"For over 35 years, the Expanded Universe has enriched the Star Wars experience for fans seeking to continue the adventure beyond what is seen on the screen. When he created Star Wars, George Lucas built a universe that sparked the imagination, and inspired others to create. He opened up that universe to be a creative space for other people to tell their own tales. This became the Expanded Universe, or EU, of comics, novels, videogames, and more.

While Lucasfilm always strived to keep the stories created for the EU consistent with our film and television content as well as internally consistent, Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.

Now, with an exciting future filled with new cinematic installments of Star Wars, all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected. Under Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy’s direction, the company for the first time ever has formed a story group to oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development.

“We have an unprecedented slate of new Star Wars entertainment on the horizon,” said Kennedy. “We’re set to bring Star Wars back to the big screen, and continue the adventure through games, books, comics, and new formats that are just emerging. This future of interconnected storytelling will allow fans to explore this galaxy in deeper ways than ever before.”"

So basically we are learning what seemed real enough since the new Star Wars films were announced, they are taking an entirely new direction. All told this doesn't bother me and I look forward to the new stories the new films will tell.

That said, not all fans are happy about this news at all. I'll admit, I grew up considering the Timothy Zhan's Heir to the Empire books to be cannon. Now that they are not, I am a bit sad but it's not like Lucasfilm is taking them away.

What do you think, is Lucasfilm doing right by the new direction Disney is taking the franchise or is this something else?

http://starwars.com/news/the-legendary-star-wars-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page.html

Wanted to share some Cheerful Ghost fan art from one of my friends and local PDX artist Hagen Deloss. I love seeing this stuff, so if you have seen someone make something or have made something yourself please share it with me.

https://twitter.com/thedelossopher/status/459872880054923264/photo/1

Follow him on Twitter @thedelossopher

Like many of you, I excitedly boarded the Starbound hype train. After a few weeks of reading the nearly daily updates, watching the update videos and talking to friends, I was hooked. I wasn’t alone as many people on Cheerful Ghost and all over the internet were really excited to see play Starbound. In April of 2013 the Starbound beta hit and over the next few months the Starbound fans funded the game at 4 million dollars! We sailed through the three pre-order bonuses of the new race, collectable fossils and starter pets. My excitement level was crazy. Clearly this game would be the answer to my prayer for an awesome open world building game in space that took the best elements from Minecraft and Terraria.

As the 2013 was nearing an end Chucklefish let us know the game beta would finally release. To be able to finally play Starbound was like a nerds dream come true. When the beta date hit, I refreshed the Humble Store got my key and frantically kept checking Steam to be able to download the game on my Mac. Later that day the game downloaded and I started a fresh character. The game was beautiful, the score was moving and the game was fun. I didn’t understand the weapon level system, the game was way too easy and the entire universe was really empty but none of that mattered because I was high on Starbounds glow. I sunk many hours into Starbound over that first week but as my play time grew the games flaws started to become more apparent.

Chucklefish mentioned the game would be buggy. They said the game wouldn’t be finished. I kept that information in the back of my mind as I played but as the games oddities increased, my excitement waned. I decided to walk away from the game a bit to give them a few months to fix the games biggest flaws. I came back to the game after Chucklefish said to expect no more player wipes. I figured that would be a good time as i’d have some permanence to my game. After a few days of playing a bug hit the game wiping out all my treasure chests. After this bug hit I also noticed how much the game hand’t really progressed in those few months.

Recently, Tiy posted something to the Chucklefish blog that I wanted to respond to.

"Tiy: The first reason is relocating the team. This is a complex and time consuming process that is (thankfully) almost at an end. We hope to have the entire team over here by the end of the month. Making this work has meant going through the visa process, setting up a work space, finding a new home for each person, team members driving for days to get legal documentation. It’s been a challenge.

Some people tell us that its a waste of time and there is no benefit to working in the same office when tools exist to work remotely. These people are grossly mistaken."

I am currently a Software Engineer that works for a very large company and we have developers distributed all over the world. My team consists of people spanning Oregon, Washington DC & Brazil. There is no question that having all development centrally located can be helpful. That said, working remotely in tech isn’t crazy. Having team members that span different timezones does take some organization and care. One mechanism is to have people flex work hours a bit to accommodate the team.

"Tiy: The other reason updates have slowed down was the community response to faster updates. People like to point out that we said we would deliver near daily small updates and have failed to do so. They do not however point out that we made the decision to go back to more substantial updates because we were criticised heavily for putting out small updates without much substance (though larger updates were ongoing behind the scenes). Critics argued passionately that updates containing one new sub biome, or new guns, or new structures, or new weather was just pointless fluff and they wanted real ‘game changing’ updates. So we listened and that’s what we went back to focusing on."

When you say you are going to do something and then later change your mind, I can see why people would be frustrated. I read the big update post where they said they were changing the way Starbound development happened to push out quicker updates and thought it was a good idea. That said, I don’t really care to much about HOW they update the game, there are lots of ways to develop software. Whatever works best for them, is totally fine.

Which I think is something worth considering. I don’t think Starbound fans care much about how Chucklefish makes the game, they just want the thing they love to be awesome. Enraged fans take to the message boards and Reddit to complain about Chucklefish relocating it’s staff to the UK or the update changes not because they ultimately care about how someone runs a company. People are complaining because the thing they lovingly funded isn’t the way they want it to be. Chucklefish could open a moon base to continue development and as long as the game was awesome, no one would care.

That said, development of the game has vastly slowed down since it’s beta launch and it's not entirely clear where development of the game is.

At the end of the day I think Starbound is a rad game and wish Chucklefish to an awesome final launch. Alongside that, it’s been a wild ride tempered by some disappointment felt by many fans. All that needs to be done at this point is to make Starbound awesome and I have no doubt it will be. Angry rage filled fans have a way of coming back to sanity when things turn around. And ultimately we all want the same thing, for Staround to be awesome.

http://playstarbound.com/starbound-progress/
https://twitter.com/Tiyuri/status/458210602021048321

I enjoy these game lore videos. Enjoyed the fake lore video playing up the hyper difficult and addictive qualities of Flappy Bird.

After watching this video I wondered what kind of faux lore would exist for Pacman?

A really great video showcasing the history behind Harvest Moon. Watching this video has me hoping that Stardew Valley launches this year!

If I would have heard about the addition of Minecarts to Terraria I might not have thought it was a good idea... Until I saw the 1.2.4 preview video. This update should make travel around large Terraria worlds really easy.

Hopefully this will be available from the starting tier! Love the game still gets these great updates for free! 1.2 has added so much and things just keep getting better.

Blizzard is a company like few others and are showing that style in it's latest foray, Azeroth Choppers. Azeroth Choppers is a reality TV web show focusing on the Horde and Alliance building competing motorcycles. The first episode is pretty interesting and ends on a typically reality TV cliffhanger. Whereas the geek in me likes the premise of the show I was really turned off by the reality TV aspect of it. The ending cliffhanger seems invented and kind of broke some of the magic.

That said, they plan on doing a whole run of shows online for your YouTube viewing pleasure. The next episode of Azeroth Choppers will launch on YouTube April 24th and keep the week release clip until it's episode 8 finale.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/choppers/

This world runs on money and taxation, so why shouldn't death be the same? Skullduggery takes a firm stand on the afterlife in what looks to be a really awesome jaunt into the afterlife. In Skullduggery you play a skull HELL BENT on collecting the unpaid debts of criminal deadbeats.

I first heard about Skullduggery from Hagen, one of my friends working on the game.

Skullduggery will launch this year on iOS and Android and I am excited to fling my skull around to collect debts. Because, you know, that would be totally awesome.

http://departmentofskullduggery.com/

Crawl is a top down chunky pixel hack-n-slash co-op rogue-like. You take your turn playing as the bad guys and when you turn comes, you can play as the lone hero. After contacting Powerhoof games I was able to land a press copy and brought it to a PIGSquad meet up and played it with a few people. I had a great time and after emailing Dave and Barney at Powerhoof they were kind enough to agree to do an interview. I wish them well to a speedy launch and hope you you create a special place in your heart for playing as evil incarnate in Crawl when it launches.

jdodson: Couch co-op seems to be making a comeback in the Indie scene. Some of my best memories in gaming are of a bunch of my friends huddling around my TV playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye. I am curious what couch co-op games you love and if any of those experiences influenced the design of Crawl?

Dave: I only had a PC when I was growing up, so my childhood memories are mostly of being huddled around a keyboard playing stuff like the Simpsons Arcade game or Liero. A lot of games weren’t even multiplayer, but we’d come to some sort of “I’ll drive, you shoot” arrangement, or just debate strategy and what to name cities in a shared game of Civilization.

Barney: Haha I did that “I’ll drive, you shoot” thing a lot too- I remember shooting in Captain Comic just involved pressing the spacebar as fast as possible the whole time! We still had a ball so that’s a pretty good indicator local multiplayer was bringing a lot to the table.

I grew up with a lot of kids around my age, so we played a lot of NES, SNES, N64 and arcade machine multiplayer. Gauntlet, Goldeneye, Street Fighter and the original Super Mario Kart (still so much better than the sequels) were always happening, with sporadic obsessions with Bomberman and those D&D “Goldenaxe-like” games. Crawl is really just an outlet for my nostalgia over those experiences, with some modern stuff thrown in just to make development difficult :)

Dave: More recently we’ve really liked playing Castle Crashers together, which is definitely an influence along with the asymmetrical nature of games like Left 4 Dead which Barney and I played every lunchtime for ages. There was definitely a dry patch for local multiplayer where there really wasn’t a huge amount out there and we’d fallback on old Mega-Drive and N64 games. That was when we decided to try making a bunch of local multi games in a little game-jam then get together to play them all, which is where Barney came up with the format for Crawl.

jdodson: Crawl on Steam Machines seems like a totally awesome fit. Are you considering releasing the game on any other platforms that are “native living room” devices like the Ouya, Fire TV, Playstation or XBox?

Dave: Crawl makes so much sense on consoles, so we’re definitely keen to release on anything we can in the living room. At the moment we’ve got plenty on our plates with early access for PC, Mac and Linux, it’ll be a while before we look at other platforms.

jdodson: If you had to release Crawl on a planet dominated by Apes, I am curious what changes you would make the game to easier for them to play?

Dave: We wanted Crawl to be a game where you could pass a controller to someone at a party and they’d be able to get into it without being an avid gamer. So the controls are really simple, just two buttons, and the depth comes from learning the characters and their special abilities and knowing when to use them.

Barney: I’m pretty sure if they can dominate the planet they can play Crawl- it’s pretty accessible :) I might slide a few banana puns in there but you can’t go crazy with that stuff- apes don’t want to be talked down to. I’m assuming this scenario involves us developing from a cage while the apes throw in scraps of food and we poop in a bucket… I think I’d be more focused on making sure Dave got the side of the cage with the bucket.

jdodson: What other games have you been playing when you’re not working on Crawl?

Dave: Neither of us have been playing any big blockbuster games recently, although we’re both eager to find the time to play Dark Souls 2. I’ve been playing tonnes of indie games recently, especially rogue-like-likes (or procedural death labyrinths, or whatever we’re calling them now). Nuclear throne, FTL, Desktop dungeons, Teleglitch, Binding of Isaac... I find I can come back to any of them after not playing for a while and they still feel fresh. I keep blowing my self-inflicted games budget backing things on kickstarter, so I feel like I’ve got a lot of great stuff coming.

jdodson: I’ve really enjoyed the press copy of the game. One thing I noticed is that it seems like the game is very punishing the single player character at times, which is fairly on par for a rogue-like. Are there any balancing changes coming that might give the main character some love?

Barney: Yep, we have a lot of tweaking to do! Balance really is the hardest part of development on Crawl- to make sure it isn’t frustrating for the hero or the monsters. There are a lot of possible ways to even the playing field a little- I’m eager to try the hero collecting autonomous helper items which float around him and attack/defend, to make the monsters have to be more cautious about approaching and stop him being swamped. I’d love to try out fodder pet-type creatures as hero followers too, not to mention all the delicate health/stat tweaks that can make all the difference. There are so many possibilities, Steam Early Access should be super fun- putting in new items and ideas and seeing how people take to them and how they alter the balance will be awesome.

jdodson: What are you guys working with the game right now? Any aspect of development proving to be a bit trickier than you anticipated?

Dave: I’m working on getting some bot AI to play against when you don’t have a full compliment of friends. That’s been quite interesting. Doing AI that’s supposed to seem human is very different than normal AI you do for monsters in games. Instead of trying to make them look intelligent themselves, you need them to look like they’re controlled by someone intelligent. Instead of balancing their difficulty by making them run slower or do less damage, you need to give them the same flaws a human player would have. So I have to program in human traits like poor reaction times, not having perfect judgment, and being inaccurate with their controls.

Barney: I’m doing some boring stuff at the moment- putting in clear explanations for our mechanics- clear HUD feedback, tutorial text, etc, but I’ve also got some awesome stuff in the works… I’ve revamped some less-fun monsters and now they’re totally awesome :) I’ve been working on magic weapons, tweaking the spells so the non-dodge ones are equally fun and viable to use.

I’ve been working the on design for a fatality system which would allow you to use an enemy as a short term powerup if you kill it in the right way- ride the blobfish or rat as a steed, cut off an enemy head and throw it at another guy etc. Also we’ve been planning to finish off a “grapple” mechanic, allowing me to put in moves where characters grab and throw each other- then I can finalize some of the really huge monsters I haven’t been able to finish yet :)

jdodson: After the trailer for Crawl launched and the Interwebs seemed to explode with excitement(I know I did). The voice acting, art, music and pacing worked really well together. How did that all come together and how long were you all working on it before you dropped it on the world? Also wondering if the voice actor in the trailer will be doing any work on the final release of Crawl?

Barney: The trailer took me about 4 weeks. It was a real balancing act- we wanted to explain the gameplay concept clearly, but we also wanted to set the atmosphere and kind of Lovecraft tone. Those things fight against each other- writing for the tone wants more complex wording, but writing for clear explanation wants extremely straightforward wording, so there was a lot of back-and-forth on how to describe things- in the end having the simple on-screen text explanations allowed us to keep more tone in the narrator but still explain things quite clearly.

I spent a lot of time playing against our early bot AI to try and record the footage, and those guys do not cooperate! I’d be just about to capture the shot I wanted, then a bot would kill me or run off and buy a powerup and I’d have to restart!

Through most of the time working on the trailer we had our own voices in there as placeholders so I could re-record on the fly when I had a wording or timing change. It wasn’t until right at the end that we did the final recording session with our narrator that we started to get a sense that it all might work out!

We definitely intend to use voiceover in the game, and we have some fun ideas for where and how to insert it, but we haven’t prototyped that stuff yet- it all has to wait until the core gameplay is a little more developed.

jdodson: Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions! Any final words before we wrap things up?

Dave: Just that we’ve been thrilled with the reaction, and that people are excited about the game! We’re really looking forward to getting it in people’s hands and continuing to add cool stuff to it!

http://www.powerhoof.com/crawl/

In this epsiode of The Cheerful Ghost Roundtable we discuss what we have been playing as well as Android's new Fire TV. After that we talk about the new FTL: Advanced Edition update and after the show ends we spend some time unboxing our versions of Diablo III.

Your welcome!

What We are Playing & Drinking

• 0.24m WhiteboySlim: Diablo III, FTL: Advanced Edition & Ocarina of Time 3DS


• 2.10m Travis: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls


• 3.35m jdodson: Emoji, Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition, Hotline Miami & Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Part 2

Amazon's Fire TV

• 8.40m Amazon's new Fire TV is out. What do we think about it? Will we pick one up?


• 14.50m Amazon's Game Studios first release is Sev Zero.


• 18.00m What market does the Fire TV serve?


• 20.10m Google is rumored to be releasing an Android TV.

FTL: Advanced Edition

• 28.50m FTL: Advanced was a free update for PC and came out for the iPad.


• 39.00m Why didn't they charge for the expansion? Will we come back and play FTL classic?

DIABLO III: REAPER OF SOULS UNBOXING

• 44.10m The unboxing seriousness commences


• 51.55m WhiteboySlim unboxes regular Diablo III

Show Notes

• Emoji we support on Cheerful Ghost: http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/


• Amazon's Fire TV http://www.amazon.com/fire-tv-streaming-media-player


• Google's new Android TV http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5584604/this-is-android-tv