Signs of Life - If Nothing Else, Look at the Gifs

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Signs of Life - If Nothing Else, Look at the Gifs

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

# ¿ Jan 27, 2014 18:37

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:19

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.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2014 19:03

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 =)

# ¿ Jan 28, 2014 20:22

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 =)

# ¿ Jan 29, 2014 06:31

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 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 - 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, ) 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).

# ¿ Jan 29, 2014 20:26

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.

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.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 02:56

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:

# ¿ Jan 30, 2014 07:41

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.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2014 06:37

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

# ¿ Feb 1, 2014 06:08

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Schwack posted:

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.

Yeah, the static content needs work, we're heavily redesigning the pioneer station and stuff to be a lot less confusing and arbitrary but it'll take us a bit before all the pieces are in place.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 07:17

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Schwack posted:

Im beginning to wonder if my first world isn't a little wonky. I restarted, to see if I missed something, and noticed that this time there were several bombs and other useful things in the mining base that definitely weren't there on my first play through.

Its possible, I've had some occasional reports of items disappearing for people but its a strange bug because I've never personally experienced it, so its being super tough to debug. I know if the game crashes during world generation for some reason (happened occasionally during development) you'll get some messed up things like fruits floating in the air where bushes should be and such.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 07:24

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Infinite Monkeys posted:

Where do I get chicken food and how do I pick up chickens or otherwise get them to where I want to farm them? 5 feathers per arrow is loads

There is a bag of chicken feed in the pioneer station somewhere but it isn't really useful at all yet, you can't really farm chickens or anything yet. The arrow recipe makes 5 at a time, so it's only one feather per arrow and you can pick them back up after they are shot.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 00:18

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Working on the assault rifle:

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 07:27

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Esposito posted:

Are you planning on hiring the cast of Archer to provide some voices? The gifs remind me of the show in a very good way.

Haha, I wish.

Babyface Mingo posted:

Loving the usage of gifs to show us what you're working on.

That sheep looked like it poo poo out meat and that's awesome, as is the assault rifle. The reload/hit animations look pretty smooth as well.

Thanks, I like gifs but I'm going to have to upgrade my hosting, I'm running out of bandwidth for the first time like ever.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 07:39

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Looks like we got the dodge roll working pretty well, check it out:

# ¿ Feb 8, 2014 23:45

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

We're working on a sweet minimap function where you scan the area around you in order to build up a map from scratch. Here is what it looks like with the highest tier amethyst installed:

# ¿ Feb 18, 2014 00:08

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

glug posted:

What would be fantastic is if you could click a button on that bag, and have it automatically grab all carried items that would normally auto-load to this bag and sort them out in there. It is horrible trying to navigate a massive bag of overlapping items to figure out wtf you have,

Yeah, I'm planning on doing an auto-organize button on containers, which would sort the container (and any sub-containers) so it would make sense to have it go through the items in your pack and shove them in the auto-sort containers (excavator etc) when you hit that button.

glug posted:

and there's no log or anything of what you're picking up as you area-loot around you. I needed grey rocks for example, and I'd knock out some rocks, scoop them up, and try and sort anything that looked rock-like in my bag so I could see what had a quantity that went up, and go "ok.. so this is limestone.." and go digging somewhere else. It's really confusing.

Ah interesting, this is the kind of thing that didn't really occur to me because I'm too close to the game - some kind of log letting you know what you just picked up would be pretty nice, I'll have to give it some thought.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2014 20:42

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Check out this wicked cool 3d printer we're working on:

# ¿ Apr 17, 2014 23:09

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

I think the material printer is pretty much finished, we added some sweet sound effects and it really kinda completes the package =D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS--AreauE0

# ¿ Apr 18, 2014 22:36

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

We did a poll last week on our site for which item to add next and the winner was the rocket launcher. Its pretty much finished, so check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5fSwql-mMI

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 16:22

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Frank Serpico posted:

Although I've told myself no more Early Access Indie games, and knowing it will go on sale sometime, this looks like way too much fun and I'm pretty certain that it'll be 10 bucks well spent. SOLD!

Hah awesome! I hope you enjoy what we have so far =)

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 17:32

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Loopoo posted:

How often do you churn out updates? Is it a regular occurrence or more of a "when it's ready" sort of deal?

Every couple weeks I'd say, but it kinda depends on what we're working on and when we can find a nice stopping point. We've got a lot of stuff in various stages of completion so they just sorta go into the game when we finish all the bits.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 19:02

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Loopoo posted:

When are you hoping to have this game released and finished?

Within a year ideally, but no specific schedule.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 19:12

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Dareon posted:

The mecha-chicken could stand to be tweaked a little bit, I think. As it is there, blocked by the ceiling, it can't eyebeam me, and its guns can't aim high enough to egg me. If I step forward a bit, it can catch me in the eyebeam explosion but I'm still out of range of the egg cannon. I didn't actually kill it that way, I got bored and left after firing over 200 crossbow bolts into it 11 at a time.

Also, neither limestone, marble, nor coal will work for making steel, and the (seriously under-informative) wiki points me to graphite and anthracite, neither of which I've even seen.

Hmm yeah, the mech chicken definitely needs some work, especially around those prefabs. We also have a more involved second-stage fight planned in a little boss room, but that is still a ways out. You make steel with anthracite and iron ore, anthracite is found pretty deep, it looks like darker coal nuggets sorta.

Also, here is a sweet gif of the TNT we're working on. There are single sticks for throwing, and then you'll be able to craft bundles that can be stuck to stuff.

edit: Update, now lasers light TNT bundles too :neckbeard:

Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 12:24 on May 15, 2014

# ¿ May 15, 2014 10:46

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Infinite Monkeys posted:

Those explosions look pretty small, you're standing about 10 feet away. Looks good though!

Yeah, not exactly a realistic explosion range, but we need to leave room for bigger, higher tier explosions down the line =D

# ¿ May 18, 2014 23:50

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Sneak peek at the work we did on the crafting window for the upcoming update, its a lot easier to navigate now!

# ¿ May 20, 2014 05:07

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

I just pushed an update to Steam, here are the update notes on our site.

# ¿ May 20, 2014 09:33

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Spent the last couple days working on elevators, yay! The visuals are still a work in progress, but functionally it all seems to work pretty well.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2014 04:24

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

We updated Signs of Life to version 0.39 today, here are the patch notes. Nothing earth shattering in there, but the saltpeter deposits on new worlds should make crafting bullets easier and now you can eat food this way:

# ¿ Jun 4, 2014 21:41

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Frank Serpico posted:

This thread needs a bump because this game is pretty drat fun. Keep up the good work, Lucid!!

ScienceAndMusic posted:

Yeah this game rules. Not enough people know about it.

Thanks, I'm glad you folks are enjoying what we have so far =D

I pushed a small update today, nothing particularly interesting but it fixed a few nasty bugs introduced in the last update.

Version 0.39.2
- Torches can now be equipped in the quick slot
- You can no longer place blocks over torches
- Fixed an issue with the timing on repeated hits with a pick that was resulting in a faster than intended overall mining speed
- You can no longer place platforms in the background
- Fixed a bug that caused the big chicken to heal during the fight
- Hopefully fixed the floating grass issues around bases during worldgen
- Fixed an issue that could cause the pod to become stuck during the intro
- Fixed some minor sound issues during the pod landing section
- Added recipe obtained text similar to the item pickup text
- Fixed some bugs related to switching characters
- Added light mob hostility setting to sandbox menu, allows you to generate worlds that spawn fewer mobs
- Work on an issue that results in a stuck screen with a warning about the resolution changing for some players

# ¿ Jun 13, 2014 03:48

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

I worked on potions tonight, check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipPfURyzyFs

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 07:43

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Here is a sneak peak of this gross thing:

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 06:29

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

ScienceAndMusic posted:

I just want to say, I know it sometimes is quiet in this thread, but your updates are always super awesome to me. I cannot wait for this game!

Awesome, glad you're digging it =D

# ¿ Jun 27, 2014 08:08

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Bernardo Orel posted:

How big is that thing in relation to player?

# ¿ Jun 28, 2014 08:13

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

Just added a GPS thing that sets a beacon on your map when it is dropped in the world so you can carry it around and then find your corpse when you die. The item itself is a placeholder and I probably need to use a color with more of a contrast from the terrain purple but its totally functional.

and here is a gif of me dancing in patchwork armor:

Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jul 6, 2014

# ¿ Jul 6, 2014 07:47

Lucid Dream: Feb 4, 2003; That boy ain't right.

We've been looking for more things to make for the device/accessory slots, so we added this biometric scanner last night (mob health display) it'll be in the next update.