Hi everyone! Now that things are finally quieting down a bit (thank goodness!) I want to update you on where we’re at with development of SBA.
As is typical shortly after the launch of game, we’ve been flooded with feedback, which we’re very grateful for! The vast majority of it has been constructive and polite, which is yet another sign that we have the best community anyone could ever ask for.
Also as is typical, some of you have your pet issues which really bug you. And you often have evidence that your issues are bugging other people as well, which makes the issues seem even more urgent. Trust me when I say I understand. I’ve got my own pet issues and some of them are unfortunately still not at the top of the to-do list, for what I begrudgingly consider good reason. 😉
Here are some of the things that are top-of-mind for us right now:
- We still need to do guilds (aka Flocks), which are massively expensive.
- We still need to do some sort of reward for people who die with well-upgraded planes.
- We still need to fix more bugs (oh god, so many bugs, they never stop!)
- We still need to upgrade the Unity version of the game (mainly to help fix yet more bugs, but also to not get left behind by Unity’s support, which doesn’t last forever for old versions.)
- We still need to do work to make the pilot UI more useful, fun and comprehensible.
- We still need to do more to help new players who are struggling to survive in a game that has been tuned to be interesting to our existing elite community, and conversely, to keep the elite players happy (dungeon mods were the start of this, but there’s just so much more to be done.)
- We still need to convert crafting items into currencies so they don’t fill up storage and annoy you.
- We still need to make the mini-map more useful.
- We still need to introduce more content, because over the past couple years what we’ve observed is that if we don’t give the community a new dungeon or class at least once every couple months, people leave the game.
And tons of other things. You can see from the stuff we recently marked “considered” in the Discord feedback channel that there’s many, many other things we agree with you that we should do to improve the game. Please just remember that we’re a small indie team, trying to juggle a LOT, and there’s only so much we can do.
Over the next couple weeks, now that the flood of new players has abated, this community will likely settle into a smaller, more experienced group of people. We look forward to improving the game for you and, in a couple months from now, doing a major update that we can promote on Steam and try to bring more new people back into the game (hopefully without any BS server issues due to AWS rate limiting…) And then several months after that we’ll likely have our first console launch, which will likely bring yet more players. So, this is just the first phase of many in the post-launch life of this game.
Having said all that, thank you once again for being so supportive over the past week folks. It means the world to us! We love ya’ll.