We’ve been working quietly on our new action-MMO for a while now and are excited to finally share it with our private Alpha Testers.
What is Steambirds Alliance
Steambirds is a cooperative massively multiplayer shoot’em up. You fly a steampunk airplane together with your friends in a vast open world. Fight against hundreds of explosive enemies, dodge intricate bullet hell patterns and collect rare loot. There are giant bosses and secret missions.
Will you survive? Probably not. The game has permadeath and rewards skill. If you get shot down, you’ll lose your plane and your equipment. But if you work together with others, you’ll all get much further. And if you do crash, at least your pilot will survive and gain wild new skills.
The world
Oh, and you are a bird. A Steambird. Your pilot is a bad-ass avian, sporting aviator goggles and flying beefy WWII-style aircraft. This is a Starfox-style world where animals are people. It turns out some cats got uppity and took over the world. Evil cat emperors, mad mouse death cults, and elite canine guards stand in your way.
An experimental MMO
We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Realm of the Mad God, the previous MMO we co-developed with Wild Shadow. There were a lot of exciting experiments we wanted to try out that we didn’t get a chance to explore. Steambirds is our new mad scientist playground. Expect a return to the creative spirit that made old Realm of the Mad God so great.
Some ideas we will be playing with in the future are improved guilds and giant shared capital ships. We also want to do some fun things with persistent pilots to help sooth the chance of rage quitting.
The long term vision
Here’s what we are building:
- 2D shoot’em up gameplay in an MMO: We love classic shoot’em ups. Can we capture that same feel in an online world with a huge number of players?
- Build a true cooperative MMO: We want the game to play better together with other people. Can we turn strangers into friends?
- Instant action multiplayer: We’ve been looking for games where friends can start playing fast. No worrying about convoluted matchmaking or leveling up for a week first. Can we make a great game where you can jump right in, fly around, shoot things together?
We’ll be slowly inviting more and more people to join the private alpha test group over the next several months. At lot of the game simply isn’t built yet and we can’t handle a huge influx of players. We’re really looking forward to eventually playing with everyone!
If you filled out our “alpha invite” survey and haven’t been invited yet, don’t worry: there’s a very good chance you’ll receive an invite in the next month or two (unless you’re one of the people who told us that you only play mobile games… you folk are out of luck I’m afraid.) If you missed the alpha invite survey, it’s too late to join the alpha, but you might still be able to get into the beta by joining our newsletter, where we announce these sorts of things!
Regards,
Ryan, Dave, Danc, Alex, Ray, Scott, Brent, & Pat (a large subset of the Spry Foxes!)