05
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LordZoric posted:Is that Halfway game any good? It looks kind of interesting but I decided against it when I saw who was publishing it. Same with Interstellaria or whatever it is. Both of those are pretty decent. Nothing amazing but then they only cost $10 or something. You realize just because it says published by Chucklefish doesn't mean CF was actually involved in any of the development (or even the publishing for that matter)?
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Dec 10, 2015 17:28
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LordZoric posted:I'm not sad about the dumb haskell-coded Pirate Game. I particularly lost interest when they showed all the different art-style mock-ups with an announcement that they were going with the "bog standard indie game" style of pixelated stick-legs. Why would you program a video game in Haskell of all things? 
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Dec 14, 2015 15:46
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Agent Kool-Aid posted:so when's the mod to fix that coming out http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/nightly-cheerful-giraffe-fastcraft.3263/
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Dec 16, 2015 16:04
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Agent Kool-Aid posted:yeah, seriously. once the devs fart out what they consider to be a '1.0' product i feel like it can be radically changed by those with the ability to be something actually pretty good. As things go Starbound is pretty open to modifications, its just a huge pain to do so because the game itself uses a combination of Lua (which is a pain to work with) and JSON (nice for the ability to change entries without overwriting the whole thing but the syntax is a *huge* pain) and the output log is borderline useless for debugging. Take the touch damage for example, you can totally set the random monsters to do no damage on touch, add the old melee attack back in and change the monster AI to utilize it instead of humping your leg. The only problem is to do the latter two you need to mess with Lua scripts and if you gently caress up the output log will just give you some generic "Could not load [file]" message with no explanation. It doesn't tell you anything about why it threw an error, could be you mistyped a file name or maybe a float turned into a bool for no good reason and the only way to find out is to go over each of your 200 lines of code and comb them for errors.
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Dec 19, 2015 10:32
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Johnny Joestar posted:eh, some people actually make huge, sweeping mods that can fundamentally change how a lot of things work because they find it fun. a lot of the time the barrier to entry is how difficult the game is to mod for, and i don't think starbound can hold a candle to minecraft in that department. despite how awful minecraft's code is people still manage to make gigantic mods. Starbound is fairly moddable as things go. Lua is an awful programming language and its developers ought to be taken out back and shot but if you can put up with it you can do some fairly extensive mechanical changes. I've seen people reimplement temperature mechanics and personally experimented with my own take on a non-meaningless/tedious hunger mechanic, as well as undoing the reintroduction of touch damage. On the content side most stuff is fairly open to modding as well, although JSON being a garbled mess makes it a pain in the rear end. Overall I'd say most of the issues with Starbound can definitely be fixed by mods simply because the fundamental mechanics of the game are sound, its just that instead of taking a good idea (e.g. the combat after they removed touch damage) and sticking to it, removing issues and building on it they move on to the next random idea, breaking previous systems and leaving an unbalanced, directionless mess. For what its worth I've been planning to do a massive overhaul mod for Starbound for ages, mostly just waiting for 1.0 so the game is in an at least somewhat stable state, just so I don't have to deal with implementing feature x only to have it suddenly become part of the base game but in a slightly more lovely way. I've got a rough concept lined up (mostly gonna focus on sandbox gameplay, adding practical functionality to exploration, mining, building, etc. to create a more integrated progression with a focus on concrete gameplay rewards and changing threats balanced by increased player capability), once I know where 1.0 stands I'll refine it a bit and start working on implementation. I already have a bunch of ideas on rebalancing progression, a lot of which is long-standing complaints, e.g. instead of monsters simply getting numerical increases to their stats each tier should have monsters change in meaningful ways. More and bigger monsters, make them become more agile, more aggressive, give them ranged attacks, etc. Same for player capabilities, as tech gives improved movement to better fight higher tiers of armor should confer increasingly powerful bonuses, the different kinds of armor should provide buffs according to their associated playstyle, so melee armor should give improved move speed, ranged armor improved energy regen, "magic" armor something that helps with using staffs (never could figure out a good buff for that one, otherwise I would have published that mod back when I originally created it). Construction should tie into progression in a natural way, rather than simply existing as an optional money farm. Give the player incentives to build a farm and shelter early on, then as the game goes on you can get tenants to earn money and then you use that money to pay farmers who work the farms for you. Build science labs staffed by scientists to unlock new biomes or special armor sets with unique effects. And obviously the combat needs a good overhaul too. Touch damage needs to go die in a fire, guns need a balance pass, random weapons need to be good enough to actually compete with craftables so they're actually worth using instead of vendor trash, etc. Honestly, I think that this game can be good, it just needs some direction and polish, rather than being broken again and again by Tiy's idea of the week.
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Jul 19, 2016 20:29
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Excelzior posted:
They already did both of those things
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Jul 19, 2016 21:57
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mods would bring comically large titties and penises
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Angry Diplomat posted:turn your gauntlet into a sick-nasty bladed gauntlet Did they ever manage to make the fist weapons not poo poo? I thought the concept was kinda neat but they were crippled by the reintroduction of touch damage making it impossible to use short-range weapons against monsters while NPC enemies just run away all the time so you couldn't do any fancy combos.
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Jul 22, 2016 17:41
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