Super items are super awesome, that’s why they’re super items. They let us do really cool things like this new item:

This is a super item I polished off earlier. For Fleet Commanders this superitem amplifies the power of their aura projector for extra energy usage. This isn’t energy your ship uses in total, or a negative energy tweak, it increases the energy the aura uses itself, something we haven’t done before quite like this (weapons and electrical tempering can do it, but that’s it). The power benefit from this superitem works exactly like the Fleet Commander skill bonus and adds up with it and we can also use the item for it to affect the range of the aura projection.

A great thing superitems can do is deploy drones which don’t count to your normal drone slots (next patch), so they make nice for superitems for classes that both do and don’t use drones. Such superitems would be the Sniper’s Blind and Super Thunder Drone for Engineer.
For those of you who remember the days of pre-beef Sniper, Sicuro had this idea I always liked of Sniper Blinds and now or soon you will have them. They’ll help conceal you and friends by decreasing your visibility, increasing your radar and giving you some offensive bonuses like damage.
The Super Thunder Drone for Engineers provide a nice energy regeneration aura for your allies and a chaining laser inflicting negative energy recharge against your enemies. The drone is also equipped with something a little extra for that extra little punch.

Speed Demons get an Overdrive device which temporarily frees them from negative effects like gremlins and critical hit side effects to allow them to get away from sticky situations.

That’s all for now, more to come soon.

This week’s post is primarily going to detail some more class changes that are coming with the rebalance; specifically changes relating to Sniper and Sniper Analysis.

First though, I want to discuss a few more changes coming to transwarps! This past week I’ve found and fixed a few issues. One, you will no longer be able to transwarp to non-player-vs-player galaxies when under the effects of the PvP timer. You can’t use a wormhole to get into Earthforce Space after you’ve initiated PvP; you won’t be able to use a transwarp to either. Two, if you are warping to a galaxy that is flagged as ‘non-slave’, for instance, the Nexus, slaves will not be warped along with you. Both of these issues were oversights with the original implementation and the fixes will be live with the next patch.

Now, Sniper Analysis. As it stands right now, Sniper is overpowered primarily due to Analysis. The damage bonus it gives is absolutely massive, and worse, players can also use collision code to deal the analysis bonus damage to targets other than the one they’re analyzing. This was never the intended function. It’s also not a very exciting mechanic. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people sit around in a boss room for ten minutes to build analysis so they can just unload on a boss and kill it immediately; again, not the intended functionality. I know not everyone agrees, but it is definitely time for a change… and changes are definitely coming.

Perhaps one of the biggest is that your analysis will be toggle-able via a new item, the Sniper Analyzer. When equipped the Analyzer enables you to build SA on your target. If you put the Analyzer in your hotbar it will display a charge bar on the icon that shows how much analysis you have on the target. This means instead of having to constantly check your Event chat channel for Analysis messages (which are being removed), you can simply check the visual in your hotbar. It will also be useful to keep in the hotbar for hotswapping purposes.

How you build analysis is different as well. Currently you just keep an enemy targeted for a length of time and you passively build analysis on that target. With the rebalance, charging analysis will require that you fire on and hit your target. Each projectile and laser hit on the analyzed target will add to your analysis timer at a rate equal to the following formula; time added = recoil / # of bullets / MF level. For instance, if you are multifiring two Excommunicators with a 1.5 second recoil (1500 milliseconds), each bullet that hits the target would add 150 milliseconds. Bullets that hit incidental targets do not count towards building analysis.

This is because you won’t want to hit incidental targets anymore; bullets that hit incidental targets also no longer grant bonus damage. Currently you can sit in a galaxy with the boss targeted using something like a Hot Glue Sprayer and also clear spawn because the analysis bonus you have on the boss applies to all the bullets fired. With the rebalance, individual projectiles will check the target they hit against the target currently under analysis. If they don’t match up, they don’t grant bonus damage. Finally, analysis will have its bonuses cut in half, but it will also only take half the time to build; instead of 10 minutes to build analysis, it will only take five.

These are some big changes and I know not everyone is going to be entirely happy with them, but they need to happen to bring Sniper damage in line with some of the other classes. Sniper will still be the damage king when it comes to PvE, but the gap is going to be a lot smaller than it currently is. Hopefully this is going to encourage squads to bring along more than just Shield Monkeys and Snipers. Also keep in mind that as we make these changes we will be rebalancing existing content so it doesn’t require the insane damage output that we currently are forced to require to make things difficult. Overall bringing Sniper more in line with other classes will make all content more accessible for everyone.

So that’s this week’s update. I’ll be taking a half-week this week due to the holidays so I will either be posting a shortened update next week or taking the week off. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving! Feel free to post comments and questions in the forum post!

Hey Star Sonatians! This is the first of hopefully a fun series of posts from your dev team where we answer your questions about the dev team, certain policies, etc. If you want to ask us a question for it to get answered in next week’s post toss it over to this topic.

This week’s questions were directed to me, Bageese AKA Marty by the player Starwyrm.

1. Hours of SS played weekly?

I don’t really “play” Star Sonata anymore, unlike the rest of the dev team who are very active in game. The reason being is that I am responsible for making some really tough decisions that directly affect the players, where other devs create cool stuff and you see it much later than when they made it. I don’t play actively because I don’t want to develop biases towards or against any groups of players, so I can be as impartial and fair as possible. However I often enjoy making new characters and trying out the nexus or exploring around, but I don’t play on my main character much aside from little bouts of dging or dueling in colo. So in direct answer to your question, on my main I might play an hour a week (duel me in colo!), whereas I play on alts for maybe 5 hours a week. Before I became community manager I think I played 20-30 hours a week.

2. What recent content have you at least influenced?

Jeff called me the planner at one point in my SS career. While I don’t directly influence content, I like to make sure the dev team has larger goals in mind and we’re working towards those goals. I LOVE organization and action based on being organized. In late 2012 we had a lot of unhappy players calling out some specific issues that we were not addressing, Jey, SI and I organized a meeting that all developers were invited to where we addressed specific concerns that the players were unhappy about. We’ve been continuing this trend of large team meetings every 3-4 months since. A lot of what I influence is more like game code oriented stuff, like PVP, BVB, economy, etc. Content isn’t really my forte. I DID redesign Sol at one point and used fancy math to make all the planets actually have distances reflective of their actual distances in our Solar System.  That was fun.

I tend to be a big voice on Solo Berserker game play, and a supporter of all classes having a solo role and a squad role. I love talking about that one time as a zerker where I fought a 10 man squad solo… no one died of course, but I held my own… People couldn’t decide if I was a sniper or an SD and then freaked out when I multi fired five weapons… Good times. My setup is horribly outdated, so if you’re in entry level t21 gear, toss me a pm and we’ll duel in colo! Or you could toss me a pm anyways and most likely annihilate me.

3. What is your position on the dev team and what does that involve?

My official title is “Community Manager” or “Community Admin.” In the dev team we don’t have an overall hierarchy. Jeff, Jey and I would be the “admins” or the decision makers in regards to major issues, with Jeff being content, Jey being server, and me being player affairs. Basically we make the final call and have the most access, but a lot of decisions are made by the team as a whole with discussion furthering progress.

Above I said I’m a community manager, and then I am the decision maker in regards to player affairs. So I like to say that I work on everything that’s not actually making the game. I am in charge of the moderation team and with developer, player, and moderation team feedback, I edit and create the rules of the game. Any time someone gets a ban, or a mute longer than two hours, I am the one directly behind it most of the time.

I am also responsible for the customer service and quality assurance teams and setting policies regarding their operation. I currently oversee five AMAZING volunteers that help on the forums, support tickets, and general feedback for developers.  I am also the primary responder on all tickets not related to bugs, with assistance from Jey, Blue Dwarf, and SI depending on the nature of the ticket. Support tickets currently take up about 25-50% of my current work schedule, and I do anything from assistance with account recovery, to billing issues, refunds on slaves, gear depending on the issue, combing through activity logs, etc.

Working with Jeff, I also am trying to direct our marketing, and while marketing an indie game is incredibly challenging it’s also a ton of fun. The trick of marketing an indie game is to figure out how to promote your game without spending any or spending little money, since that money would best be served improving the game. I’ve been researching conventions to attend for indie games, youtubers to contact, and marketing strategies. With WinterWind, The Vert, and The Suit’s amazing assistance I was able to put together the 2013 survey that I’m using to figure out who plays Star Sonata currently so our advertising going forward is targeting the right people.

And finally, I’m responsible for overseeing player relations, whether this be mending relationships with players that haven’t had an ideal experience, social media management, and events. I try to be fairly active on the forums, reading and scouring topics to find what sorts of things are plaguing the community so I can highlight those in meetings with developers. I try to be the bridge between the Dev world and the Player world explaining to Devs why they need to change, implement, or improve something, and explaining to the players why something can’t happen (bonus points if you caught my subtle reference in that sentence).

So to conclude this exceptionally wordy post, I do a lot of little and different things, instead of focusing on one major task.

Hi guys.  Today I’d like to show a preview of one of the new class super itemsunder development called a “Large Field Hospital”.  It’s a non-sticky, class locked super item for Shield Monkeys, and is tech 17.  There’s a smaller, cheaper tech 5 version called simply a “Field Hospital”.

This item takes 90 seconds to charge up with a total energy cost of 9000. In addition to the energy charging cost, it requires an instant consumption of 12000 shields in order to use.

Upon use, the Shield Monkey and all allies and their possessions gain a 75% resist all aura that lasts for 5 seconds. A drone called a Large Field Hospital Drone is deployed with a 30 second lifetime. This drone has high resists, and has a shield transference on board that heals targets for 1000 shields every 2 seconds, and imparts a 3 second shield regen aura on the target that regens shields at 4000/s.

The drone is created partially with the Shield Monkey’s own shields, and you can see a center concentration of shield in the middle of the drone. This shield shrinks to nothing over the course of the drones 30 second lifespan, so there is a visual indication of how long this drone has before it disappears.

In the following demonstration video, you may notice that I deploy my 3 temporary drones, and then use the super item to deploy this as a 4th drone.  There is new code that’s going in that causes all drones deployed by super items to not count towards your personal drone limit.  This means that using a super item that creates a drone will not diminish your normal ability to use drones.  This change should be especially useful for Engineer who is getting some new super items that deploy drones, since using these won’t reduce his normal DPS.

This weeks’ update focuses mainly on a major set of class rebalance changes concerning everyone’s favorite form of combat, Drones. Keep reading to find out more!

A fair amount of time this week was spent on two major changes to drones that I think are very needed. As everyone is aware, players who fight primarily with drones (Engineers), face much higher risk than players who fight with conventional weapons. If an Engineer wipes, they potentially lose all their drones permanently. The two major changes I’ve done address the two ways you can lose your drones.

First, drones can expire. If you are sitting in a pod waiting for light stasis and your drones time out, they’re gone. With the class rebalance, this is changing. Instead of disappearing when they expire, scoopable drones will simply go inactive. Inactive drones will get a small name change to ‘Inactive + Drone Name” so you can identify them. The will also no longer attack AI, give auras, follow you if they’re mobile, etc. However they still take up drone slots and can be attacked; which means they can still be destroyed; the next way players can lose their drones.

Drones can be destroyed. Unlike slaves or weapons, (which can stasis or lose durability), drones can actually die. This is also being addressed with the class rebalance. Instead of blowing up and being lost forever, scoopable drones will now enter a destroyed state when they run out of shields. The destroyed state is identical to the inactive state with a few notable changes. Destroyed drones get a particle effect so you can see they are destroyed. They also get a name change to “Destroyed ” + “Drone Name”. When you scoop a destroyed drone it has zero durability and displays as a “Destroyed Drone Name” in your inventory. Destroyed Drones can’t be equipped or deployed until they are repaired. Repairing a destroyed drone functions the same as any normal repair. Currently you are able to simply right click on the item and pay a credit cost to fix it.

Right now we are mainly considering credit repairs for scoopable, non-permanent drones and a binary durability system where they’re either full durability or null durability. The binary system will cut down on stacks; you’ll only have two stacks; one for destroyed drones and one for normal drones. It also means loosing a drone will still hurt. It won’t hurt as badly (as it’s not gone forever), but you’ll still have to pay a full repair cost each time you lose one. What exactly that full repair is going to cost is still under discussion internally and we will be giving you more details when we come to a consensus.

So, that’s this weeks’ update! As always feel free to post comments, questions and suggestions in the forums. I’ll be back again next Monday with another update!

This past week I took a bit of a break from class rebalance content, so this week’s update will focus on some pretty big bug fixes, new transwarp content and an introduction to a new bit of content I am working on. Keep reading to find out more!

Firstly, bug fixing! Two major issues with transwarp devices has been located and fixed. People were reporting they couldn’t see some destinations on their list for Temporary and Team beacons. After a lot of painful debugging I finally tracked it down to an issue where the beacon is in an unexplored galaxy. I’ve made a client update so if your client doesn’t have the galaxy record for the galaxy the beacon resides in, it’ll still display the beacon in the list, but under “Beacon Inaccessible / Unexplored.” Since the client only keeps a list of the galaxies you’ve been too, we can’t give the name of the galaxy the beacon is in, but at least this way you know the beacon exists. You can then ask your squad, team, etc, where it is so you can get it fully added to your list properly.Secondly, the bug where Team and Temporary beacons were going missing from the destinations list on server crashes has been located and fixed. There was an issue where the beacons weren’t being properly flagged as temporary or team beacons when they were being saved, so when the server would reload, it would skip all the code to re-add the beacons to the list. Both these fixes will be in the next patch.

Secondly, I have a Transwarp content update! I’ve changed the mission for Tech 20 Transwarp devices to be Premium only, as Free-to-Play players can’t use the device. This will only affect the Tech 20 version of the device, the rest will still be accessible for Free-to-Play. I’ve also gone ahead and made a repeatable variant of the mission for each device from Blue Photon. In the next patch I’ll enable these missions and you’ll be able to get duplicate devices for each of your ships. This should be good news, no more waiting for the cooldown when you swap ships!

Finally, as you may have noticed, the past few weeks (including this week) I’ve been posting some ‘golden’ images. This was a not-so-subtle way of saying I’ve restarted work on a long dormant content project I started a few years ago call the ‘Trials of adum.’ This will be a new instance containing a new Tech 22 boss for players to fight and ultimately rewarding a new Tech 22 Hauler, the Divine Behemoth, among other Tech 22 items.

The instance is a new multi-part one utilizing some new features we’ve added over the last few months. It contains a single player section and a squad section. In the single-player section of the instance, one player, and one player alone, will have to complete the ‘Trials of the Golden Path.’ Passing these three tests will reward the player a key they can use to give their squad access a new boss, the ‘High Prophet.’ Expect to see this in game at the latest, the next universe, earlier if I can add it without a reset.

So, that’s it for this week’s update. As always, feel free to post questions and comments in the automagically generated forum post!

This week’s update has a lot of interesting information mainly related to the forthcoming Class Rebalance. Keep reading to find out more.

First, I made a lot of skill changes that will go live with the rebalance. Both Berserker and Gunner will now get a 100% bonus to multifire at level 1 of their respective skills. This should have profound impact on newer players when they are first choosing a skill and should help with the fledgling Gunner or Berserker’s damage output. Both Berserker and Gunner class skills will no longer grant an incremental multifire bonus either. This means a fully leveled Berserker will now have 3x MF instead of 5x. To compensate for this, Berserker will also get a rate-of-fire bonus on their core class skill. I also made some changes to the Speed Demon skill, Speedy Firing. The bonus will no longer be scaled with speed. Again, this should help with Speed Demon damage output in PvE situations quite a bit.

Second, and perhaps the biggest thing I tackled this week, was expanding the current ‘buff’ system used by Field Generators and Neurotweaks. Currently, the buff system is locked to a maximum of 32 buffs, all of which had been already used. This hard cap was due to a bitmap that needs to be sent to the client to tell it to display buff icons. Going forward I’ve doubled that number and we’ll be able to have a maximum cap of 64 different buffs. This gives us a lot more stats we can play with when creating Field Generators and Neurotweaks.

Of course, I didn’t just raise the buff cap on a lark, I’ve also gone ahead and added a few new buffs; Tractor Power, Electric Tempering, Inertial Dampening and Anti-Transference. The first three of these are extremely familiar so I don’t think they need explaining, but the last, Anti-Transference is a brand new buff. Anti-Transference is similar to Lifesteal in other games. It converts a percentage of your damage to your target into healing for your ship’s shields. Expect to see this buff used for some special new Berserker items.

The third big thing I worked on this week is also Class Rebalance related. It is a brand new item for Fleet Commanders called a Fighter Recall. When used, this item will do three different things. Firstly, it will destroy any fighters that can’t return to your ship. Secondly, it will teleport any fighters that can return back into your ship. This will be extremely useful for saving valuable fighters and also for destroying fighters to free up slots for new fighters. Thirdly, if you have any fighters queued, it will remove them from your launch tube and return them to your ship. This should allow Fleet Commander a lot of additional freedom in using fighters as they can save valuable injured fighters or escape from a bad situation quickly without sacrificing fighters. Below is a short video demonstrating the new item.

This weeks update is going to be focused primarily on post-reset woes and the Tech 22 Alien Ship revamp and a new UI feature! Keep reading to find out more!

The universe reset wasn’t without its share of difficulties; I ended up spending the first few days of last week just sorting out bugs, missing content, etc. But, that is to be expected. With the launch of a few major new features there is always going to be something missed during our testing. I am pleased to say that all of the immediate issues found have been fixed — and patched in via a micropatch last Wednesday. There is still one transwarp issue waiting on patch, but it shouldn’t be long ’till that’s live as well. As always, I’ll keep my eye on tickets and the bug forums and make sure to continue fixing any issues that might come up.

I started working on this last week, but I got the bulk of the work for the Tech 22 Alien Ship revamp done this week. All the ships got upgraded in some way and should be a little more desirable now. I am sure you are interested; so here is a rundown of exactly what I did. Note that these changes do not include any stat changes, I am still considering some but at this time I haven’t made any.

• Rajanicar’ayu’s fighters now have cloaks, more shielding and damage as well as copy the owners name.
• Subhatt’ayu has a new inbuilt that increases hostility, resistances and rate of fire with a forced thrust ‘charge’ effect.
• Isvas’ayu had the range on the microwarp inbuilt increased and the microwarp stops the player. It also has a new inbuilt similar to the Subspace Submerger.
• Bhisajayu had the max shield bonus removed from it’s Overcharger. It also has a new superitem that injects a very powerful healing parasite into it’s target and reduces its transference resistances.
• Samgrahak’ayu had the max energy bonus removed from it’s Overcharger. It also has a new superitem that injects a powerful energy recharge parasite into it’s target and increases the targets resistances slightly.
• Antuayu has a new ‘Siege Mode’ superitem that significantly reduces speed, thrust and turning but greatly increases rate of fire.
• Vaziayu has a new superitem, the ‘Nest Drone’, which deploys a drone to buff and heal nearby fighters as well as launch additional fighters.

Now for the new UI feature. As I always seem to do, I’ll announce it with a screenshot!

Tooltips for item-form ships will now display a preview of the ship’s model! I think this will be especially useful for newer players in identifying what is what when it comes to ships and stats. Perhaps more importantly though, is how useful this preview will be if (or when…) we add a ship skin system. For those you concerned about performance, I might add a graphic option to turn this off. Regardless, expect to see this feature live in an upcoming patch.

That’s it for this week’s update, feel free to post questions, comments or just discuss this post in the discussion post!

Ding ding!   As I said in my spontaneous update last Friday, I’ve been working on a multitude of things as well the Crucible. Now a shiny refurbished Crucible is on the test server for more testing! This time round, there are versions for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Gunner and Fleet Commander. For those of you that missed the post last week, I’ll reiterate on the changes. Calypso wrote up a new type of spawner, similar to the Ambush Spawner but for waves and thus aptly named a Wave Spawner. Wave Spawners can spawn a series of waves of AI, each wave can have lots of different AI and the AI can get different drops. Waves also have various options for when they spawn based on the previous wave, like as soon as the last wave is completely eliminated or after a certain amount of time, regardless of the AI left alive. In addition to this we can also set two trigger areas, one which lets the Wave Spawner function normally and another to force spawn a wave if valid to do so. The Crucible now uses this so that if you beat a wave, you can spawn the next one immediately instead of waiting around, which is one of the main requests I got from feedback from the last time we done testing. Additionally I’ve changed a few AI around, which’ll hopefully make things a bit nicer. The bosses don’t have any fancy scripts, but I can easily add some superitems to make some quirky behaviour if desired. I’ve also written a new mission requirement for completing waves of a specific wave spawner. Missions for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Gunner and Fleet Commander are located at Arena Central in Arena Lobby on the test server (test.starsonata.com:3032). You can pick the missions up and play through. Jump into the instance, AI will spawn. The drone ring just north west of the sun is the force trigger area I mentioned earlier, sitting in there will spawn the next wave when possible.

A couple of months ago, I made a blog post about some content I was working on; The Crucible.

Since then I’ve been working on various things, but not much else has been heard, except for my normal forum posting but that greatly fluctuates on what topics there currently are.

So here’s a relatively sporadic update, of what I’ve been up to since, and including The Crucible.

The Crucible

From the feedback I got it was clear there were two main issues; the stage bosses were just normal AI and rather boring to kill and that a lot of players wasted time waiting for the next wave.

The first of these issues is pretty easy to fix, our super item system is diverse and we can do very interesting things using it.

The latter however is a bit in-depth. We all know waiting around for things to happen is a bit boring. The easy option would of been for me to just make the next wave instantly spawn when the previous wave had passed, but I didn’t want to do that as I figured it’d make the later stages much, much harder. At the time, The Crucible consisted of two boss AI. A hidden controller featuring an extensive and long boss script featuring a few things I had written specifically for this, which controlled all the AI that spawned and stage selection, and a dummy AI which just roamed around (the Crucible Commentator).

The controller AI’s script is was about 1500 lines which is pretty long already given that Pretender Hermes is about 500, Easter Bunny/Zombie Easter Bunny are about 200 each and Copper Blob is a measly 140 lines.

As such it was decided it’d be too complex to modify the current script to allow for some mechanic where you can manually trigger the next wave either ahead of time. So it was decided that Calypso would write us a new type of spawner, a Wave Spawner. Similar to an Ambush Spawner but allowing us to spawn waves in succession with mission requirements and a force spawn trigger area. Removing the need for messy boss script and giving us much nicer way of doing wave-based combat in the future. While Calypso worked on that, I took a detour and started playing with other things.

After Calypso finished up the Wave Spawner code, or the large part of it. I got dirty with it, there was some quirky behaviour or things which I wanted and were lacking, mostly hindsight when actually trying to use it. So I then polished it off, including mission goals for clearing waves of a wave spawner. Compared to how it was going to be, doing the Crucible will feel very smooth and sleek. Now the spawners are done for Engineer, Shield Monkey, Fleet Commander and Gunner and will be on test later today. Now, onto the other things!

The Other Things

Some of these things are in game already, some are yet to come and some are real life things, of which I’ll save the coolest for last.

Starting with things that have already hit live, the most noticeable is probably the new level names. Previously the level names that accompany your level stopped increasing at 5350. Years ago when these level ranges were made, 5350 was such an unbelievable level to hold and it shows when you see that ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ covered the tiny range from 182 to 316. Our list of level names now extend to our absolute level cap, which is currently 10,000. Removing some of the old less inspirational names such as ‘Super-Duper Elite’ and adding some new much more epic ones such as ‘Marauder’, ‘Supreme’, ‘Demigod’ and replacing ‘Average’ and ‘Above Average’ with ‘Reasonable’.

Halloween is around the corner, literally, I’m typing this like 30 minutes before I’m activating the event. Unfortunately this Halloween doesn’t have a great deal of new, last year I added Vampires and Holoprojectors, this year features a new item class which you may of already heard of, the Sound projectors. There aren’t a great deal of these, but there are some! You will need your sound on to hear them, though. This years Halloween event also featured a contest in a similar vein to the Astro-Santa letter competition. The competition has ended now though and winners have been picked; their prizes will be various collection of Halloween items + something extra special.

Finally I have started on some (other) new content. This is a zone I’ve been interested in doing for about a year now and I love the idea so much, I’ve been collecting ideas for things to do and include on it and I feel like I’m at the stage to just do it, save for the other things I’ve been doing.

The new zone like the minor faction, Vervaardiger, is somewhat inspired by the iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS game Galaxy on Fire 2. The content will be featuring three new galaxies within the normal universe, occupying Celestial Gardens, Earthforce Space and Perilous Space. It’ll revolve around industrialism, specifically the mining industry. The span of universal layers covered does mean that there will be content for both low level and high level players. There will definitely be some worthwhile items from there for all players.

The Coolest

And now, to finish off, the coolest one I have to say. Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of October was the Norwich Game Expo. Having been tipped off just the Monday before by one of my Explorer Scouts, I managed to get myself an exhibition spot quite last minute. NGE was no PAX Prime or E3, but it was good. I popped down on the Saturday where I demoed Star Sonata on one of my computers on a local server for new people to try. It was quite honestly fun, I just wish I had more time to talk to the other developers who were there. Needless to say I’ll be doing it again, and this time I might seen a current player! I also got some good feedback from people trying the game and noticing things myself which just weren’t quite right. After which I spent about 6 hours playing through the entirety of The Nexus content to find things which aren’t quite right. And that was just the Volcom faction! I plan to do the Cadet side soon as well.

 To finish up, like Calypso I will be doing relatively often blog posts, although they won’t be every week, nor the same day each time.