The 5 day playtest is underway. We kicked it off yesterday with the stream, and it’ll continue for 5 days, ending at 10am PST on Monday 21 May. If you have a Steam key, pop into the servers and have a look around; we have a lot of new stuff to check out: the store, quests, new classes, some with dual-stick controls, and probably a bunch of small things we’ve forgotten about!
Let’s have a look at some of the things we’ve been working on this past week…
Pirates
We have a new class in the game: the pirate. Obligatory arggg! The pirate is still a work in progress, so for now it’s stealing the shield maiden model, but it already features: an EMP weapon and short teleportation maneuver, in the direction the player is aiming. The new EMP weapon will fire a large slow-moving bullet that disables unassuming enemies, rendering them unable to move or fire a weapon. Probably a good time to take the out. This EMP is a new bird invention, so has some weaknesses and it won’t work on bosses, but smaller enemies have no defense, at least until the effect wears off!
Quests
- Finished island quest. You’ll get it when you enter an island, or you can select it from your quest log (only on an island). Progress will update on the quest and it’ll stick around if you can get to Meowza. You’ll also get notified about changes to an island quest, like getting it, losing it (leaving the island) or completing it.
- Fix bug where some quests didn’t show as completed in a quest giver
- Cleanup quest config and separate some server-side config from client builds. Some quest things are not directly shared with the client (it’s a need-to-know basis for strict bird security purposes), and we can be vague with quest reward drop rates
- Automatic bands/buckets of scheduled quests, so they are less likely to repeat
- Restrict allgiver quests to admins only (they’re only for testing)
- More work on new tutorial missions
- Experiments with setpieces: using unit types and markers to trigger events within setpiece, different setpiece sizes, how to guide people to the right location, etc
- New setpiece quests:
- “Heist”: Go through a guarded maze to get to the treasure
- “Mine”: Dig through a bunch boulders while avoiding hidden enemies and fighting monsters
Store
- More UI polish, including: icons and a more streamlined currency buy menu.
- Dyes now only apply if the color would change, so you don’t waste it by accident
- Dye items’ icons are now colored with the dye color itself
- Bigger store previews
- Show timeout on special sales
- Confirm dialog now integrated into tooltip popup
Art
The shield maiden variants have made it into a game as well as their dear paladin friends! There are also many different paints you can play with to further customize your feathered friend’s favorite craft. You can now fly through the skies in very varied variants of various volant vehicles.
In addition to these adventures in aircraft, there’s been some tuning on the UI to make sure it all matches a bit better, some updates to the textures on the Duster class, and in the rebel city the smokes have been updated to be more crunchy and stylized to match the rest of the art!
Other
- Hooked up the new tutorials
- Fixing low disk space on servers