That’s right, it’s another update on the progress happening on Steambirds Alliance! Let’s jump right in and see what’s new…
Quests
The quest system is almost done (for now!) and it’s pretty much just the last little small changes and tweaks that are coming in. At the same time, this means that content creation will start to take over, so this week we made some changes to help that process.
Quest configs can now inherit from other quest configs (some of which are more like templates), so we can de-duplicate a lot of the config data and make maintaining it and adding more content easier. Is this programming yet? We’ve also added a new format for adding dialogue to quests, so we can really speed up that process and introduce more lore into the game more easily.
We also have a few more changes for quests:
- Worked on and deployed the 3 set piece missions
- Performance tracking for quest updates and guidance, so we can see if quests become too hot (don’t worry, optimization can cool them down!)
- Change quest tier to level in UI, so now it’s easier to compare to plane levels. At the same time we made level = 2 * tier throughout the game.
- Automatically trim old quest history so it doesn’t continue to fill up indefinitely
- More responsive guidance – more quickly assign a new quest target
- Tiny config tweak: merge join and activation unit lists
Store
- Ability to list multiple store sections in one.
- Stripping filler configs from the client side, cause clients shouldn’t know about them.
- Keep a list of recent products to allow a grace period after the end of a product to finish the ongoing purchase operations
- Fixed the broken masking of player names below the store popup.
- Fix: Can’t purchase starter bundle
Art
In art news the big change is new item icons! The old icons have been with us for quite a while, and were made using an older unoptimized modeling system. The new ones fit our shiny SBA style and are much nicer in terms of object load for the engine. There are also more diverse models for each type of item upgrade so you can get a hint from the model itself that it’s gonna be a boost!
Other
As we get closer to release, we’ve started working on some more smaller tasks that don’t fit in with quests, store, art or some other big heading. These smaller bug fixes and polish tasks should make the game feel a lot better, but it also means this “other” section will probably have to change in the near future. Who know how that will work? Certainly not this writer! For now, feast your eyes on an epic list of “other” changes:
- AI: multiple concurrent state machines – for content creation of complex enemies!
- Players start with 2 initial hangar slots now
- Better reporting for network errors, so we can more easily track them and (in the future) help fix some of them
- Improvements of offline mode (useful for development)
- Fixed the bug where you could consume a health boost while dying.
- Fixed a lot of problems in edge-cases in all buildings. Getting disconnected while docked broke every building menu.
- Fix: selecting between planes using horizontal axis on controller
- Target text in onscreen guidance marker is now localized.
- Consumable plane XP boosts
- Players can gain currency for getting pilot XP
- Some initial investigations into a few more bugs that cropped up in the playtest
- Investigating the clipping problem between non-ingame and ingame UI
- Scheduled Events: filter how we replace loot tables and enemies.
- Added shield triggers to all T8+ bosses
- Made all non-critical boss minions susceptible to stun