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[sol_alex]

Steam, Website, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube

Here is our most recent trailer. it is somewhat out of date at this point, but we probably won't make a new one until we're closer to release.

About the game:
Signs of Life is a 2D sci-fi survival action/adventure sandbox game, with a combination of procedurally generated and meaningful hand crafted content. We're basically trying to create a game that captures the sense of exploration and progression of a game like Super Metroid, but set within a dynamic sandbox world similar to Terraria with a hint of our twisted sense of humor. We want to create a story with a beginning and satisfying ending, not something that you just play until you get bored (Although we'll of course let you keep playing to your hearts content once you finish the story content).

Features:

• An expansive world with procedurally generated and hand-crafted content.
• Online Co-Op Multiplayer
• A bunch of weird alien creatures.
• Some familiar creatures.
• Chickens.
• Mining, hunting, gathering.
• Gobs of ores, materials and animal organs you can use to...
• Craft all kinds of weapons, armor, gadgets, furniture, etc.
• A bit of story and lore to hold the whole thing together.
• Eggs.

Development Status:
We just recently released our 0.5 update, which brought the long-requested Co-op multiplayer. With the addition of multiplayer all of our major technical challenges are now solved and we can focus on fleshing out the content and story. We're considering the game about halfway done at this point, and while we have a lot still planned we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel =) Future updates will bring more bosses, more bases and other locations to explore, more story content, new creatures to fight and new weapons to fight them with.

Here are some sweet animated GIFs:
Engaging and dynamic combat

A wide variety of weapons

Weird creatures

Neat gadgets and devices

[sol_alex]

What we've been working on recently:

Scaling the inventory
Aside from bug fixes related to the multiplayer, we've been working on some basic usability things. One of the complaints we've had with our game is that the inventory can be fiddly to use on high resolutions. We chose to go with a gridless inventory reminiscent of Ultima Online's inventory because we on the team feel like it gives you a better feeling of ownership of items. With grid-based inventories, I always feel like I've got a bunch of icons that represent items rather than properly "owning" the items. Here is what our inventory looks like:


Based on feedback we've received through Early Access, we've added things like an auto-organize button that stacks items and arranges them in a grid pattern (so you can find the tiny items that inevitably end up hidden behind a sack or something) but one of the frequent complaints we get is that many of the items are too small which makes it hard to select them in the inventory. I think the item size is fine, and most players don't seem to have any trouble, but players using high resolutions seem to have trouble, which is understandable. Because we use the same item graphics in-world and in the inventory, we couldn't really make the small item sprites much bigger or their scale wouldn't make sense in the world. For example, here is what it looks like when you drag some bacon into the world:

If we double the size of that bacon, it would be easier to grab from your inventory, but then it would look huge in the world.

We also realized that having a static inventory size will be completely unusable on 4k+ resolutions and we want to future proof as best we can. So, because of those reasons, I've been working on scaling the inventory. What at first seemed like an easy feature, ended up turning into a bit of a can of worms. Making the inventory draw larger was a fairly simple task, but actually making all of the input work has been pretty time consuming, but I've got it mostly working, here is what it looks like scaled up 2x at 1680x1050:

One problem I haven't quite figured out the solution for is how to handle the transition from the inventory to the world, but I'm leaning toward making it so that the items are scaled up until you drag them out of the container, but once they are dragged over the world they drop back down to the world scale so that you can properly place them. After we get the inventory scaling, we'll have to work on world scaling and scaling the rest of the HUD as well.

Scroll Slot Icons
Most games in this genre have used slots in their HUD that you drag items to, which we felt was really awkward and clumsy to use. One of my biggest frustrations with Terraria, for example, was constantly switching out items in my hot bar. To avoid that, we set up a system that automatically fills the hot bar with items matching certain categories and you can scroll through them. Here is what it looks like now:


We feel like it is much more convenient and we have gotten quite a bit of good feedback about the system, however, we've also found that it causes a bit of a learning curve for new players who expect the system to work like other games in the genre. To partially alleviate this, we're considering adding icons to the scroll slots that indicate what each slot is for. However, as we added the icons we had to extend the height of the HUD element, which ended up looking a bit more intrusive than we intended. To alleviate that, we made it partially transparent which ended up looking a lot better, here is what it looks like so far:

Hopefully with that change and some tooltips it will be significantly more intuitive.

New Creatures
For our next update, we're planning on adding a new boss and a few new creatures. We have these creatures in-game now:

who act as a nice passive threat on the surface of the planet. They spawn during the night and walk around, and then in the morning they go static and cause more damage. They stick to blocks as they move, so they act effectively like little spiny barnacles. Our plan is to add a world boss, a new species of that creature and a sort of living spawner that will spawn the spikey creatures. The alternate species of spikey creature will be a more active threat, shooting spines out occasionally. Here is what it will look like:

And here is what the spawner will look like:



I don't want to spoil the boss creature, so I'll save that for later =)

[Pitxardo]

BEST GAME EVER!!!

[sol_alex]

Some of what we've been working on recently:

Dart Crawlers

We've mostly finished the new crawling mob, here is what it looks like in-game:


Trajectory Computer

We decided the throwing in Signs of Life needed to be easier to use because it was kinda awkward to throw things reliably. We decided this is a sci-fi game, so there should be a sci-fi solution to that problem. To that end, we decided to make a device that the player can use to project an estimated trajectory for thrown items. It was pretty straightforward, our physics are pretty simple, so we were pretty easily able to simulate where a thrown item would be several seconds from now. Early attempts looked like this:

Even as a proof of concept it felt really good already. We continued to polish it up visually and here is what it looks like now:


It makes planting seeds so much more satisfying!


It also works great with a bow:


It actually works so well and makes throwing stuff so much more fun to use that we decided to hide it somewhere in the world for the player to find in the early areas of the game as well as making it a high-end craftable.

Hologram Decoy
Between working on the trajectory computer and playing far too much Metal Gear Solid V, we decided to make a decoy item. Once again, because of science fiction, we had to make it a hologram decoy. It's thrown like a grenade, and when it comes to a rest it projects a hologram of the player making various threatening and/or alluring poses, here is what it looks like to use:


The decoys take the attention of nearby aggressive creatures for a few seconds and then close back up, but they don't get consumed by using them and can be picked back up which makes for a funny bit of risk vs reward as you probably won't want to run too far away from your sweet sci-fi hologram grenades.

[DangerMomentum]

This game is seriously a gif factory. Keep up the awesome work!

[sol_alex]

This game is seriously a gif factory. Keep up the awesome work!

Haha, thanks.

We realized that there is a lack of heat sources (used for certain recipes, mainly cooking) between the very early game campfire project and the very high-end craftable portable gas grill, so we decided to do a basic portable iron charcoal grill. Here is what it looks like: