I know what you’re thinking and yep that’s right, we’re still hard at work on Steambirds. Let’s have a look at what the team has been up to this past week.
Art
This week we did an experiment into different animation states, depending on things like whether the player is attacking or not. If you watched the steam you’ll know why – so we can have glorious bird mechs with moving limbs. We should see some updates to that next week and going forward, so our incoming mechs can look a lot more alive.
Other than that we’ve integrated animations for spiderboss and thief chest; done the initial work on the paladin and arena dungeon environment and enemies; and finished the goose color and instructor modelling.
Quests
Work on quests still continues. This week we have a nice compliment of 20 daily quests for players to tackle. We’ve also done lots of testing, tweaking, bug fixes, and improved and cleaned up quest configs.
Store
The store is working its way up to its big opening day. We can now have items that add hangar slots, so you can get all those planes and have them all cosy in your hangar. We’ve also been experimenting with some backend improvements so we can concurrently update player state from the server or the support backend. No longer do we need you to logout of the game when we give you an item or make a change behind the scenes (for some changes). Now those changes and items can just automatically appear as if they were always there. Maybe they’re just quantum (Schrödinger) items and we collapse the wave function? Who knows how MMO stuff actually works anyway?
Other
As usual, some bothersome bugs surfaced and we beat them into submission, including a “lovely” little JSON parsing bug. FYI, we employed bird species that likes eating bugs for this, so it’s really a 2 birds with 1 stone 2 bugs with 1 beak thing