What's your opinion on the development of Starbound?

Personally, I could put up with a lot greater difficulty when I was younger. I don't have as much time for it these days.

 

The kids I've been around from this iphone/youtube/twitter/netflix era don't have the attention spans to master games as difficult as the ones we had on NES or SNES/Genesis. They fail once and give up. This is why games marketed toward youths now like CoD and AC are so forgiving. Regenerative health, restarting from the same level (what?) and things of that nature are designed to cater toward a broader, less patient audience.

 

Sure thing, buddy.

Children no longer obey their parents, and everybody is writing a book.

 

Apparently everything is Dark Souls difficulty. Whole real life occupations require the use of invincibility frames whilst rolling on the ground.

I like the news that has been coming out, I wonder if I'll get used to saved progress again.

 

What?

 

I feel like Starbound has a serious disconnect between the type of game the devs seem to be trying to make, and the lore itself.

The Lore gives us a dark, horrifying universe. The destruction of Earth, purposeful technological repression, sacrifices, 1984 styled governments, and an interstellar war that ends with one species without a homeworld after a brutal war where blood and sap flood worlds and fire and herbicide rain from the sky. Strange, fungal creatures lurk in the darkness, transforming corpses into more of themselves, their true purpose unknown.

And then the game gives us monsters that make fart noises, horse head masks, and penguins.

 

It's hard to not go down the cutesie road when you are making sprite content. I find it juvenile myself, but it's so much more likely that the devs are going to make short, natural looking space penguins than... let's say, tall, scary looking space penguins that look vicious. Cute is more likely than dark or horrifying when you make sprites. It's the cartoonish nature of the art. Some examples of horror in sprites exist but they're borderline.

 

That is a very nice observation. Though I'd point out that dissonance isn't even just between gameplay and lore but in the lore itself - you have serious, dark themes you've mentioned next to actual story of a penguin space pirate or theme-based races: of robots programmed for medieval values and beliefs even if a lot of it is rather illogical given their society and inorganic makeup, underwater samurais with architecture and art noticeably based on land utility or gas balloon cowboys with ADHD who developed a civilisation integrating articles that seem totally unnecessary, even counter-logical to their biology, like clothes straight from wild west.

Such kind of sillyness is permeating game's content and mixing with more serious undertones at every step. As if someone decided that there is this great number of really great ideas and then threw it all together no matter if themes of many of said ideas clash, rather than just providing a variety.

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It shapes up to be a very nice thread. Someone with connections draw the attention of the devteam to it? The problems mentioned here should be really regarded 'at the top', I'd risk claiming - for the sake of future development. It would also be quite nice to see what the devteam's take on some of the things mentioned here is.

 

Meanwhile, I see no reason whatsoever why you can't mix odd and cute visuals and gags with darker undercontent.

I mean, people eat Adventure Time right the hell up, and that's a silly, bright cartoon about Earth after the apocalypse has wiped out all of humanity.

 

I dunno, I've seen more than a few pixel art examples that have kept me awake at night. That I attribute retro graphics with my childhood drives it even deeper than standard 3d mess. Mortal Kombat never got the same reaction from me as, say, Sweet Home or Waxworks.

 

I recently just tried out the game again (nightly) to experience what else has been implemented and the new style of progression. Basically from a new character start everything looked good, logical progression etc... Then, after some gameplay, I experienced my first dungeon (Floran). The new audio/soundtrack, the layout of the dungeons, it hit me like "YES!" this is a great addition to the game.. my 'hats off' to the dev team and the art team for the implementation of the new dungeons...

 

On the supposed lack of ways to put horrifying things into sprites... terraria. That's all I'm going to say on the matter. The Corruption and Crimson (especially the Crimson) are something quite horrifying to view.

 

Hello,

I think that starbound is worth the wait since its going to be really, really good when its done and I know that it takes time to make a good game but last year they told us that it was coming out in 2013 and its still not out so I would say that people just wouldn't be as mad if they hadn't said that the game was going to come ou in 2013 but I'm fine with it because its on steam.

 

I just wish it was over already so I can move on.

 

We could go back and forth on that. I don't find anything in Terraria horrifying. I find the attempt at horror with the goofy style of the sprites amusing, but I don't find it horrifying. Maybe the brain boss. I didn't say that there aren't any good examples, I was trying to make the point that when you have a game that is generally 'cute' or 'cartoonish' with its spritework, it can be hard to deviate from that at all. I didn't mean that it wasn't possible. The notion of some areas being scary or giving the player the feeling like he/she might not be prepared for something... the feeling that something unknown could be around somewhere and you can't quite figure it out is something I'd like to see added to the game in some format. Maybe a monster that stalks you intelligently and doesn't just mindlessly try to kill you. Something that can randomly appear on certain worlds and there are very, very subtle signs that it might be near.

 

We'll, I know zombie characters would be a weird sight to watch in this game. Doesn't mean the art direction doesn't have any potential to be nasty, it just needs to be thought up.

Would be interesting to her the devs idea of where Starbound is on the scale of Spaceballs and Warhammer 40k.

 

There are face huggered kind of enemies in the moon base mission

 

You mean the moontants or something else? Cause the moontants remind me of the fungal creatures from Waxworks, they're even in a mine level!(this is probably the most times I've ever referred to that game in a week! )

 

Looking at the nightlies, many of the main features have already been implemented, and in the post about Starbound being a year old, They said an unstable update is a bit closer, but no information about a stable update.
In my opinion, the development is fine, playing the nightlies (With a little bit of cheaty-cheaty) is still fun, even though i know my character's won't last