Fearing the Poison Lords

We’re back with some updates on the changes going on in Steambirds Alliance this past week. As always, the team is still hard at work making the world even more and more exciting and fun!

Quests

The amount of quest content is quickly growing. This week we have 6 new quests with some exciting custom content:

  • “Scurry” – Large group of squirrels surrounding a squirrel leader unit
  • “Playing in Entrails” – Mecha-Mooses are in the Hunting Area and are filled with real meat. Steal the meat for the carnivorous birds
  • “Energy Grid” – Fight variants of Guard Turret that has more lasers.
  • “Nocturnal Bombers” – Bomb Kitten elites are bombing ally buildings. Hunt them down.
  • “Fear the Farms” – Poison Farmer are being helped by local Poison Lords.
  • “Pesticide” – Poison Sprayer elites are trailing minions and spraying poison in a large ring

On the backend we’ve improve the organization for quests so we aren’t stymied by that anymore. The processes for making quests are getting more streamlined, so we can keep making more interesting and varied quests.

The closely-related dialogue system has also been improved this last week. The dialogue now has better timing that gets automatically computed: lifetime per message, delays between, overfull queue handling. This adapts to languages with more dense information density, like CJK languages. There were also a couple general fixes and improvements.

Art

The different animation state experimental work from last week has been turned into a more proper solution. Units can have different animations depending on their state (chilling, maneuvering, superspeeding, moving, …), and it’s only on the paladin for now, but will be extended to other units in the future. The paladin has been re-rigged and re-animated as a result of this work.

Other art changes:

  • Arena dungeon work and designing a unit
  • Various polish and art bug fixing
  • Finished hog modeling
  • Started Instructor coloring

Store

The store has seen some improvements. There have also been some general fixes so the relevant data is correctly updated on the client-side. We can have items with limits (eg. max 1 per account) and/or escalating prices, and storage is now dynamic, so you can buy more storage from the store. We’ll start adding some items to fill up the shelves soon!

Other

  • Fixed some issues with the new character patching API.