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Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.


Signs of Life is a 2D sci-fi survival action/adventure sandbox game, with a combination of procedurally generated and meaningful hand crafted content.



Steam, Website, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube

Here is our most recent trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw4-8hv8DUY

Here are some sweet screenshots:


And here are too many animated Gifs:


We launched on Steam's Early Access, and we'd be more than happy to answer any questions you folks have.

Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Aug 4, 2017

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MMF Freeway
Sep 15, 2010

Later!
Ok, here's the question I think everyone I gonna be asking right off the bat: what do you feel this has to offer over Starbound in terms of gameplay features?

Stick Figure Mafia
Dec 11, 2004

voltron lion force posted:

Ok, here's the question I think everyone I gonna be asking right off the bat: what do you feel this has to offer over Starbound in terms of gameplay features?


Starbound ain't got that

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

voltron lion force posted:

Ok, here's the question I think everyone I gonna be asking right off the bat: what do you feel this has to offer over Starbound in terms of gameplay features?

Fair question given the similarities, in my opinion it comes down to breadth versus depth. Instead of going for the whole infinite procedural universe thing, we're focusing on a smaller but more fleshed out scope. Also, our bone-based animation system gives us way more freedom when it comes to making cool/wacky weapons/gadgets/whatever, and the resulting melee combat is orders of magnitude more fun IMO.

OwlFancier
Aug 22, 2013

I see you took the Ernest Evans approach to character animation.

Those are some fine .gifs you have there.

Dapper Man
Jul 12, 2006

press V for animal kicking

a slime
Apr 11, 2005

Request to add automatic GIF creation as a feature

marshmallow creep
Dec 10, 2008

I've been sitting here for 5 mins trying to think of a joke to make but I just realised the animators of Mass Effect already did it for me

I think most games in this genre look pretty terrible, but the almost QWOP like way the avatar can flail about just elevates this.

Harlock
Jan 15, 2006

Tap "A" to drink!!!

quote:

He was an intergalactic chicken farmer. Until the aliens came for his chickens. He vowed to wield his shotgun for revengeance.

xutech
Mar 4, 2011

EIIST

I like the artstyle and for the price, why not?

Just don't go mental with crafting recipes like Darkout and you'll be fine.

numptyboy
Sep 6, 2004
somewhat pleasant
Is this the bit before commander sheppard found his favorite shop on the citadel?

xutech
Mar 4, 2011

EIIST

Well, I dropped $5 on it and it reminds me of that game where you try to complete a stunt course with a segway as parts of your body fall off.

When you die you drop everything you own, eating is an unfathomable trial and crafting / placing even the simplest thing like a torch is ????

I understand that you've made a lot of effort to distance yourself from other sandbox crafting games, but there IS a reason for making games playable without reading a manual or wiki. And everything is tiny as well. I don't like rummaging through a backpack for a torch that I can't equip or place because reasons.

Seriously, make an effort. And get someone other than your immediate friends to test this game before you even put it on steam, because you seem to think its a lot easier to play and learn than it really is.

NJersey
Dec 1, 2008

xutech posted:

Seriously, make an effort.

Sounds like you need to take some of you're own advice.

To build a camp fire, click the right most icon at the top of your screen. The Projects button.
Right click any food you have to eat it.
To place a torch, just drag and drop it from your pack to where ever you want to place it.

Are you new to gaming? You make it sound like right clicking, drag and drop, clicking buttons and losing everything on you when you die are some new features that have never been used in a game...

Stop making mountains out of mole hills.

Anyways, I've been enjoying it so far.

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

xutech posted:

Well, I dropped $5 on it and it reminds me of that game where you try to complete a stunt course with a segway as parts of your body fall off.

When you die you drop everything you own, eating is an unfathomable trial and crafting / placing even the simplest thing like a torch is ????
Well, dropping everything you own isn't unheard of in sandbox games (Minecraft being the primary example), and the items don't go away over time or anything so you can just go pick them back up whenever. I can understand that it might be a little frustrating, but we designed the game around it and its the reason why we give you the wrist laser that can dig/suck up items/light up the area around you/etc even if you are completely naked with no gear. If we get enough negative feedback about the death penalty its not out of the question that we could put an option on there or something to disable it. You just right click it to eat fruits, but you have to cook raw food on the campfire, although now that you mention it I could have AGIS pop out and give you a bit of tutorial text if you try to eat the raw food, might make it clearer. I'll totally grant that torches aren't ideal right now, and we plan to do make it equippable soon, but for now you just pick up the torches from your inventory and drag them to where you want them in the the world.

xutech posted:

Seriously, make an effort. And get someone other than your immediate friends to test this game before you even put it on steam, because you seem to think its a lot easier to play and learn than it really is.
We actually did quite a bit of testing, but of course we haven't smoothed over all the rough edges yet, and Early Access has been great for letting us start to identify issues that didn't seem obvious with the testing we did. The game is still in active development, so hopefully things will get better with time =)

Plum Chaser
Jul 2, 2011

by Lowtax
Dropped about the price of a big mac trio on this, hopefully I'm not disappointed in what looks like an animal kicking simulator. Gonna edit this post after I play it a bit.

EDIT: I honestly expected a janky piece of poo poo, no offense, but this is actually pretty neat. While there does need to be some more information (I was literally dragging and dropping items from the ground to my inventory for the first 10 minutes until I realized I can just pick them up with M3.), it's fun. I mean, I don't really know what I'm doing right now so I'm just running around trying to get better gear I guess.

The hotbar, while being pretty cool, is kind of annoying thought - I'm sure most people would really rather have complete freedom over what they can place in their hotbar. Hell, is there even a way to put these sap torches onto my hotbar, because dragging them from my inventory all the time is getting to be a pain in the rear end. Also, the inventory system is cool at first glance but it makes finding poo poo quite a pain, dunno if I'm the only one to think this. The player moving mechanics and everything about the character and the way he handles is really neat though, I'd love to see more poo poo done with that (climbing, dodging, etc?), so overall I believe this is a pretty promising game, while still having a lot of work to do and some feature changes would really help it. Worth 7$ in my opinion.

Plum Chaser fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Jan 28, 2014

Aryoc
Nov 27, 2006

:black101: Goblin King :black101:
Grimey Drawer
I've played a couple of hours and it's a pretty entertaining game thus far. I love the way you've made the character move, it feels really smooth. But the thing that keeps getting more irritating is the inventory, the fact that items can be freely positioned combined with the fact that icons are tiny makes it impossible to see what you have at a glance, and I keep finding things in my inventory I didn't even know I had.

Also because I haven't figured out a way to actually see an item's name thats on the ground, when I hoover something up into my inventory it's lost in there because I don't know which 10 pixel item the new item is and which ones are the old ones. Tooltips appearing when you hover over an item would be great, having to click each gray rock to see what kind of gray rock it is is getting old.

I like the idea of the inventory pouches, but you really need to either make everything much bigger, or add some kind of larger indicator around the items. Not allowing items to overlap could help a lot as well, I've noticed that what I've thought to have been one item has actually been 2 or 3 overlapping. I'd even consider going with a traditional grid-based inventory, it does have it's advantages.

Another gripe is that text is way too small to read, but I guess you're working on that as I noticed the large font setting does change some of the text. Though the larger font is not actually much more readable, as the font only leaves one pixel of space between letters and is blocky, which makes all the words look like just blocks of color instead of text.

I've noticed that there are some jagged rocks that aren't blocks that I can mine with a pickaxe, but then there are fairly identical ones that are actually just part of the background and thus not interactable at all. Also it's a bit confusing which small trees are real trees and which ones are actually background plants.

For the most part I do really like the game, even though I'm just complaining here. I think it's got a lot of potential.

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

Aryoc posted:

I've played a couple of hours and it's a pretty entertaining game thus far. I love the way you've made the character move, it feels really smooth. But the thing that keeps getting more irritating is the inventory, the fact that items can be freely positioned combined with the fact that icons are tiny makes it impossible to see what you have at a glance, and I keep finding things in my inventory I didn't even know I had.
Yeah, we knew the inventory system would be sort of a love it or hate it kind of thing, but we're totally willing to consider options to make it better for people that are having trouble with it, we'll have to play with it and see what we can come up with as we continue getting feedback.

Aryoc posted:

Also because I haven't figured out a way to actually see an item's name thats on the ground, when I hoover something up into my inventory it's lost in there because I don't know which 10 pixel item the new item is and which ones are the old ones. Tooltips appearing when you hover over an item would be great, having to click each gray rock to see what kind of gray rock it is is getting old.
Tooltip would probably be an option, I'll write it down and see if something like that would work.

Aryoc posted:

I like the idea of the inventory pouches, but you really need to either make everything much bigger, or add some kind of larger indicator around the items. Not allowing items to overlap could help a lot as well, I've noticed that what I've thought to have been one item has actually been 2 or 3 overlapping. I'd even consider going with a traditional grid-based inventory, it does have it's advantages.
We're definitely not going to switch to a grid based system entirely at this point, but one option we've been considering is a button next to the minimize button on containers that would auto organize/align all the items to a grid as best it can, which might alleviate the problem somewhat. Making the inventory bigger is an interesting thought though, it would conceivably be possible to just have an option to scale the inventory containers/items 2/3/4x bigger, and although it would take up a much bigger chunk of the screen, it would likely only be a problem if you were running a low resolution.

Aryoc posted:

Another gripe is that text is way too small to read, but I guess you're working on that as I noticed the large font setting does change some of the text. Though the larger font is not actually much more readable, as the font only leaves one pixel of space between letters and is blocky, which makes all the words look like just blocks of color instead of text.
Yeah, totally not happy with the fonts right now, the small/large fonts are definitely a rock and a hard place situation. Sometime in the very near future I'll either replace the current large font with a smaller one or add a medium font in there as well.

Aryoc posted:

I've noticed that there are some jagged rocks that aren't blocks that I can mine with a pickaxe, but then there are fairly identical ones that are actually just part of the background and thus not interactable at all. Also it's a bit confusing which small trees are real trees and which ones are actually background plants.
Hmm, yeah I can understand the confusion there, we may need more visual hinting on the deposits and the bushes to distinguish them a bit from similar stuff.

Aryoc posted:

For the most part I do really like the game, even though I'm just complaining here. I think it's got a lot of potential.
Awesome, and the complaints are great, as devs we're way too close to the game to see the (seemingly) obvious issues a lot of the time, so its great to hear honest feedback =)

Dapper Man
Jul 12, 2006

xutech posted:

When you die you drop everything you own, eating is an unfathomable trial and crafting / placing even the simplest thing like a torch is ????

Right click on food to eat it when it's in your inventory, drag and drop torch from inventory to place it. Most everything else in the game works the same way. Pretty simple stuff here.

Aryoc
Nov 27, 2006

:black101: Goblin King :black101:
Grimey Drawer

Lucid Dream posted:

We're definitely not going to switch to a grid based system entirely at this point, but one option we've been considering is a button next to the minimize button on containers that would auto organize/align all the items to a grid as best it can, which might alleviate the problem somewhat. Making the inventory bigger is an interesting thought though, it would conceivably be possible to just have an option to scale the inventory containers/items 2/3/4x bigger, and although it would take up a much bigger chunk of the screen, it would likely only be a problem if you were running a low resolution.


An auto organize button could help a lot, especially if the items can be sorted by category so you have say all your weapons at the left followed by all your food and so forth. I think that and a scaling option might be all you need really.

Esroc
May 31, 2010

Goku would be ashamed of you.
The game looks great. Starbound didn't entirely click with me (making a huge world doesn't necessarily equate to a very deep one), so I've been hoping a similar game might come out and do exactly what this is attempting. I especially love the art direction, the pseudo-realism is great and I quite like the animation. I wish more 2D games would go with smoother bone-based animation like this rather than framed animations. I think it looks pretty cool.

Unfortunately I don't buy into the whole early access fad and won't purchase this until I can see a more completed game. But once you get there you've got my money. Will it support mods?

Plum Chaser
Jul 2, 2011

by Lowtax

Heran Bago
Aug 18, 2006



Lucid Dream posted:

We launched today on Steam's Early Access, and we'd be more than happy to answer any questions you folks have.

Is there controller support or do you plan to implement controller support in the future?

I prefer to aim weapons with a twin stick type of setup and I'm fine using a d-pad for navigating menus and crafting. I prefer using a conroller for 2D games in general rather than hunch over a mouse and keyboard. I was okay putting up with that for Minecraft and Terarria but it's weird how the console players are the only ones with the more comfortable controls.

Armitage_Shanks
May 16, 2004

Fear the aVICtar.

Lucid Dream posted:

We launched today on Steam's Early Access, and we'd be more than happy to answer any questions you folks have.

Where is the version on Steam at the moment? Not worried about bugs but whats in place feature wise especially related to goals/progression? Would you say it is more engine demo or game right now?

Plum Chaser
Jul 2, 2011

by Lowtax
Had about a good 6 hours of game time played before I kind of got stumped and not quite sure where to go, I've :siren:killed the giant robot chicken, got my card up to level 2, turned off the robot, powered the big station and watched the video of the guy blowing his brains out:siren: - now I'm kind of assuming I have to make the big antenna, but no real idea how to make steel (probably ignoring something really simple, :downs:) and the batteries are a huge pain in the rear end to make.

The story (or what I've got of it so far, as you kind of piece it together by finding logs) is pretty neat as well, if not kind of cheesy sci-fi.

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin
Well, I bought this on the strength of the GIFs and teaser video alone, but it crashes on startup for me. Probably my video card, just one more thing on the list of "Why I need a new video card".

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

Heran Bago posted:

Is there controller support or do you plan to implement controller support in the future?

The inventory system really wouldn't work very well with a controller, which is why we never really went down that path, but after hearing about the valve controller its definitely an option with something like that, so we'll just have to see when it becomes available.

Armitage_Shanks posted:

Where is the version on Steam at the moment? Not worried about bugs but whats in place feature wise especially related to goals/progression? Would you say it is more engine demo or game right now?

Seems like the story content takes people between 5 and 14 hours to get through, depending on how much exploring/hunting/etc you do. Personally I would compare it to a vertical slice more than an engine demo right now, it has a significant, polished chunk of most of the elements that we want to have in the finished game.

Babyface Mingo posted:

Had about a good 6 hours of game time played before I kind of got stumped and not quite sure where to go, I've :siren:killed the giant robot chicken, got my card up to level 2, turned off the robot, powered the big station and watched the video of the guy blowing his brains out:siren: - now I'm kind of assuming I have to make the big antenna, but no real idea how to make steel (probably ignoring something really simple, :downs:) and the batteries are a huge pain in the rear end to make.

The story (or what I've got of it so far, as you kind of piece it together by finding logs) is pretty neat as well, if not kind of cheesy sci-fi.
You've pretty much exausted the story content we have in game now, there are probably some more things to find underground but you've gone through all of the key story elements currently implemented. You can make steel by using iron ore and anthracite as an additive in the second tier smelter.

Dareon posted:

Well, I bought this on the strength of the GIFs and teaser video alone, but it crashes on startup for me. Probably my video card, just one more thing on the list of "Why I need a new video card".
Well shoot, what video card do you have? We're still trying to work out exactly what our current minimum requirements are as the game seems to run fine on all of our dev machines. You could also try running the game out of the installed folder directly, that solved the problem for at least one person (although we still haven't figured out why).

Caufman
May 7, 2007
Aw yeah, getting in on the near-ground floor, maybe the mezzanine. I dig this chicken feeding simulator.

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Lucid Dream posted:

Well shoot, what video card do you have? We're still trying to work out exactly what our current minimum requirements are as the game seems to run fine on all of our dev machines. You could also try running the game out of the installed folder directly, that solved the problem for at least one person (although we still haven't figured out why).

An Nvidia GeForce 6150SE, it's pretty terrible. Most games that require a modern shader implementation run slowly and/or have display issues, when they don't fail outright.

I'll try running it straight from the directory in the morning, once the game is installed again. :v:

e: Nope, still crashes.

Dareon fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jan 29, 2014

Plum Chaser
Jul 2, 2011

by Lowtax
Do you plan to regularly update with new content? As in, can we expect shorter time between patches or long time? Not that it really matters, just interested in the games development.

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

Dareon posted:

An Nvidia GeForce 6150SE, it's pretty terrible. Most games that require a modern shader implementation run slowly and/or have display issues, when they don't fail outright.

I'll try running it straight from the directory in the morning, once the game is installed again. :v:

e: Nope, still crashes.

Dang, its possible that the graphics card won't support it, but we're putting some better error logging in soon, so once we get that in we might be able to figure out exactly whats going wrong.

Babyface Mingo posted:

Do you plan to regularly update with new content? As in, can we expect shorter time between patches or long time? Not that it really matters, just interested in the games development.
Our workflow seems to be frequent but relatively light patches, basically we've just been pushing updates whenever we feel like we've made good, stable changes, which over the last month or two has been multiple times a week. I won't make any specific commitments because who knows what parts we might work on that might take longer than others, but our workflow with frequent but lighter updates seems to be working well so far.

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.
Working on making the torch a thing you can equip so you can use them without having to open the inventory:

HardKase
Jul 15, 2007
TASTY
Hitting the sheep with the torch and setting it on fire looks fun.

The Inventory reminds me of Ultima Online. Its a bit of a pain in the backside as things get buried. The packs that auto sort things help a bit.

The character animation and the chicken kicking is top notch. I don't regret chucking some dollars your way at all. Keep up the good work.

Dapper Man
Jul 12, 2006

HardKase posted:

The Inventory reminds me of Ultima Online. Its a bit of a pain in the backside as things get buried. The packs that auto sort things help a bit.

The Ultima Online similarities were very intentional. The devs are big fans of it, and intended for the inventory to be immediately familiar to those who played UO.

Some people have been asking for it to be replaced with a grid like system. I happen to love how freeform it is, and how you can neatly layout items as you wish, or simply pile non essential materials into a corner. It also factors into player death. Either take the time to use the bags and tools available to keep a neat workspace, or suffer the consequences of all your items spewing everywhere and making a mess when killed. I can understand why some people would rather have inventory simply be a "set it and forget it" kind of thing, but for me it's another layer of gameplay that I enjoy.

Dapper Man fucked around with this message at 00:19 on Jan 31, 2014

Plum Chaser
Jul 2, 2011

by Lowtax

Lucid Dream posted:

Our workflow seems to be frequent but relatively light patches, basically we've just been pushing updates whenever we feel like we've made good, stable changes, which over the last month or two has been multiple times a week. I won't make any specific commitments because who knows what parts we might work on that might take longer than others, but our workflow with frequent but lighter updates seems to be working well so far.

Ahh yeah, I was mostly just interested in a kind of "what to expect". That's great though.

Lucid Dream posted:

Working on making the torch a thing you can equip so you can use them without having to open the inventory:


That's amazing and I eagerly await for this to be in the main game now :allears:.

Dapper Man
Jul 12, 2006

Babyface Mingo posted:

That's amazing and I eagerly await for this to be in the main game now :allears:.

It was added in last night. You can find torches in the 4th slot on your toolbar.

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.

Dapper Man posted:

It was added in last night. You can find torches in the 4th slot on your toolbar.

Yeah, its not quite finished (it still has a couple issues, and you can't stick torches to blocks on the floor/walls yet with the right click while its equipped), but we figured it was too useful as-is to hold off on at this point, considering how often we got the complaint that it was annoying as hell to have to open your pack to place torches while exploring.

Dipes
Oct 24, 2003
Nice looking game man, I'll bite

Lucid Dream
Feb 4, 2003

That boy ain't right.
Working on bricks:


Edit: Update notes:

Version 0.18
- Capped the width/power of the laser pistol
- You can now swing melee weapons through platforms
- Project window amount font switched to the small font
- Throwable objects rotate while thrown now
- More craftable tiles (Mud Brick, Brick, some additional steel/wood/stone/brick tiles)
- Changed brick crafting, bricks are now a material
- Added a better crash logger
- Fixed a crash

Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 07:10 on Feb 1, 2014

Infinium
May 27, 2010
The strength of those gifs and the fact that Starbound is kinda disappointing to me currently as well has made me throw you $7 on Steam. Will post a trip report after I play it for awhile!

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Schwack
Jan 31, 2003

Someone needs to stop this! Sherman has lost his mind! Peyton is completely unable to defend himself out there!
Where the heck is the level two keycard dealy? I've enjoyed most of my time playing this game, but the 'story' could really use some tuning up. I spent most of my time mining with the wrist laser because I didn't even think to climb around the bases with dirt and break in until much later.

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