If you missed last week’s post: the big news is that from 18 July the game will be live 24/7 for the foreseeable future. This is the next step in our process of getting Steambirds to the masses, and we’re really looking forward to having everyone jump on the servers and have a lot of fun with us!
Sounds and Music
We’re in the process of replacing a lot of the sounds in the game and adding some long-sought-after music. This week we see many of the shooting sounds replaced and adjusted. We also have some lovely new music in the Rebel City! Each building has some of its own music, but it’s designed to overlay smoothly, so flying around the Rebel City should now be a lot more atmospheric. Do you hear that? It’s the song of the Steambirds.
Performance
Work on client performance is currently underway. Lots of profiling has been happening and we should have some more details on this in the future. Hopefully we can get Steambirds to run better on your hardware!
Art
We’re continuing to grease gears, put on new coats of paint, and mix gunpowder in the art world!
Exploration of the in-game portraits is making progress, with every boss cataloged and the player portrait production nailed down… some new faces, from feline to avian, will be staring us down in game soon.
We’re also shining up the enemy models; units that were missing their own unique art are getting the special ships they deserve. As for existing units the evil cats are putting holes in the ozone layer as they continue to up their smoke trail game. Also in trail-land the players are getting some iteration on their special trails and custom emotes! Check it out on our next stream, or during the big playtest!
Content
- Added 2 new setpiece quests:
- “The Grand Parade” – Hunt and kill a wandering “minotaur” in a pacman grid maze. Minotaur drops mines that shoot in perpendicular angles that align with the grid maze. Uses invisible units as markers to navigate the maze, and can take different paths so it’s somewhat unpredictable
- “Vault Deposit” – A dungeon room setpiece that has a mixture of mechanics from “The Vault” (Grab the key, fight the turrets to temporarily disable them, activate the transport unit to make it through the laser gate, destroy the lock with key, repeat 4 times)
- Converted the existing “dungeon entrance setpiece quests” into trigger quests that spawn the same way that event bosses do. To start the quest, you go to the treasure in the middle of the setpiece.
Polish and Bugfixes
- Hide irrelevant key bindings for relative controls in control settings
- Filter out product duplicates in the store.
- Fix some bugs with new emotes UI
- Fixed “thumbs up” emote. Thumbs up!
- Lobbyist wandering bug is fixed!
Other
- Work on the build server continues, although it is nearing completion.
- Moved the gameserver upgrade execution to coordinate mass upgrades.
- Flag for store content so we can more easily test new stuff on the test servers only.
- Test commands plane color/livery setups (speed up dev)
- Some improvements to the auditing system to avoid some false positives.