How fast can my Shield Monkey do 1 million damage?  In this video, I test against one of the new test targets.

We have been testing every class against these test targets to measure total dps output more accurately.  It’s nice, because it lets us measure classes like Shield Monkey, Engineer, and Gunner, for which straight up math estimates from their skills and augs aren’t sufficient due to slave, drone, and missile damage.

The test target instance is live on the test server with a wormhole in Sol.  How long does it take your character to do 1 million damage?  Upload a video to prove your might!

Looks like it’s my turn to answer the weekly dev questions!

My questions this week are from Arias:

1. hours of SS played weekly?
2. what content have you influenced recently?
3. you work on weapons and zones, so what are your current projects?

These days I play about 10 hours of SS per week. I mainly log on to fiddle with my bases and do an occasional run with my team, but I’m planning to get more active when the new class skills go live!

My first project was to make a new balance sheet for Sebastopols (Lion Incinerator type weapons).  Blue Dwarf and I worked together on that, which is what made the popular Vervaardiger weapons possible.  Since then, I spearheaded the rebalance of manhours on many blueprints, with a focus on making most projects build in a few days at most, if not instantly.  I also do little things behind the scenes, like helping Calypso balance the shields and resistances of bosses in the Aveksaka zone.

My current main project is, of course, the class rebalance. My role in the project is to work out stats for all the skills and super items so that every class gets a useful role that they can excel at in squad-based play, while also being able to enjoy the game in solo PvE and in PvP. I am very happy with how everything is turning out, and look forward to sharing our work with you all!

After the class rebalance begins to wrap up, I am planning to put some serious thought into userbases (and Player versus Base combat, in particular).  I am also interested in working with a few other developers to revamp the low- to mid-level experience in Star Sonata.  If you have any thoughts on these projects, don’t hesitate to send them along to me!

As was mentioned on the forum, the class rebalance has moved into a testing stage.  The test server now has a new instanced galaxy off of Sol that contains passive test dummies with various shield banks.  If you start shooting one, it will keep track of how long it takes you to kill it and notify you of the time in galaxy chat.  To reset the test dummies, just exit the galaxy and make a new squad.

Test server is also updated with the newest draft of class skills. We have already posted class-specific details on the forum, so I will just point a few things out here that may not be immediately obvious.

• Speed Demon no longer needs to be moving to get Speedy Firing DPS bonus.
• Berserker now only multifires 3 weapons, but has actually received a modest increase in DPS as well as boost to DPE.
• Most classes now have access to various super items. Drop by your class’s base in Lyceum on test server to see if there are any available for your class (they’re not all done yet).
• If you use missiles, try dragging your launcher up to the hotbar. It will use the charging animation to show when it’s ready to launch a volley of missiles.

If you try out the new classes on test server, I would like to invite you to also post your results on the forum (or send them to yclepticon in a forum PM).  I am especially interested to get feedback on the class-locked super items.  Thanks for your time!

This week’s update is going to focus almost primarily on some more class rebalance updates. These updates mainly pertain to missiles.

Missiles in their current state are kind of a pain to use — this is why we’re changing quite a few things about them with the rebalance. As I’ve detailed in another post; when I made the initial changes to missiles I added a few new features. I’m going to mention these a lot without explaining them again, so If you get confused, reread that post!

First, missiles will be separated into two categories; damage and debuff. Debuff missiles will be any missile that does a detrimental effect to the target; for example, a Disintegrator Missile or a Vortex Torpedo. These will be single fire.  Damage missiles will be a Gunner’s go to if they need extra firepower to take a target down; for example, Large Armor Piercing or Kinetic. These missiles will fire in salvos. We will also be adding two new types of damage missile that are the same difficulty to obtain as AP and Kinetic; these will be a new heat-damage Incendiary Missile and a surgical-damage Surgical Strike Missile. This should round out the arsenal of a Gunner very nicely.

The distinction is rather necessary since you won’t be able to spam missiles anymore. Missile Bays will have a 5 second delay between launch; that means Gunners will have to make a choice when they queue up. Do they debuff the target or do they load the launch tube with a devastating salvo? This leads into some big changes to missile launchers and fighter bays that took place this week.

Since we want a 5 second delay between missile launches due to salvos, we ran into a dilemma; Combination Launchers (or launchers that can launch both missiles and fighters). If we were to set a 5 second delay between launches on a combo launcher, it would be absolutely horrible for Fleet Commanders (imagine getting 12 fighters out at 5 seconds each). However, if we left the delay at around 1 second, Gunner missile damage output would be through the roof. To solve this issue we decided that we had to kill combination launchers entirely.

Combination Launchers can exist because Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays are the same item. They just have flags set to determine what they can launch. That meant to get rid of combination launchers we needed to separate Missile Launchers from Fighter Bays entirely. This is exactly what I’ve done. Missile Launchers and Fighter Bays can now be equipped independently (you can have one type of each equipped), and they each have their own fighter and missile slot pools.

Since we won’t have combination launchers anymore, any ship that had a combination launcher is being retrofitted to have two launchers, a missile launcher and a fighter bay. The size, weight, etc, on both launchers will add up to the size, weight, etc, of the previous combo launcher.

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update for you. Feel free to post comments, suggestions or questions in the forums!

So this week it’s my turn and I have a nice little collection of questions to answer!

From starwyrm:
Hours of SS played weekly?
What recent content have you had a hand in?
I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?

And from DragonGod:
What was the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition?

So firstly, in all honestly I don’t play a lot of Star Sonata any more. I occasionally log in and do some DGs or bosses with Jeff. I don’t play a lot of games in general though, well three or four, including Star Sonata and excluding little flash web games.

Changing direction a little bit, I’m going to answer the third question before the second one (it makes more sense this way, trust me). I think your position has something to do with the forums, but remind us all of the specifics?
My position doesn’t really involve the forum and I could work without using it all. When it boils down to it, when I joined the dev team I was a rather active forum poster (had over 5,000 posts) and that trend just continued on. I now have about 7,500 post if you include that 5,000. Although I would say I don’t post as much as I used to, I occasionally follow threads and never post in them if they intrigue me. My actual role is much the same as Calypso’s; content and programming. Although I only do server sided programming. I also often to lookups on things like missing slaves or blown up stations.

Still in odd directions, question two! What recent content have you had a hand in?
Recent content… I haven’t really done a lot lately that’s hit live and players known about it. Calypso pumps out a lot of content-y things like missions and zones etc and also posts about them in blog posts every Monday, while I generally do odd fixes and miscellaneous things. I do quite a few things you never see or hear of either like documenting stuff on the wiki for other content developers or extra little things for the admin panel. To answer the actual question of what I’ve done recently, in terms of big content, not a lot. I created the DD22 boss originally and scripted it to act like an Engineer-ish as well as working on The Crucible, the mining content I mentioned a few weeks back and making various class superitems. Mostly I do little odds and sods around the place, these are the things I committed to the last patch:

• Changed the radar blip to be uniformly transparent.
• Removed the ‘experimental’ and ‘alpha’ notices from Orthographic camera, HDR and SSAO checkboxes.
• ‘Buttonified’ the undock button.
• Added support for untanglers (graviton disruptors) to optionally also disrupt tweaks (including auras etc), gremlins and critical hit effects (you’ll still do the extra damage).
• Made missions take into account required items to complete it when calculating if you have enough space to finish it.
• Made missions able to have multiple galaxy reveals on the map
• Missions now tell you how many credits you are short when you try to complete a mission that requires credits
• Beefed hullspace on Academy Freighter and Academy Thatch.
• Fixed the blue photon transwarper missions not taking the credits they should
• Fixed the mission ‘Urzod’ to kill Urzod (the giant volcom) not telling you where Honey Moon is.
• Fixed incorrect manhours on the Adonis Protector Z blueprint
• Added Zebucart variants (CS, HF and FR) to the Basic (normal Zebus) spawners in Earthforce and Celestial Gardens

I also created the sound projector items that came in with this years Halloween event, and of late have been doing a few things to spice up this Christmas.

Any plans on an in-game ship based on your forum avatar?
I do not have any content planned around my forum avatar, for a very simple reason. This is just an image of the ship Red Dwarf from the British science fiction sitcom of the same name which has been modified to be blue and flipped horizontally. The actual ship from the show is a five mile long mining ship belonging to the Jupiter Mining Corporation. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure using the model or a similar model would be copyright infringement.

DragonGod’s question: the answer to the Dungeon Danger Factor competition.
For those of you who don’t know, a couple of months ago I hosted a competition about how Danger Factor works which was won by singularity. Basically, in the code danger factor is 100 times smaller, DF100 in game is 1.0 in the code. DG’s start out at the galaxyDF + a random number from 0.025 to 0.1 * 10. The random part becomes pretty small in the end, if you take a DG from a DF400 galaxy, the first stage is going to have a maximum DF of 4100. From here the DF increases between 37.5 and 62.5 per stage, averaging about 50. The clues I gave were pretty cryptic to solving the puzzle but did get there. The first clue related to PvP ranges, the second clue was towing costs.

That’s all of the questions for this week, but I did like answering them so you should definitly ask some more!

This week’s update covers a few fixes to the towing system, some bug fixing and a lot of changes for the coming class rebalance.

First, the towing system. Recently we enabled a ‘tow-on-death’ feature so players can get out of sticky situations. When we did this we also updated Janitor’s Outpost in the Nexus to be a towing base so new players can utilize this feature (without getting sent to Sol which could be very confusing). However, this had a few unforeseen side effects. First, dying in certain places outside the Nexus would lead to a towing offer into the Nexus! This is due to how the server calculates the closest towing base. I’ve updated this bit of code so that Janitor’s Outpost will only be offered as a towing location if you are within the Nexus.

Secondly, towing bases. When we made Janitor’s Outpost a towing base it also removed the skills tab from the station dialog. I’ve updated the client to address this issue. As part of this, I added a new flag for AI bases to let the client know if they offer skill training. If they do, the skills tab will be shown, if they don’t, it won’t. Unfortunately neither of these were ready in time for the patch.

And patch we did. I spent a fair amount of time this weekend doing some post-patch support and bug fixing. We had two major issues that needed fixed, first, a line of code meant for the rebalance was in the wrong place: this lead to fighters being double-subtracted from your current count and allowed infinite launch. Secondly, with Fleet Commander Transwarps fixed, we inadvertently looked over the fact premium players could use them to bring non-premium players along for the ride to places they shouldn’t be. Both these issues were fixed immediately and they are already patched in. There are still a few more minor issues that are being fixed (including drones not equipping), expect another hotfix for them very soon.

This past week I also did a lot of work on the Class Rebalance; which is coming along nicely. We’ve done another round of analysis and I had a lot of skill stat changes to do. This latest round of changes is up on test and was meant to bring the damage and damage-per-energy bonuses of all class a bit more in line. It also contains a very big change to the Gunner subskill, Destruction.

Currently Destruction adds a +0.5% (+1% if Multifiring) per level vulnerability debuff to the target on weapon impact. This debuff is the same damage type as the weapon used to apply it. Going forward, this has been significantly changed. Instead of using normal weapons to apply the debuff, the debuff is applied via missile strikes. With this, the debuff has been increased to +2% per level (for a max for 40%) and now affects all damage types, not just the one used to apply it. I’ve also update the warhead splash effect to apply the debuff to all incidental targets hit as well. This will pair very well with the Gunner Deathblossom item and allow them to launch something like a Bunkerbuster to debuff a group of spawn and AoE them down very quickly.

That’s this week’s update! As always, feel free to sound off in the forum post with comments, questions and suggestions. Also, before I forget, I have been fixing permanent Warp Beacons. So if you or your team has one that’s still non-functional, let me know the owners name and I’ll reset it.

I’ll snatch that last question from maniac45 in the Weekly Dev Questions thread. 

“Does Star Sonata plan to do any sorts of increasing in the community as to bringing more players? if so what kind of plans are set to action?”

This post might be a little wordy and talk about some pretty boring things, but hopefully it’ll give you some insights into how marketing an indie game is a fun and challenging juggling act. So marketing and promoting Star Sonata is my department, so I’ll give some insights into how I go about promotion. I’ve been starting to heavily work on the marketing strategy for Star Sonata over the course of the last month. That survey you guys have taken, is part of my effort to learn more about YOU so I can know who likes to play Star Sonata and why. From that survey we’ll learn who primarily enjoys SS and where they like to visit online so we know where to focus our efforts.

Many of you guys have often sent me emails & private messages asking me why I haven’t gotten SS on this website, or this blog, or this youtuber’s page. Most of the messages I receive from you guys deal with marketing and promotion! The fact of the matter is, I probably HAVE contacted them. We have a spreadsheet of hundreds of various websites, forums, youtube channels, and news sites that we contact for big things, like T22′s launch, and uni resets. We even subscribe to press release services made specifically for gaming. The problem however is for every 100 places we contact, we’re lucky if even one of them bites. It’s not so much Star Sonata’s fault as it’s the way of games journalism, and even journalism itself.

Marketing an indie game is a juggling act, you don’t want to waste time contacting the big websites that don’t consider you newsworthy, and you don’t want to contact the bloggers or youtubers that made one video or blog and called it all off and never posted again. The strategy is simple. Daily I contact youtubers that have small, but dedicated followings, and research websites that NEED the content. We give these sites something to talk about, and we get promotion as well. The plan is to essentially get press on places that are eager for devs to contact them. There are a lot of great youtubers out there with interesting channels, and awesome videos, but none of them ever get the popularity of youtubers like TotalBiscuit, Tobuscus, or SeaNanners. Did you see MartyrA2J’s review of Star Sonata? Amazing right?  We’re all about the indie here at Star Sonata, and if we can support smaller, fantastic channels, then that’s what we’ll do.

Now I know what you might ask next. “Well, yeah okay that’s news, and blogs and stuff, but what about ADVERTISING?” There were lots of changes in web advertising over the last few years that severely gimped us.  Old Star Sonata players might remember the surge of activity we got back in 2009-10. This was due to Google’s advertising platform. Unfortunately things have changed, making advertising on specific websites nearly impossible to do cheaply or effectively.

Another thing that costs a ton of money is things like gaming conventions. We prefer this to advertising on a smaller budget because it allows us to actually interact with our players and future players. We went to PAX Prime this year to see how it’s done, and had our first appearance at the Norwich Game Expo this year. If you know of a gaming focused convention close to you, toss me a PM or an email and I’ll look into getting us an exhibitor space!

We’ve also increased our efforts in our outward communications such as social media and blogs. We’re making an effort to focus on writing blog posts that provide useful information to not only our players, but to non-players as well.

So for the Tl;dr of this post I’ll answer maniac45′s question in as few words as possible:

Yes, we plan on increasing our playerbase. Our plan is to finish conducting research into our target audience and contact youtubers, and smaller blogs & sites that cater to that audience. We also plan on attending various gaming centric conventions as exhibitors to make sure our name and game is consistently out there and on people’s minds. Once we start seeing a consistent gain of players we’ll start pushing for the bigger websites, youtubers, and bloggers.

If you are a developer with questions about marketing, toss me an email at marty@starsonata.com! I’d love to chat with you!

This week’s update is going to be rather short, I only worked half the week due to the Thanksgiving holiday!

I started last week doing a little bit of cleaning up. When we do holiday events, we often add new galaxies and they tend to clutter up the map. After this Halloween’s Zombie Rat Invasion I am sure everyone noticed the map was a complete mess… so I have created a new holiday map layer where all holiday galaxies will end up. This will include the future Lapland, Easter Warren and Egg Hunting galaxies as well as all levels of Plaguespace. I’ve also moved all the current Plaguespace galaxies from their current layers (Earthforce, Subspace, Celestial Garden, Wild Space) into this new layer. Your maps should look much nicer!

After tidying up the map clutter, I started on something I think is much more exciting. For those who aren’t aware, one of our volunteer content developers has been working on a very exciting and interesting new zone targeted at players ranging from levels 40 to 120. Unfortunately, they were unable to get this finished before real life intervened and they had to take a leave of absence. I had collaborated a little bit with them on the zone while they had been actively working on it so last week I took up the mantle of finishing it.

This new zone is group of galaxies called the Color Empires. These areas are inhabited by a race of sentient crystal beings who send the player on a very exciting series of missions ranging from mining, assassination and even to ship capture. Most of the work has already been finished; missions written, galaxies created, items made, etc. I am just taking the time to make sure those missions are fully implemented and making sure everything looks great. This will officially launch with the next universe reset and should provide a very nice amount of exciting level-up content for newer players.

That’s all I have for this week’s update, come back next week for a full-sized update. As always, feel free to comment on the forums with suggestions and other feedback!

Another new super item currently under development is the Shield Inversion Device for Shield Monkeys.  There are tech 9 and tech 20 versions of this. These devices reverse polarity on a portion of the Shield Monkeys shields and funnel them at a target, simultaneously reducing both shields.

The tech 20 version, “Large Shield Inversion Device” takes 1,000 energy over 10 seconds to charge up, but upon use, saps an addition 8,000 shields from the ship firing it. The target is hit with 4,000 energy damage, and a shield debuff that takes off an additional 16,000 shields over 4 seconds, for a total of 20,000 damage before resists.

The nice thing is that only the 4,000 energy damage is reduced by the targets resists. Be careful, though, because since the bulk of the damage inflicted with this super item is in the form of a shield debuff, it will not stack with other shield debuffs, so if you have multiple people attempting to use this item on a single target, make sure to stagger the attacks. It also takes a half second before the damage is actually inflicted, so careful aiming is also required.

This week I was asked to answer the weekly dev questions, so here we go.

Me!!

First, let’s start with a question asked by The Crazy Game Master. They ask,

“IIRC, you were gone from SS for a very long time. Where’d you go? What did you do? Why’d you come back? (Not saying that we’re not all REALLY happy you are back).”

I was first asked to work on content for Star Sonata by Atlum (everyone remembers Atlum and Code Herder, right?) in late 2005. Over the next few years I did content projects on the side of my crappy regular job and churned out a bunch of stuff; parts of the Nexus, Tortuga, Aug Tweaking, Enigmatic Sector, etc. I ended up leaving in 2008. This was because I headed off to university. During my time at uni I pretty much didn’t do anything for Star Sonata and I stopped playing (mainly due to coursework and a distasteful, shameful addiction to WoW). I really got roped back in right before C2 was going to launch in 2011. Jeff asked that I come back and refurbish the Nexus. I was still pretty low key then though. The following year, 2012, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. I had a hard time finding an entry level programming job in the area I wanted to live and Jeff offered a position as a Content Developer / Programmer. So, I’m here full time now.

The next questions are from Arias. They ask the following things,

“1. Hours of SS played weekly?
2. Recent content influenced?
3. As you have a role in major content, how’s the Adum-themed zone going?
4. Any plans to redo the Ur’Qa UZ?”

So, first, how much do I actually play Star Sonata? I probably put in 10 hours a week onto my main, Calypso. Most of this is checking up on bases so I can set colony prices or toss excess metal from my mining base. The rest is spent leveling up my Sniper alt, Evil Calypso. Yes, that’s me.

Second, recent content influenced. The entire Subspace Assault ‘expansion’ was pretty much my project. The alien invasion mechanic is something that has been planned for a long time and a little work had been done on the programming, but for the most part, everything from lore, language, missions, instances, invasions, etc, was something that I started and finished over the better part of a year. Most recently, I’ve been working on server programming related to the forthcoming class rebalance. Jey is busy with a lot more important things (some of which, even with a uni education, only vaguely makes sense to me), so a lot of this content programming falls to me.

Third, the adum-themed zone is going swimmingly. It will consist of a set of instances, a single player instance where one player completes the trials of adum to get a key that unlocks a multiplayer boss. Most of the work on this is finished, I will be doing some balance testing sometime in the near future and I hope to have it live next universe.

Fourth, the UrQa Uber Zone. Everything related to the planning of this area, etc, was safe in analog storage (a notebook), and I’ve moved it all into a pretty elaborate series of gDocs. I’d like to work on this again sometime soon, but there are some other projects that take priority, chief among them, working on the new-player experience some more. We also want to flesh out the existing tech levels a bit more before we start barreling towards T23 (which is what this project would probably turn into).

The last question for today comes from Captain Fatbeard, They ask,

“ask him why he decided on the african names for T22…”

Are you sure you’re thinking of T22? Those names are not African. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Mzungu missions in Enigmatic Sector which are written in pidgin-Swahili? If you are thinking of T22, you mean my pseudo-mangling of a dead language originating in the Indus Valley? It’s because the aliens don’t know Standard Galactic English.

That’s all the time I have for the dev questions this week, hopefully you enjoyed a look into why I’m here, what I’ve done and what I plan on doing. Feel free to post comments, etc, in the forums.