I’ve been pretty busy the past week on some extremely important and interesting stuff related to the new player experience. I am sure we can all agree this is an area the game needs to improve on, and hopefully this round of changes will help!

Nexus

First, creating a new character is going to be a bit different. When you start your first character, not only will you have a faction choice (Volcom or Cadet), but also a starting ship selection choice. We are introducing three new Zebucart variants each tied to the idea of a focus for new players. In addition to the default Zebucart, we’ll be adding the Heavy Zebucart, the Zebu Freighter and the Zebu Gunship. If it’s not apparent, these are meant to allow players to experience a focus without actually being tied to one.

A very WIP screen of the new build selector.

• The Zebucart won’t receive any changes.

• The Heavy Zebucart will be a slightly slower, more armored Heavy Fighter with a big energy pulse gun superitem.

• The Zebu Freighter will be an even slower, but significantly more spacious Freighter with a special Zebu Drone superitem.

• The Zebu Gunship will be a mini-capship with a missile launcher, a missile superitem (and of course, a Capital Engine).

Expanding on this idea, we will also be adding a bunch of new ships from Techs 1-3 to the Nexus (mainly in the freighter and capital varieties) so players can continue along their ‘focus’ as they progress through the Nexus. When the players are sent to Janitor’s Outpost at level 10, they will be asked to choose their focus. The missions have been rewritten to be more new-player friendly. I hope that adding some new character creation elements and pushing focus choice forward will help new players connect to their character a bit more — as well as make it a bit easier to understand Star Sonata’s rather unique class system.

These aren’t the only changes happening to the Nexus though. Almost as important, we will be offering Drone Deployment and Remote Control in the Nexus. More importantly though, we are changing the way the very first missions work when a new player logs into the game.

I created a new option for galaxies allowing them to specify a mission to be given to players when they enter a galaxy. Using this, when a player enters the starting galaxies, Earthforce Outpost or Volcom Testing Grounds, they will be given a short, interactive mission chain that should help familiarize the controls and the basics of combat. Hopefully this is much more exciting than docking to pick up a mission which is the first thing a new player is required to do now.

Mission Enhancements

Other than some Nexus tweaking, I’ve been working on some other interesting features. If you haven’t done any missions in Subspace, you might not be aware of the auto-complete and auto-start features we have for missions now. They allow players to start and complete missions on the fly. For these, as well as the ‘auto-accept on galaxy entrance’ tag I recently worked on, I’ve added an attribute called “display pop up”. Enabling this for an auto-mission tag means when the mission completes (or starts) it will display a mission dialog in the client, IE, you are getting a “transmission” from the mission giver while you are flying about.

Second, I’ve been working on a feature that might seem more interesting to more players than the above changes — that is an auto-complete feature. If you dock at a space base and accept a mission that you have the ability to complete right away, the mission will be automatically completed. In addition, if the mission is repeatable, it will reopen the mission automatically for you. I am sure the appeal of this feature is instantly understood when it comes to turn-in missions. Instead of sitting and sifting through the mission list in Lyceum and tediously clicking until all 40 of your Avalon Whatever Blueprints are gone, you can quickly turn the entire stack into Mentions.

Hopefully everyone has enjoyed another look into what’s been going on behind the scenes at Star Sonata! Be back next week with another update!

Those of you who’ve been reading our daily dev blog posts, would know that I’ve been working on some project, amongst other things including some new AI. Well, the bulk of the project is nearing the end, so I thought I’d tell you all about it!

The Crucible, is the name of the project, and is a new sort of Arena. Once it’s complete it’ll be located off of Arena Lobby with the arena galaxies. Beginning from the relatively recently suggestion ‘wave solo instance’ area, the result so far I feel is looking pretty good.

The Crucible consists of 24 waves, split up into 6 stages, each wave spawns after the previous wave has been cleared, the end of each stage is marked with a boss. In some ways it’s quite like a DG with no wormholes. Most of the AI have been taken from other locations, but there are a few new things in the mix (notably the bosses).

Each class will get it’s own version of The Crucible, with specific AI for their class, and class will get their own specific rewards, although the rewards haven’t been fully fleshed out yet, there will definitely be goodies in there. The area is suited for all levels, as the AI range from lowly Helgas and Roswells all the way up, past Zaphragi fleets to some new AI.

The Crucible is currently on our test server, but only for Engineers. A lot of boss scripting is involved to get it to work correctly, once I’m sure that it’s okay, I’ll duplicate it and make the suitable adjustments for the other classes. The missions to try it out (as well as the entrance) are located in Arena Lobby over at test.starsonata.com on port 3032.

On to the second point of this blog post, the aforementioned new AI. After waiting which must be about two years now since I had the idea for Tech 22 skills to be released, I’ve finally added the final stage of AI.

These new birdies will be appearing in The Crucible, as well as in the wild (where they belong) as late as next universe. They may also appear in dungeons.

First off, sorry for the lack of posts last week! We had a slight hiccup with our daily blog posts, mostly due to a communication issue and a bug with WordPress. Hopefully sometime this week you’ll be seeing an update from Blue Dwarf regarding his ongoing projects.

I will be absent from the daily meetings for two whole weeks as I am going to Pax Prime for a Work/Vacation. I plan on promoting the game by handing out FREE 3 month subscription cards. How cool is that? Following PAX Prime I’m taking my first real vacation in… I don’t even remember to see some family I haven’t seen in over a year. After taking non-stop classes for a few years and not having a legitimate break from… life(?), I’m pretty stoked to have just a few days to myself and family.

I’m going to take this blog post to discuss a little bit of what I’ve been doing this past week. I’ve been getting ready for PAX PRIME! As I mentioned I am going to be promoting the game while I’m there. We unfortunately, were unable to get a booth space this year because all booths sold out at the conclusion of last year’s PAX Prime! What we plan on doing instead is handing out some ultra-cool three month voucher cards. I’ve been busy designing the cards, learning our new voucher system and trying to update our site accordingly. Thanks to a very awesome community member my progress on the Free to Pay vs Pay to Play features page is coming along nicely. I’ve also learned more about HTML, CSS, and javascript than I really wanted to know, and am working on a whole new page dedicated to in person promotions going forward.

One item I also wanted to discuss was our monthly events, I said it would be every fourth Friday of the month, yet when I put it into my calendar to be scheduled, I made it be the LAST Friday of every month. Well, August has 5 Fridays. I was so caught up on my preparation for PAX that it didn’t even occur to me to double check the date. That was an oops on my part and I’ve adjusted my calendar appropriately. Regarding Monthly events I personally feel as though they’re getting stale and repetitive. The problem is, there’s not a whole lot we can change easily.  The game has a bunch of parameters that can globally change various things within the game. Many of these are specifically for the administrative side of things and are rather boring, but a few, like EXP and Augmenter drop chance, can easily be changed on the fly. I’ve had a smattering of suggestions from players. One that particularly interested me was the idea that roaming ubers spawn rate was increased.

Before I conclude I want to address the blog itself. I know our blog posts have been erratic. We’ve had Daily blog posts, and then big project posts like Calypso’s updates. So what kinds of blog posts do you like? Daily meeting posts? Or individual big project type posts?  A little combination of both? Let us know!

To conclude I want to let you guys know that we are looking into doing a patch very soon. It will go onto Livetest first, where we will post the patch notes for you guys to scrutinize to your heart’s delight. If you help us out by testing any of these issues and document what you did to test, we may reward you with in game goodies, or even some space points.

PS. I will be posting updates from PAX Prime on my twitter and the Star Sonata twitter account. Check them out!

Again, it’s been a bit since I’ve posted an update on the specifics of what I’ve been working on, so here is your Calypso Update! Over the past few weeks I’ve had two major projects in the works, both of them from the Suggestions system.

The first, at number three, are the proposed scooping changes.

In case you aren’t aware, it was proposed we change scooping from a button spam to a ‘hold the button down and just keep scooping’ type operation. To facilitate this, all scoops will have two new values. The first is a ‘scooping range’ value. Any debris that is within this radius of your ship will be eligible to scoop. The second is a ‘scoops-per-second’ value. This will determine how fast your ship can scoop items while you keep the scoop key held down.

Along with that change, I’ve also added a new feature we plan to use on some scoops called ‘Vacuum Scooping’. A vacuum scoop will not only function as detailed above, but it will have a third new value called ‘vacuum range’. All debris within this range will be slowly pulled towards your ship until it is in scooping range and can be scooped. This means stuff like scooping credits in a DG is going to get a lot easier.

Both these change also mean the way scoops use energy has to be changed as well. Instead of using a small chunk of energy every time you hit the scoop key (which is the way it currently works, scoops will subtract from your overall EPS in the same way shield chargers or other equippable items with an energy requirement do. This delta in the EPS will only be applied while you are actively scooping of course.

Don’t be worried that these changes will make scooping feel unnatural though. These are more of an addition to current scooping functionality than a complete change of how scoops work. If you want to spam your scoop key, by all means, go ahead. But it will be a lot easier to just scoop and hold.

The second, at number nine, is the Neurobind and Mod feature.

Again, if you aren’t aware, this feature will introduce a new right-click option in your client, “Neurobind item…”. Neurobinding and item will require one Bindomite, a new commodity that will be a global drop at all levels (and also be found in prospecting nodes). In exchange for neurobinding the item, the item will be given a roll at the mod system with a minimum of one mod guaranteed (more are possible however!). The “Neurobind Item…” option can only be used on non-neurobound, unequipped items while docked, so yes, you can neurobind an item that is already modded to get more mods on it. However, you will want to be careful. Once an item is neurobound you can’t go back and you will be stuck with whatever mods have been randomly assigned.

Both these changes are about to hit testing so it shouldn’t be too long until you see them (as well as some other suggestions that you guys have voted up!).

Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday. There wasn’t anything new and exciting to report. Today we had our usual quick meeting plus a meeting with myself, Jeff, Jey, and Kalipso to discuss SS as a whole. Meetings for 1.5 hours today! Woo!

First the dev specific updates!

Jey found the memory corruption issue! Huzzah! This was the source of most of the crashes here recently. We’re crossing our fingers that most of the crash issues have been resolved. (Knock on wood)

Thomas is finishing up our new front page and it’s looking snazzy!

I honestly forgot what Kalipso and Jeff have been doing, mostly bug fixes from what I gather? (it’s late and I forgot to take notes).

I took yesterday largely off to recoup since I haven’t had a day off in 10 days.  I also worked some on our F2P vs P2P page to adequately explain what all goodies you can do as a F2P and what perks you get when you move P2P. I wrestled with JavaScript and taught it a lesson, and thankfully Thomas and SI had more experience with JavaScript than I and were able to help me make JavaScript work with our crappy CMS page editors.

Blue Dwarf has been still working on something with the balance sheets. Yes, they’re still evil.

As I said we had a big meeting today to discuss marketing and how to frame the game as a whole. Jeff wrote up a good document showing how the game is really all over the place and it’s hard to try and peg down what exactly Star Sonata is to a new player. Marketing & advertising Star Sonata has been a right challenge since we have no real central vision. Essentially we are all over the place with different features and ideas, but we haven’t really capitalized on one thing and become the best at it.

Thus, after a very quick deliberation, we have decided we want to focus Star Sonata in a skill based action MMO. We want you to be able to hone in your skills and fight real time to defeat your enemies. We discussed a little bit on how we want our end game to look, but those ideas are very raw and in need of much refinement, and especially with the launch of T22, we’re in no rush to make any sort of change or addition to the end game.

Now that I have a good idea of how we want to take the game, I can now effectively advertise around that. We also know that all the marketing & advertising in the world isn’t going to do anything if our entry to the game is… crap. While the Nexus is fun for some, nothing spectacularly grabs you in that first five seconds of play, and it doesn’t really jive with our idea of positioning SS as a skill based action type game. One of our main priorities then is going to be to vastly improve the entry to Star Sonata to show off what the game is and grab your attention so you don’t click that X in the top right corner.

We won’t be doing any radical changes to game structure, or removing features, so don’t worry. Star Sonata will still have all the kickass features and content it has already. What we’ve decided is that we would like to focus new additions being added to the game around this “Skill & Action Based Combat” idea.

This was one of the first meetings we had where everyone in attendance was largely in agreement about what was being said, which is great. We’ll have more blogs coming up describing what we’d like to add moving forward.

Kalipso did some Prospecting work, when there was an error relating to prospecting there were no error messages transmitting, so that was added to the client.

He finished up some eridium stuff and added a factory that breaks eridium down into 24 pieces to be used as a fuel for energies (so if the server crashes you won’t lose out on your fuel).  He also added some options in the admin panel to add/remove missions without editing xml, which is super nice for us to make things way more efficient.

Jeff rewrote some code for engine thrust since it was ancient and buggy.

I forgot what Blue Dwarf said he did in the meeting, but I know he’s been working on cleaning up something regarding the balance sheets, and apparently no one wants to do it. Balance sheets are evil.

Jey hasn’t reported yet whether he’s found that memory issue, I suppose no news is good news, as we’d be hearing him bitching about seeing hexadecimal in his sleep if he wasn’t on the right track.

Thomas did more website stuff (I was distracted in the meeting with tickets).

I worked on tickets and some investigations. I also started work on our F2P vs P2P page so we can use that in marketing materials going forward. I am having to take a crash course in javascript which makes me cry inside.

All in all another productive day in the SS dev world!

I’m about halfway into my workday so I’ll talk a bit about what we discussed in the meeting this morning plus some other stuff!

Blue Dwarf fixed up some code bugs regarding sticky items & drones. He and I went through our bug tracker yesterday to try and clean it up a bit. We have a TON of old bugs in there that were fixed but never actually marked as such on the tracker. It’s still a little chaotic but definitely getting organized.

Kalipso has been making some new uses for Eridium. One of the cooler things he added is a fancy energy that gets fueled for a day.

Jey’s been split between two different tasks, the first is the in game item shop for things that cost space points, item forms, aug resets, and name changes. He’s also been trying to isolate a memory corruption error and has been staring at Hexadecimal for way too long. He’s like Neo now.

Thomas did some more work on the main page update that will look dramatically different. This is also our first post with the new blog! Hopefully things will go off without a hitch!

I got the support ticket system caught up to date yesterday so it can be easily maintained on a daily basis instead of an every other day to three day basis. We’re at about 33 tickets. I ended up having to add a rule to the game rules yesterday. Too many people were getting their accounts compromised when they shared their passwords, because the people they shared with would turn around and share with THEIR friends, who may be on a team you’re warring. We will now ban if you share the password to an account you do not own, and it leads to compromised accounts/bases. Play the game legit, if you can’t take a base or galaxy cause it’s too strong, don’t log into someone’s account and toss all the shields. Either play legit or get banned. On the same note, we really discourage you from sharing your account password, yes, we can temp ban if someone compromises your account now, but we still can’t get any items lost back into your hands.

Jeff and I had a discussion yesterday about how we want to position Star Sonata moving forward. We both agreed that right now Star Sonata is a bit all over the place, and we’d like to focus it in. We both love how SS is action based, and requires much more skill than a point and click type game. While we haven’t come to a grand decision yet, it’s something that we will be looking into heavily and making decisions on in the next few weeks. How we market SS going forward will also define further game design decisions. We’ve planned a meeting for Friday to discuss marketing and how we want to brand the game going forward.

-Bageese