Next week the servers will go live 24/7, and if you can’t tell, we’re excited!!!!!!11! While we wait for everyone to join the fun, we’re all hard at work getting the game as good as it can be! Let’s see what the team has been up to…
Art
This has been an exciting week for art as we have finished the player plane art for all existing classes, each ship has their own original model and a couple variants with unique skins!
Also upping the game for unique player planes has been some iteration on new trails, including the totally awesome lightning trail, the cheery rainbow trail and more.
In the land of bosses, the Arena 2 boss has been animated this week, and modeling on the thunderboss and his minions has been completed. Additionally we’re experimenting with a new explosion on the bomb boss, so keep an eye out for that when you get in the game.
Last but not least, the untiereds have their own new icon, so when you see one in the wild you’ll know straight away… and that you really want to chase it down before it floats off into the sunset.
Build Server
The build server is done. We can now deploy a new build to the test setup with a single button click (and some time, making all the builds isn’t instantaneous). Once that’s been adequately tested we can press another button to promote those builds to production, so everyone can get at them. This should help us roll out new builds more reliably and effortlessly. Yay for automation!
Crafting!
Crafting quests are now a thing in Steambirds. We can have long-lived quests, which take upwards of months to complete, but reward you with some appropriately awesome stuff. This mostly relies on the quest system but now all collection goals can be partially completed by handing in items at the quest giver, and we have a separate designation for crafting quests in the game, with their own building in the Rebel City.
Content
- The system for “popup setpieces” is now a thing. What are these? They’re similar to other setpieces, but they are much more uncommon – often used to add some flavour to the world. They can get triggered by a variety of means, and nice a nice larger permanent mark on the world, at least until Meowza can be summoned!
- Some new UR guns. We’ll probably show some of them off on the stream
- Enabling more complex event scheduling. Biweekly!
Polish and Bugfixes
- Fix bugs with “equip” button in Storage UI
- Add plane preview when clicking on paints in plane inventory or storage UI
- Auditing has been updated, enlarging the number of situations we can detect and handle.
- Localized some more strings that were missed earlier.
- Some small fixes and polish tasks on the new music/audio.
- Added indirection for cloud overrides to prevent problems if we change asset names later.
- Optimization continues, reducing garbage collection, improving some config string parsing and a new array of quality settings, so you can have more control over your performance!
- Fixed performance problem with guaranteed-hit bullets (units that lasso/follow you).