So much to talk about this week! First and foremost: a reminder that 11am PST tomorrow marks the beginning of our October competition! If you’d like your name permanently baked into the game, in association with a high-value item that future players will be sure to desire, this is your best and possibly only opportunity to make that happen prior to the launch of this game. There are other prizes too; you can read about them here! And with that said, let’s talk about the changes that await you all in-game:
After four solid weeks of engineering effort, we’ve changed absolutely everything about the Steambirds’ backend; user account data is managed differently and the server management code is all-new and better. Some vestiges of the old systems are still around but we’ll be cleaning those up and players probably won’t notice that process. In the long term, we expect to gain improved stability and functionality from this! In the short term, there’s a lot of corner cases that we probably didn’t cover so there will be bugs.
The current state of things:
- Friends lists have been blown away
- All your planes and their items have been blown away
- Class unlocks / skin unlocks were preserved and carried over
- Hangar unlocks were preserved and carried over
- Pilot name and portrait were preserved and carried over, but your pilot’s progress is gone
Known brokenness:
- Resetting password inside the game is broken (this doesn’t show for Steam players, so shouldn’t affect ya’ll)
- Forums are disconnected from our new backend, so any new accounts created from this day forward won’t have forum access until we fix this. Not an issue for existing players.
- If we shut down servers for whatever reason it still doesn’t save player state. We’ll try to be good and warn people so they can exit before the shutdown (exiting the game and TPing to rebel city saves state.)
- Player numbers on dungeon dropships aren’t updating correctly.
- There are a tiny number of player accounts that mysteriously don’t want to correctly import into the new backend. Not sure why. If you can’t login, you’re probably one of the unlucky few who are impacted – please drop us a line if so.
- New account registration is broken. If you’ve been sitting on an unused Steam code for some bizarre reason, it won’t do you any good till we fix this.
- We always discover random corner cases when we do big changes like this. Consider this a placeholder item for the inevitable-to-be-discovered corner case. 😉
Big wins:
- We now have 100% control over our data and have more freedom to implement features that will make the game better. No more major dependencies on third parties whose interests may or may not align well with our own.
- We simplified a lot of the pipeline for logging in and switching servers, so those should be faster.
- The islands have different random names; poor “Danielvania” is retired.
So, with that major bit of technical news out of the way, let’s talk about content changes:
We have a new dungeon, “The Arena” (T5). Fight through 20 non-stop waves of enemies and defeat Legion, master of the swarm! The swarm, by the way, is the name of the very large quantity of harassers that will be chasing you throughout this experience. Note: you can expect to see a new T10 dungeon inspired by The Arena in the not-distant future. 🙂
The enemy health bars and conning system have gotten an experimental update. Hopefully things feel cleaner and more legible to all players, and hopefully the big scary skull appearing over the health bar of enemies multiple tiers above yours will help new players better understand what parts of the game might be challenging for them.
The White Spider and Fire Dungeon both have their final, polished art! Deadly and beautiful, now.
The pilot upgrade system has been modestly overhauled:
- There’s a nice celebratory UI when you level up now,
- We’ve added two new upgrade options: +1% Speed (“Wings”) and +1% plane and pilot XP gain (“Quick-Learner”).
- Dynamo (+4% Steam Rechange Rate) has been lowered to just +2%
- Fusion Monkey (+3% Armor Recharge), Acrobat (+1% Turn Rate) and Quick-Learner are all capped at 25 upgrades per pilot, instead of the default 20. (From reading Discord, we noticed that many of you didn’t realize that there have always been caps. Well, now you know!)
Consumable plane upgrade caps (per class) have also been adjusted. Most of the adjustments are relatively minor, save for a large drop in the HP cap for Paladins and smaller but still significant drop for Medics:
Assault:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 50 >>> 55
- DPS upgrade cap: 55 >>> 40
- Steam recharge cap: 55 >>> 50
Medic:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 40 >>> 25
- Steam recharge cap: 60 >>> 50
Raptor:
- DPS upgrade cap: cap: 50 >>> 40
Hog:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 55 >>> 50
- DPS upgrade cap: 55 >>> 40
Walker:
- DPS upgrade cap: 50 >>> 40
Old Faithful:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Duster:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Shieldmaiden:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Paladin:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 25
Merlin:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Engineer:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Angler:
- Max HP upgrade cap: 60 >>> 50
Other notable changes:
- Walker balance adjustment: baseline armor increased 25%, baseline DPS decreased 10%, baseline range increased 10%
- Rebalanced T0-10 shotguns/snipers so that the damage increase across tiers is more linear
- All sniper guns have proper piercing ability now
- Lion Guard quest enemy has been been reworked. Should feel more like a proper miniboss