Topic: Starbound (from Terraria devs)

[idolminds]

Official site

Ok not entirely the Terraria devs I guess since they are named "Chucklefish" now. Might be a splintered off group or something? Whatever, the connection is there and its descriptive for the topic.

Anyway, holy fuck:

A story within a sandbox

Starbound begins with you fleeing your homeworld in a space shuttle, just as it’s destroyed by an unknown enemy. With nothing to guide it, the escape pod shoots into space without direction, becoming hopelessly lost in a sea of stars. As luck would have it, the space shuttle makes contact with an abandoned space station and an adventure begins that will take you hurtling across the universe. Starbound contains both quests and story driven missions, buried inside its vast sandbox universe.
The Space Station

The space station in Starbound is sprawling and full of potential. Throughout your travels you’ll find ways to upgrade and repair it, restoring it to its former glory. You’ll need to find a crew, conduct research, catch rare creatures, and unlock its multitude of facilities. From a factory capable of producing mechs to labs where captured enemies can be studied and trained, the space station contains everything you need to explore the universe.

Endless Planets to visit

Planets in Starbound are entirely procedurally generated and filled to the brim with unique content. We went into the planet generation with one simple goal: no two planets should be the same. By procedurally generating even the smallest details, we’re doing just that. Not only is the terrain of the planet procedurally generated, but the weather, the gravity, the difficulty level, the plant life, the behaviour and appearance of alien creatures, and much more all contain random or procedurally generated elements.
We want you to feel like an explorer!

Because we’re working so hard to make each planet unique, we want to give you the tools to catalogue the things you find and make sure absolutely everything you find has depth in the world. Much like old school point and click adventures, absolutely every object in the world, right down to the trees and flowers, can be examined for a description.

See a weird alien tree? Examine it! Maybe you’ll discover something about its use! For any explorer, sharing discoveries is important. So whilst the game is fully coop (Bring your friends along! Form an expedition!) you can also record your findings in an electronic logbook. Not only that, but each and every planet has unique coordinates in the Universe that you can share online, so other players can check out exactly what you found!

Finding a new home

Exploring is wonderful, but everyone needs a place to call their own. That’s why we’re letting you claim an entire planet!

When you claim a planet as your new homeworld, a whole new aspect of gameplay opens up. Everything that makes a planet unique is at your command. Feel like changing the weather? Build a weather centre! Don’t like the terrain? Terraform it! Every aspect of the planet is under your control. Once you’re happy with it, start populating it with characters you’ve met in your travels and take care of them! They’ll have needs and desires and won’t hesitate to ask for your help if they require assistance.

This is only just scratching the surface of what we have in store for you in Starbound.

Thats sounds so amazingly amazing...


Ok yeah it looks better than Terraria but I was hoping for some more varie...



I'M THROWING MONEY AT THE SCREEN AND NOTHING IS HAPPENING!

[shock]

Oooooooo!

Curious to see how much they deviate from the Terraria-mold.

[PyroMenace]

Ah man that looks amazing.

[idolminds]

Bump. Sorry Que.

[TheOtherBelmont]

That looks and sounds awesome!  I'm sold.

[Quemaqua]

You sons of bitches.

[Xessive]

I'm not a huge fan of Terraria (in all fairness I haven't truly delved into it) so I have my doubts about games from the same developer. However, those screenshots present quite a few elements that would be frickin' fantastic in any game! A ninja? Giant tentacles? Oh yeah!

I'll be on the lookout.

[idolminds]

Preorders up!

$15 gets you beta access, the final game, and the soundtrack. Only the soundtrack is available right now, but it sounds like beta isn't too far away. At any rate the final game should be out this year so you won't have that long to wait. Higher tiers are available if you want to show off a forum badge or get your name in the game or whatever.

[sirean_syan]

So, anyone wanna go four pack?

[idolminds]

Sure, I'll go in on the 4-pack.

[Quemaqua]

I will for sure go in on that.

[TheOtherBelmont]

I'll go in on the 4 pack as well.

[sirean_syan]

That's four.

So how do you think it works? One person buys it and gets four keys to give out? I can do that if that's the case.

[TheOtherBelmont]

That's four.

So how do you think it works? One person buys it and gets four keys to give out? I can do that if that's the case.

I've never done a purchase of a game like this before, but that's how it probably works.  If you have a PayPal account I can send my portion of the purchase to you that way.

[PyroMenace]

I would be interested in buying in a 4 pack if anyone else wants to.

[idolminds]

Looks like its through the Humble Store, so you'll get an email with 4 gift links. One for you and then just pass out the others.

[Quemaqua]

I can't do PayPal because they won't let you confirm anything without a landline, which I don't have. But I can do cash/check/money order/illegal drugs/whatever.

[idolminds]

They just passed $1 million in pre-orders. Three stretch goals were added along the way and so far all have been met. So we'll get another race, some fossils to find/dig up/display/clone, and now we'll have pets! Wee!

[Quemaqua]

Yesterday I put the soundtrack on my iPod and went through all the dev roadmap stuff (which is totally worth doing if you haven't). I am so ungodly excited about this game now.

[sirean_syan]

So we're in beta now!

There's planned save wipes going on right now but once that phase is done I'll look into hosting a OW server like I did for Terraria.

[Ace_O_Spades]

So I got the game, and I guess I've been experiencing game breaking bugs. I got stuck in a loop where when I try to beam down to the planet, it just beams me back to the ship. Died from hunger. yay!

BUT despite these problems, I still want to keep playing. I might take a break once they wipe my current character and wait for some bug fixes. Still a really fun game so far.

[Quemaqua]

I think that bug may be related to what you're holding. When I switched to what I think I was holding when I beamed up, it would beam me back down.

But yeah, fiddled with it for 45 minutes this morning. I may hold off until after save wipes, but so far it's really wonderful looking and I'm totally excited.

[Ace_O_Spades]

I think that bug may be related to what you're holding. When I switched to what I think I was holding when I beamed up, it would beam me back down.

But yeah, fiddled with it for 45 minutes this morning. I may hold off until after save wipes, but so far it's really wonderful looking and I'm totally excited.

Yeah it is just a lot of fun to look at, and the soundtrack is amazing. I'm excited for when it gets more stable. I also noticed some serious framerate issues that I hope they clean up. I went into a city full of apex and was getting under 10 fps.

[Quemaqua]

Yeah, I've noted some bad performance as well, hopefully that clears up. Game is so addicting, though. It makes Terraria feel really primitive in some ways, everything is just cleaner and nicer. I'm really looking forward to where it's going. The only thing I hate is no custom controls. I fucking hate WASD and anyone who uses it. ESDF 4 lyfe.

EDIT - http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads%2Fgeneral-beta-faq-read-this-first.34314%2F

Just some general stuff.

[Quemaqua]

So this game has come a long way, and I think a lot of us have forgotten about it. Heather and I wanted something to play together, and as I was poking around, I thought, "Well what about Starbound?"

It was a good thought. It took me a little fiddling, but I did eventually get a server going, and so we played on that, and while it wasn't perfect (she would randomly get logged out from time to time and have to reconnect), overall it was fairly smooth and we had a lot of fun. So then I thought, hey, why not open this up to everyone? I'm not going to just start keeping a server going 24/7 at this point without some sense of interest from the community, but if it's something you guys would be into, let me know and I can do that.

The game has really come a long way. There's just a ton of stuff, and so many little niceties and nuances that make it great. Unfortunately, I suspect I may sink more time into this than is entirely reasonable. It's kind of all I want to do today.

There are still issues for them to clean up, but they've got a couple more patches before they officially hit 1.0 and the release. I gather there's a big story overhaul yet to come, where they add more story quests and fix up some existing ones, and then a big general spitshine which will include some improvements to multiplayer as well. So now really isn't a bad time to get back in before release.

So if anybody wants to join up and just share a universe for a while, post in here indicating your interest and I'll PM you the server address. If we have enough interest, I'll just leave it going and people can come and go as they like.

[idolminds]

You already know Im interested. Ill try make a note to install it.

[Quemaqua]

For your dial-up information, my game install is 2.07 GB.