Modding
Signs of Life now has basic support for modding, with further support planned.
Currently, you can create the following things with the Mod API:
Contents
Mod Basics [ ]
ModInfo.JSON [ ]
Every mod must have a ModInfo.JSON file in the mod’s root directory. You can look at the Example Mod for an example of a ModInfo.JSON file.
ModInfo.JSON must contain the following properties:
| JSON Property | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| UniqueModName | A unique text string up to 32 characters that uniquely identifies the mod. This should be unique from any other mods. | ExampleMod |
| DisplayName | A user friendly display name. | Example Mod |
| Description | A description of the mod. | An official example mod for Signs of Life. |
Mod Directory Structure [ ]
Most mod files can be located anywhere in the mod’s directory aside from the following:
Using Mods [ ]
Mods will be loaded from «My Documents/My Games/Signs of Life/Mods». Mods can either be in the form of a zip file or an unzipped directory.
Example Mod [ ]
We’ve created an example mod that we hope will help you figure out how to get things working by looking at some examples. This example mod is very bare bones right now, but it will be expanded shortly to add comprehensive examples of all the kinds of things you can add into the game through modding.
Drop the example mod in your My Documents/My Games/Signs of Life/Mods directory, start up the game and the mod should be working. You’ll know if it’s working if you can spawn a Shotel by pressing T to open chat, and using the command «/item ExampleMod.shotel»
The example mod adds the following content so far:
Modding
Signs of Life now has basic support for modding, with further support planned.
Currently, you can create the following things with the Mod API:
Contents
Mod Basics [ ]
ModInfo.JSON [ ]
Every mod must have a ModInfo.JSON file in the mod’s root directory. You can look at the Example Mod for an example of a ModInfo.JSON file.
ModInfo.JSON must contain the following properties:
| JSON Property | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| UniqueModName | A unique text string up to 32 characters that uniquely identifies the mod. This should be unique from any other mods. | ExampleMod |
| DisplayName | A user friendly display name. | Example Mod |
| Description | A description of the mod. | An official example mod for Signs of Life. |
Mod Directory Structure [ ]
Most mod files can be located anywhere in the mod’s directory aside from the following:
Using Mods [ ]
Mods will be loaded from «My Documents/My Games/Signs of Life/Mods». Mods can either be in the form of a zip file or an unzipped directory.
Example Mod [ ]
We’ve created an example mod that we hope will help you figure out how to get things working by looking at some examples. This example mod is very bare bones right now, but it will be expanded shortly to add comprehensive examples of all the kinds of things you can add into the game through modding.
Drop the example mod in your My Documents/My Games/Signs of Life/Mods directory, start up the game and the mod should be working. You’ll know if it’s working if you can spawn a Shotel by pressing T to open chat, and using the command «/item ExampleMod.shotel»
The example mod adds the following content so far:
Signs of life моды
Heya folks, we’ve got a new pretty significant update ready. Our intention with this update is to improve on a lot of the foundational parts of the game, improve the ease of use of various mechanics and systems, and add some new fun progression mechanics. Also we made it so when you eat raw meat you have a chance of getting a parasite that will gestate inside your guts and consume some of your digesting food until it grows big enough to burst out.
We decided to add cybernetics because we felt like the game needed more fun choices with regards to character progression. Cybernetics lets us add certain kinds of specialization or trade-offs that are rooted in something physical rather than just an abstract skill or stat. Maybe your character is better at melee combat because he equipped big beefy Behemoth cybernetic arms, or maybe you’ve got Sleek cybernetic arms that improve your ranged accuracy. Most cybernetics have an energy cost, either over time or when used, and all cybernetics can be toggled on and off within the Cybernetics window, which can now be accessed by clicking the button on the top right of the Character menu. When toggled off, cybernetics will still function as basic limbs/organs, but they will lose any of their beneficial properties as well as their associated energy costs.
Cybernetics arms and legs will have the most direct impact on minute to minute gameplay, as they will have the most impact on your defenses, movement abilities and weapon handling. Cybernetic legs will be able to adjust things like your run speed, encumbrance, jump height, etc while cybernetic arms will be able to adjust things like ranged accuracy and melee damage. All cybernetic limbs will have some additional defense, although the tradeoff is a slight reduction in blood volume (max health). Some cybernetic limbs are «Bulky», which means they cannot be worn under armor, but the rest can be combined with armor.
The biggest change isn’t really exposed to players directly, but opens a lot of doors, and that is that we’ve now got the world generating based on data files instead of being hard-coded. This means that it is now much, much easier for us to add new things to the world generator (new bases, new materials, etc), but it also means that, at least in principle, folks can tinker around with those data files and make custom worlds. We haven’t really exposed that stuff cleanly through Steam Workshop yet, but that is very much our intention in the not too distant future.
One thing we will need help with is dialing in the proper ore and resource density with the new world generator. We tried to match it pretty closely to what it was before, but we need you folks to get your hands on it and let us know how it feels. There are probably still some other issues as well, so let us know if you see any general weirdness with the world generator.
You can now zoom in and out in the world by using the Up and Down arrow keys by default. We are also working on making it so you can scale the UI and containers/menus, but that is not quite ready yet.
We’ve replaced the existing fonts with some more readable, bigger fonts. We’ve also gone through most of the UI elements in the game to make sure that all sizes of fonts fit and look right. There are a handful of exceptions, notably the MEG tool menu, which is slated for a full re-work in the not-too distant future. The changes we made to the font systems also means that we’re a step closer to supporting other languages.
From now on, when you die with item drop on death enabled you will drop a convenient backpack rather than spewing out your items. When you right click on that backpack it will re-equip you with whatever you had when you died. Your dropped backpack will also show up on the minimap and GPS Device Map.
We’ve struggled with the balance problems inherent in a game like this for awhile, and we want to try something different for the way blocks are placed in the world. We don’t want to make creatures that can simply move or attack through walls, but the ability to just place blocks instantly anywhere you want really makes it easy to trivialize almost any fight in the game. The solution we want to try is a new system that delays block building by a short time in a way that shouldn’t slow down the creative side of building. It works like this:
Blocks will be printed out over time, and any creature that passes through will cancel the building process of that block. You can queue up many blocks to build at once, so ideally it isn’t too intrusive when you just want to build, while still making it a bit harder to just wall up any creature you come across.
Try it out and see what you think. If you hate it, this change can be disabled by going to the settings menu and setting «Instant Block Placement» to «on».
We’ve never been particularly happy with the way the Scan Laser 
functioned in the game so in this update we’ve reworked it pretty significantly. Now, the primary function of the Scan Laser will scan creatures, structures, and it will also periodically send out a pulse of ground-penetrating particles that bounce off of any detected ores or other buried resources.
Our goal here is primarily to reduce the amount of random digging you need to do, while still leaving some ambiguity about what you’re detecting. The scan laser is great for finding pockets of resources, but you’ll need to dig your way there to find out what the resource actually is. Give it a shot and see how it feels.
We’ve overhauled the Codex a bit. Previously you could only scan creatures, but in this update the codex will also track scanned structures in the world and any datapads you find will be automatically downloaded to your codex.
We wanted to add craftable corn dogs but we hadn’t actually added corn to the game yet. Each corn seed will grow 2 cobs, and a cob can be put in the grinder to separate out some seeds.
Apparently the creatures on the planet are infected with some kind of parasitic lifeform, so you should make sure to cook any raw meat before eating it.
We’ve been working on new story content simultaneously with all of this other stuff in this update, so our plan is to finish some of that up next. We’re actually pretty far along on the next story content update, so it shouldn’t take us all that long to get finished. We’ve got a handful of story updates planned that should give more context to the world (and it’s inhabitants. ) and have a satisfying conclusion, so finishing that story content will be our primary objective for awhile.
Signs of Life Windows game
Signs of Life
SoL Developers | Released 2013
Signs of Life is a 2d survival sandbox platforming game set in the distant future. It is designed from the ground up to support drop in/drop out online co-op. Explore procedurally generated worlds full of meaningful handcrafted and procedurally generated content and a wide variety of creatures, some of which don’t even want to kill you and eat your corpse. You’ll hunt monsters, gather resources, craft weapons, armor and gadgets, cook the innards of the various creatures you encounter and if you have some time left over maybe you can try and save humanity.
Story:
Sensing that an apocalyptic war was imminent, the United Nations executed a last ditch plan to save what they could of the human race. 2 crafts were launched, a massive colony ship called the Hephaestus and a smaller, faster scout ship called the Hermes. The destination was a recently discovered earth-like planet with the potential to harbor life located roughly 18 light years away. The Hermes reached the planet first in order to establish a presence in anticipation of the arrival of the Hephaestus, but shortly after it reached its destination, all communications between the vessels were lost and never recovered.
4 years later, as the Hephaestus approached its destination a faint signal was detected from a nearby asteroid. Upon investigating the signal, a small artifact of presumably alien origin was discovered. Against their better judgement, the crew of the Hephaestus decided to attempt to activate the artifact, and upon doing so set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the destruction of the Hephaestus.
The good news is, you managed to survive by hitching a ride on a small escape pod just in the nick of time before the destruction of the Hephaestus. The bad news, is everyone you knew and loved is dead, you have nothing but the clothes on your back, a standard issue wrist laser and a faulty artificial intelligence companion named AGIS. Oh, and the human race is probably doomed. Probably.
Development:
We have been working on Signs of Life for just over a year and we’re quite far along, but we are far from finished. The majority of the core systems are in place and most of them are nicely polished and satisfying. The game is starting to come together and is already very fun to play, but we have a lot of work ahead of us. We are shooting for a multiplayer alpha sometime in the next few months. We want to be very open with our development, and plan on doing regular dev blogs which you can follow on our website (www.PlaySignsOfLife.com).
We have ambitious plans for Signs of Life, and we intend to continue developing the game long after the initial release.
Signs of life моды
Версия от 06.01.2013
-Added ability to add random item drops from tiles
-Added 3 rock types that can drop from stone, rocks are only really used for making the campfire right now.
-Added Greatsword weapon base type
-Added Iron Greatsword:
Iron Greatsword
-Added Shotgun weapon base type
-Added Pump Action Shotgun:
Pump Action Shotgun
-Added Blunderbuss:
Blunderbuss
-Added Arnie’s Gun:
Arnie’s Gun
-Added Energy Charge Cannon (Still needs more work on particles/effects, but its functional):
Версия от 06.06.2013
Heya! This week I mostly worked on behind the scenes stuff, but I did some world building as well. Nothing terribly interesting to let you guys in on, but I figured I might as well share these sweet pics.
Here is a map inside of a mysterious base:
pioneerMap
Here is a shot of a futuristic high-tech bathroom:
pioneerBathroom
And here is one of the rooms that is also in the mysterious base:
pioneerRoom
Completely unrelated to world-building, but here is an alternate flare ammo for the flare gun:
Версия от 27.07.2013
Heya, we’ve been working on fleshing out the underground areas recently. Up until recently the underground was really boring – we had basic world generation (tunnels, caves, ore, etc) so it was functional, but not very interesting. First, we added some gross larva caves, here is a video:
The gross larva things shoot bio-luminescent goo that slows the player, while dealing a small amount of damage over time. Not too much of a threat on their own, but the effect stacks, so if you run into a bunch of them or other mobs at the same time things can get hairy pretty quick. The jetpack is mostly a dev-tool at this point, we will absolutely going to have it in the full game, but we’re not sure where we want to position it progression-wise.
We also added material deposits, which will be scattered around underground and give you some sweet drops when you mash them:
sulfurDeposit
And we added the UI element for our the wrist tool, which will be used for the various upgrades of the tool:
Версия от 11.08.2013
Heya, thought I’d pop in and give you guys another update on what we’ve been working on lately. We’ve come up with a more or less hard plan on what we want to have in the alpha/demo we’re working towards, so at this point we’re pretty much filling in the blanks to finish up the content and fix a bunch of usability issues/bugs.
On the content side, we’ve been finishing up the materials/ores/etc underground. We now have all the materials (Dirt, Basalt, Slate, etc) and all the ores generating in the world at roughly the right depths. We also have the plants pretty much completely functional, there are bushes and trees, both of which grow fruits and when you eat the fruits you get a seed that can be planted in bare earth to grow another of that kind of plant. We’ve also got mushrooms and various fungi growing and mineral deposits that give you bonus materials and gorgeous gems you can use to upgrade your wrist laser.
We added a salvage kit the other day, which lets you take things apart in order to re-use the materials. Here is a video where I craft an energy cannon, blow some stuff up, and then salvage the cannon for its materials:
We also added a sweet mini-boss robot drone but I don’t want to spoil it =D