We are now less than a month away from Early Access launch. I submitted a test build to Steam last week for official approval - another big step on this long journey.
As I've said in past updates, despite my best efforts not everything is going to be in the game come Early Access. I set up the game to support quite a lot of systems and expandability, but actually filling in that content can be very time consuming. Now, I could push back the launch date but that is not without complications and at some point I need to actually start making money out of the game as it's been in development for nearly 18 months now, so the finances start to run low!
The good news is, right off the bat you will have access to at least 75% the bosses and arenas, with updates coming each week (at least) featuring new bosses / arenas before I finally unveil the Starbound Gladiator and the great showdown at the end. You won't be waiting 6 months for this, it'll be a month or two at most after EA launches, maybe even less.
Also, multiplayer will be coming sooner than I thought - my multiplayer coder has got the gladiators talking to each other now, challenges can be issued, there's a chat lobby and more. In the next few weeks we should be able to issue commands to gladiators and have the commands play out for both gladiators on each others screen. I think it'll be awesome, given how much fun S&S 3's multiplayer was. No matter how much work I do on the computer gladiator's AI logic, they will never be as fun as a multiplayer enemy.
Anyway, this week I've been powering my way through designing the Arena Champions. Although I have a boss creation tool , it's still very time consuming and often I have to go back and tweak older bosses based on some new parameter I had just thought of. At any rate, we now have 25 champions in the game now ( 21 regional and 4 Grand champions ) and in a week or two I should have at least another 15. As I was saying, I hope to have over 75% of the champions in the game at the time of launch!
One cool addition to the game ( that sidetracked me for a day ) is the new 'color cycling' on magical enchanted armour! So , looking at the GIF above, a fire enchanted helmet now glows like hot magma. Other effects include soft glows on other enchanted items and the simple 'colour shift' we saw in S&S 3.
You'll notice gladiators are a *LOT* more colourful the more high level you get , with all sorts of zany colour combinations depending on the magical gear they are wearing.
Until next time, I salute you my friends!
Cheers, Oli