Hyperspace Harvest is ripening like Painapple in mid-jump photo-activity. Here is an overview for what has been happening:

Suit Mods

Added in modable suit symbionts that modify your player character. Right now this is mostly geared towards the combat portion of the game. Suit symbionts will be your main way to increase health and shields for example.
As you can see there is also a framework for buffs and debuffs now to support certain suit mod mechanics.
I'm also still experimenting with the mod systems, trying to see what sticks. Suit mods don't use a combination of mods to create their item, they just need a single base mod. They also have fewer mod slot types than weapons or crops, but can have multiple slots of the same type. Skin is or health/shields, muscles is for speed, strings is for dodging and blood affects suit energy usage. The base mods for your suit all grant different amounts of these slots, so the different suit symbionts favor specific aspects of your character as a result.
As shown, suit mods won't just affect stats though, they can also augment your moveset in various ways.

Seasons

After that I worked on a lot of additional sprites for the different seasons. In the current design, the (Re-)Birth, Life, Decay, Death cycle of the whales roughly corresponds to a temperate earth-like climate. As you might expect this will affect which crops you can grow and which life forms you can encounter in the wild. It might also affect which areas of the world you can access, right now death season removes low feather shrubs and makes water traversable for example (not shown on on gif).

Weather

To further differentiate the seasons I then added in a weather system that features stuff like causality rain, necrotic particle fall and dust storms. The different weather conditions all come with their own ambiance sound.

Vetai also gives you some athmo data at the start of the day so you can plan ahead.

Tool Mods

Then I went back to finally finish up the baseline for the mod system, with your multi tool becoming the final piece of gear you can modify with bio-code.
Tool base code defines what grade of trees/rocks you can exploit, which will also gate off some parts of the world. So tool base mods will be hard to acquire. On the bright side, they are anomalous in that they do not get used up when creating a tool. This basically makes them permanent upgrades once you get your hands on them. Tools again come with multiple mod slots of the same type, so you can specialist your tool into various directions simultaneously. Submods can affect all kinds of farm activities, irrigation and parasite fishing included. Options menu, title screen, tree cut rework and tutorial overhaul are up next. For the title screen I'm considering focusing on save slots that show these kind of sprite stack dioramas.

They would have a couple variants and change depending on what you last did in the game. The game still has tons of problems and reworking the tutorial and tree cutting is really only just the start. As I see it the game still needs way more content before the core loop can click. Additional crops to fill those seasons, resources to make use of those tool mods, tool mods that interact with farming, parasite variants for different weather/seasons,- there is a lot still to be done. So maybe 2022? Anyways, I'll get back to it...

[ 2021-04-12 12:52:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi there aspiring whale vetrinarians. Hyperspace Harvest now got a dev roadmap, outlining plans for the game in 2021. Note that this is all very broad and subject to change, if you want to see what Im actually working on in detail you can always check the dev board. How the updates in the roadmap will go public is still undecided. Using the new Steam playtest system, a Steam game festival demo, early access,- thats all under consideration right now. Ill decide once the birth update is done. Which Ill get back to now, cheers! Stefan Sleeper Games

[ 2021-02-17 14:12:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh no, you died when the planet blew up! But you've been reincarnated by a giant space mammal and now you run a farm on its back. You'll have to use your space veterinarian skills if you ever want to get back to a regular planet. Grow medicinal crops on the space whale's' skin, or venture deep into its anatomy and terminate the corrupted cells yourself!

It Has Features!

Engineer and mod crops, tools, gear and weapons!
Create your own strands of plants to grow on your whale farm and optimize your crop builds according to preferences/playstyle. Modify weapon creatures with a wide variety of submods, change your tools performance for specific tasks and even alter your own body with bio-engineered symbionts.


Fresh farming in a fresh setting!
Explore the surface of the whale across its season-like life cycle of continuous death and rebirth. Use your multitool in skill-driven minigames to clear cancerous overgrowth, infected feather trees and mineral crustations. Grow self-made crops on the hex-skin of the whale and discover hidden interactions between plants, tiles and native vegetation.
(A system inspired by Permaculture, a real life concept about crop synergies.)


Juicy dungeon crawling!
Explore the different anatomic regions of the whale and fight various diseased cells, constructs and hardlight entities that have turned against their host. Use a wide variety of modable weapon creatures, both for melee and ranged combat. Make use of your Vet-Suit's superior mobility and manage suit energy to charge shields and weapons.


Streamlined UI and Mechanics!

• Universal tesseract inventory! No need to search through a dozen chests to find that one piece of gold ore.
  
• Your whaler tool is a single item that adapts to tasks you want to carry out, but can still be upgraded in individual areas.
  
• The time management aspect of the farming portion of the game does not interfere with the other core mechanics. Dungeon crawling only advances time when clearing a room and time of day pauses completely while moding gear, giving you the freedom to experiment and exploring possible builds at your own time.
  
• I hope you like smells cause the game constantly tells you the current odor of your surrounding!