Great news: not only have we been hard at work this week, next week we’ll open up the servers again for anyone with a Steam key. When? From 10am PST on 13 June, for 5 days. Where? On Steam. How? You’ll need a Steam key, and the best way to get one is to hang out on Discord for any community competitions or watch our weekly stream. Once again, we’ll be kicking off the playtest with our stream, so if you don’t manage to get a key this week, next week is another chance! What? Steambirds!
Content
- Updated quest dialogue into new quest text formatting, and updated more quests with new writing. More text, more lore, more quills!
- Worked on 4 bosses’ invulnerable states:
- Ra Generator has blinky shields,
- Noble Politician has swarms of assassins to kill,
- Doomsday Mechanism summons minibosses, and
- The Frozen Horror has nodes you need to continuously kill in order to lower shields.
Art
In art news, there are more item icons floating around the world! There’s also some exciting development happening behind the scenes on effects and character art that we’re excited to show you when it starts to get fleshed out. Meanwhile the Arena 2 dungeon will soon be populated with a unique set of cohesive enemy models instead of the placeholder art that’s been hanging out there in the playtests lately!
Events and News
Work on the overhaul to events continues methodically. This week we have a spiffy new UI to show upcoming events and news items, with some info on them. The events are more powerful now, allowing us to do stuff like replace loot, enemies, or award extra XP, so you’ll have to keep your eyes open for new stuff coming up in the future and remember to come back to the game then!
Upgrading Unity
Something important that happened this last week was: the whole team moved over to a new version of Unity (2017.4.4). This version is part of the LTS series of Unity, so we wanted to get on this before release so we can more easily get updates and bug fixes without things breaking post-release. Usually any update to a game engine is fraught with peril, but this one was surprisingly frictionless! Yay!
Other
- Quests: include quest goal units as landmarks for ‘Rally to me’ emote
- Disable Unity hardware stat collection for GDPR
- Analytics: Updated events for quests, and some related missing analytics
- Fix guidance bug where it would keep pointing you at dead unit
- Report a useful error message if we can’t find a Nexus (LNCxx)
- Set playerTiers back to non-linear so it more closely matches the balancing
- Fixed the account-server-link issue
- Improved the Nexus picking. Fewer broken connection screens. Pick a “better” Nexus if there is a choice to be made.
- Graceful server shutdown
- Connect the graceful shutdown to Ozy (WIP)
- Connected revised circular UI to stats (to fix layering issues) (WIP)
- Fixed a bug in the backend system, where we copy some of the production data over to the test servers